2012年高考英语湖北卷 - 阅读理解B

When my brother and I were young, my mom would take us on Transportation Days.
我和弟弟小的时候，妈妈会带我们体验交通日。

It goes like this: You can’t take any means of transportation more than once. We would start from home, walking two blocks to the rail station. We’d take the train into the city center, then a bus, switching to the tram, then maybe a taxi. We always considered taking a horse carriage in the historic district, but we didn’t like the way the horses were treated, so we never did. At the end of the day, we took the subway to our closest station, where Mom’s friend was waiting to give us a ride home - our first car ride of the day.
行程如下：任何交通工具乘坐不能超过一次。我们从家出发，步行两个街区到火车站。坐火车到市中心，然后坐公交，转乘电车，然后可能是出租车。我们一直考虑在历史街区乘坐马车，但我们不喜欢这样对待马，所以从来没有这样做过。一天结束时，我们乘地铁到达最近的车站，妈妈的朋友在那里等着开车送我们回家——这是我们一天中的第一次乘汽车。

The good thing about Transportation Days is not only that Mom taught us how to get around. She was born to be multimodal. She understood that depending on cars only was a failure of imagination and, above all, a failure of confidence - the product of a childhood not spent exploring subway tunnels.
交通日的好处不仅在于妈妈教我们如何出行。她生来就是思维多样的，她知道仅仅依靠汽车是想象力的失败，最重要的是信心的失败——这是童年没有探索地下通道的产物。

Once you learn the route map and step with certainty over the gap between the train and the platform, nothing is frightening anymore. New cities are just light-rail lines to be explored. And your personal car, if you have one, becomes just one more tool in the toolbox - and often an inadequate one, limiting both your mobility and your wallet.
一旦你学会了路线图，并确定地跨过火车和站台之间的空隙，就没有什么可怕的了。新城市只是轻轨线路，有待探索。而你的私家车，如果你有私家车的话，只不过是工具箱里的一个工具，而且往往不够用，限制了你的行动和钱包。

On Transportation Days, we might stop for lunch on Chestnut Street or buy a new book or toy, but the transportation was the point. First, it was exciting enough to watch the world speed by from the train window. As I got older, my mom helped me unlock the mysteries that would otherwise have paralyzed my first attempts to do it myself: How do I know where to get off? How do I know how much it costs? How do I know when I need tickets, and where to get them? What track, what line, which direction, where’s the stop, and will I get wet when we go under the river?
在交通日，我们可能会在栗树街停下来吃午饭，或者买一本新书或玩具，但交通是关键。首先，从火车窗口看世界疾驰而过，令人兴奋不已。随着年龄的增长，妈妈帮助我解开了那些原本会让我第一次尝试自己动手时陷入瘫痪的谜团：我怎么知道在哪里下车？我怎么知道要花多少钱？我怎么知道我什么时候需要票，在哪里可以买到票？哪条轨道，哪条线，哪个方向，车站在哪，当我们走到河底时，我会淋湿吗？

I’m writing this right now on an airplane, a means we didn’t try on our Transportation Days and, we now know, the dirtiest and most polluting of them all. My flight routed me through Philadelphia. My multimodal mom met me for dinner in the airport. She took a train to meet me.
我现在在飞机上写这篇文章，这是我们在交通日没有尝试过的方式，我们现在知道，飞行是最肮脏，也是污染最严重的。我乘坐的飞机经过费城，我的思维多样的妈妈在机场接我吃饭，她坐火车来接我。