2025考研英语：《经济学人》中英读译Day91

英语阅读能力依靠什么？必然是词汇的积累，但，仅仅是词汇的积累是不够了，更应该了解英语句式，不同句型所表达意义。如何培养自己的阅读语感呢？那么就跟着聚创考研网小编每天学一点英语，一起为考研筑起坚实的地基。阅读是需要积累的，就像我们需要经常和人沟通才会促进我们的表达能力一样~小伙伴跟着小编一起，每天坚持打卡，培养英语阅读能力及语感，了解文章一些经典词汇的用法。

经济学人：超级细菌的秘密(上)

From caesarean sections to chemotherapy, antibiotics make much of modern medicine possible by keeping bacterial infections at bay.That is why the growing bacterial resistance to those drugs is so worrying.The United Nations estimates that by 2050 infections with drug-proof bacteria could claim up to 10m lives a year, more than double the current toll.A problem with tackling such resistance is that scientists have an incomplete sense of how it arises.One way is essentially random: a chance mutation in a particular bacterium may make a certain drug less lethal.

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从剖腹产到化疗，抗生素通过防止细菌感染使现代医学的大部分疗法成为可能。这也是越来越多细菌对抗生素的耐药性令人愈发担忧的原因。联合国估计，到2050年，每年的耐药细菌感染将夺去多达1000万人的生命，是目前死亡人数的两倍多。对付这种抗药性还存在一个问题，科学家还没有完全了解它是如何产生的。有一种基本上可以说是随机的情况:一种特定细菌的偶然突变可能会降低某种药物的致命性。

 

If that bacterium survives a dose of treatment, its descendants will inherit that same resistance.But the speed at which bacterial drug resistance spreads means that cannot be the whole story.“I always felt there were additional mechanisms of evolution.And probably more powerful ones,” says John Chen at the National University of Singapore.In a paper in Cell, Dr Chen and his colleagues identify one such mechanism.It centres not on the bacteria themselves, nor the viruses that are known to infect them, but on yet more rudimentary genetic parasites that exploit these viruses in turn.The fact that bacteria can transfer genes horizontally, to other unrelated bugs, as well as vertically to their offspring, is well known.
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如果这种细菌在一定剂量的治疗中存活下来，它的后代将继承同样的抵抗力。但是细菌耐药性传播的速度意味着这并不是全部的“故事”。“我一直觉得还有其他的进化机制。而且可能更强大，”新加坡国立大学的约翰·陈说。在《细胞》杂志的一篇论文中，陈博士和他的同事们发现了这样的一种机制。它的重点不是细菌本身，也不是已知的感染它们的病毒，而是更为基本的遗传寄生物，它们会依次利用这些病毒。众所周知，细菌可以将基因水平传递给其他不相关的细菌，也可以垂直传递给它们的后代。

Some are exchanged via small loops of DNA called plasmids.Others are transmitted by bacteriophages, specialised viruses that infect bacteria.When a phage latches on to a bacterium, its DNA forces the bacterium to make more copies of the virus until it bursts.Sometimes, small fragments of bacterial DNA can be erroneously included with the new viruses.If they infect another bacterium, the hitchhiking DNA can end up integrated into the new host’s genome.

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一些基因会通过被称为质粒的DNA小环交换。另一些则通过噬菌体传播，噬菌体是一种专门感染细菌的病毒。当噬菌体附着在细菌上时，它的DNA迫使细菌复制更多的病毒，直到它破裂。有时，细菌DNA的小片段可能被错误地包含在新病毒中。如果它们感染了另一种细菌，搭便车的DNA最终会整合到新宿主的基因组中。