剑桥雅思17Test4Passage2阅读原文翻译 Does education fuel economic growth 教育会促进经济发展吗
剑桥雅思17阅读第四套题目第二篇文章的主题为教育与经济发展之间的关系。作者详细介绍了剑桥大学经济学院Sheilagh Ogilvie所研究的项目，包括其面临的问题、使用的数据、该数据的独特性、可能得出的结果、以及对现在的启示等。下面是具体每一段的翻译。
点击查看这篇雅思阅读中出现的常考词汇与对应的答案解析：
雅思阅读真题词汇 剑桥雅思17 Test 4 Passage 2 教育与经济发展的关系
剑桥雅思17Test4Passage2阅读答案解析 Does education fuel economic growth 教育会促进经济发展吗
剑桥雅思17 Test4 Passage3阅读原文翻译
老烤鸭原创翻译，请勿抄袭转载
A部分
Over the last decade, a huge database about the lives of southwest German villagers between 1600 and 1900 has been compiled by a team led by Professor Sheilagh Ogilvie at Cambridge University’s Faculty of Economics. It includes court records, guild ledgers, parish registers, village censuses, tax lists and – the most recent addition – 9,000 handwritten inventories listing over a million personal possessions belonging to ordinary women and men across three centuries. Ogilvie, who discovered the inventories in the archives of two German communities 30 years ago, believes they may hold the answer to a conundrum that has long puzzled economists: the lack of evidence for a causal link between education and a country’s economic growth.
过去十年里，剑桥大学经济学院Sheilagh Ogilvie领导的团队整理出1600年到1900年之间有关德国西南部村民生活状况的巨大数据库。它包括法庭记录，行业账目，教区注册者，村镇人口，税单，以及最近添加的9000份过去三个世纪里普通男性和女性所拥有的超过100万件物品的手写财产清单。30年前，Ogilvie在两个德国社区的档案里发现了这一财产目录，认为它们可能能够回答长期困扰经济学家的谜题：缺乏证据证明教育与一个国家的经济增长之间存在因果关系。
B部分
As Ogilvie explains, ‘Education helps us to work more productively, invent better technology, and earn more … surely it must be critical for economic growth? But, if you look back through history, there’s no evidence that having a high literacy rate made a country industrialise earlier.’ Between 1600 and 1900, England had only mediocre literacy rates by European standards, yet its economy this article is from laokaoya website grew fast and it was the first country to industrialise. During this period, Germany and Scandinavia had excellent literacy rates, but their economies grew slowly and they industrialised late. ‘Modern cross-country analyses have also struggled to find evidence that education causes economic growth, even though there is plenty of evidence that growth increases education,’ she adds.
Ogilvie解释说：“教育帮助我们更有成效地工作，发明更好的技术，赚更多的钱。那么它必然对经济发展至关重要？但是，如果你回顾历史，并没有证据表明较高的识字率让一个国家更早地实现工业化”。1600年到1900年间，以欧洲的标准而言，英格兰的识字率仅仅是中等而已。然而，它的经济快速增长，也是第一个进行工业化的国家。在此期间，德国和斯堪的纳维亚的识字率很高，但它们的经济增长缓慢，工业化也开始的比较晚。“现代跨国研究也很难发现教育引发经济增长的证据，即便有充足的证据表明经济增长会提升教育”，她补充到。
C部分
In the handwritten inventories that Ogilvie is analysing are the belongings of women and men at marriage, remarriage and death. From badger skins to Bibles, sewing machines to scarlet bodices – the villagers’ entire worldly goods are included. Inventories of agricultural equipment and craft tools reveal economic activities; ownership of books and education-related objects like pens and slates suggests how people learned. In addition, the tax lists included in the database record the value of farms, workshops, assets and debts; signatures and people’s estimates of their age indicate literacy and numeracy levels; and court records reveal obstacles (such as the activities of the guilds) that stifled industry.
Ogilvie正在分析的手写财产清单中包含着已婚、再婚和死亡男性与女性的所属物品。从獾皮到圣经，从缝纫机到深红色的女性紧身胸衣，村民的一切物品都包含在内。农具和手工工具的目录揭示经济活动，书本和教育文章来自老烤鸭雅思相关物品，比如笔和写字板，表明人们如何学习，此外，数据库中所包括的税单记录着农场、工作室、财产和债务的价值；签名与人们对自己年龄的评估表明识字水平和计算能力。庭审记录揭示遏制工业的障碍（比如行业协会的活动）。
Previous studies usually had just one way of linking education with economic growth – the presence of schools and printing presses, perhaps, or school enrolment, or the ability to sign names. According to Ogilvie, the database provides multiple indicators for the same individuals, making it possible to analyse links between literacy, numeracy, wealth, and industriousness, for individual women and men over the long term.
之前的研究往往只有一种方式将教育与经济增长联系在一起，即学校与印刷报纸的存在，或许还有学校的入学率，或者书写名字的能力。Ogilvie认为，数据库为相同的个体提供多重指标，让分析男性和女性识字能力，计算水平，财富和勤奋之间的长期联系成为可能。
D部分
Ogilvie and her team have been building the vast database of material possessions on top of their full demographic reconstruction of the people who lived in these two German communities. ‘We can follow the same people – and their descendants – across 300 years of educational and economic change,’ she says. Individual lives have unfolded before their eyes. Stories like that of the 24-year-olds Ana Regina and Magdalena Riethmüllerin, who were chastised in 1707 for reading books in church instead of listening to the sermon. ‘This tells us they were continuing to develop their reading skills at least a decade after leaving school,’ explains Ogilvie. The database also reveals the case of Juliana Schweickherdt, a 50-year-old spinster living in the small Black Forest community of Wildberg, who was reprimanded in 1752 by the local weavers’ guild for ‘weaving cloth and combing wool, counter to the guild ordinance’. When Juliana continued taking jobs reserved for male guild members, she was summoned before the guild court and told to pay a fine equivalent to one third of a servant’s annual wage. It was a small act of defiance by today’s standards, but it reflects a time when laws in Germany and elsewhere regulated people’s access to labour markets. The dominance of guilds not only prevented people from using their skills, but also held back even the simplest industrial innovation.
Ogilvie和她的团队重建了居住在这两个德国社区的人们的人口统计数据，并在此之上建立起庞大的财产数据库。“我们可以追踪相同人群 – 和他们的子孙 – 在这300年间教育和经济方面所发生的变化”，她说。个人生活在她们眼前展开。比如，1707年，24岁的Ana Regina和Magdalena Riethmüllerin因在教堂中读书而非聆听布道被严惩。“这告诉我们，她们在离开学校十多年后仍然继续提升自己的阅读能力”，Ogilvie解释到。该数据库也展示了Juliana Schweickherdt的故事，一名居住在Wildberg社区小黑森林的50岁未婚女性。她在1752年“因违反协会条例织布和梳理羊毛”被当地织工协会严格惩罚。当Juliana继续从事为男性协会成员保留的工作时，她被传唤到协会法庭前，并被要求支付相当于一名仆人一年工资的三分之一的罚款。按照今天的标准，这不过是小小的违抗行为而已。但它反映出，某个时间里，德国和其他地方的法律控制人们是否可以进入劳动市场。协会的主导地位不仅阻止人们使用他们的技能，而且也阻碍了最简单的工业创新。
E部分
The data-gathering phase of the project has been completed and now, according to Ogilvie, it is time ‘to ask the big questions’. One way to look at whether education causes economic growth is to ‘hold wealth constant’. This involves following the lives of different people with the same level of wealth over a period of time. If wealth is constant, it is possible to discover whether education was, for example, linked to the cultivation of new crops, or to the adoption of industrial innovations like sewing machines. The team will also ask what aspect of education helped people engage more with productive and innovative activities. Was it, for instance, literacy, numeracy, book ownership, years of schooling? Was there a threshold level – a tipping point – that needed to be reached to affect economic performance?
该项目的数据收集阶段已经完成。根据Ogilvie的说法，现在是提出大问题的时候了。一种研究教育是否引发经济增长的方式是“控制财富常量”。这涉及在一定的时间内，追踪拥有相同财富水平的不同人群的生活。如果财富恒定，就有可能发现教育是否与新作物的培育或者工业创新（比如缝纫机）的采用相关。该团队也会研究教育的哪个方面帮助人们更多地从事生产与创新活动。例如，究竟是识字能力，计算水平，图书拥有量，还是多年的教育？是否需要达到特定的门槛 – 转折点 – 才能影响经济表现？
F部分
Ogilvie hopes to start finding answers to these questions over the next few years. One thing is already clear, she says: the relationship between education and economic growth is far from straightforward. ‘German-speaking central Europe is an excellent laboratory for testing theories of economic growth,’ she explains. Between 1600 and 1900, literacy rates and book ownership were high and yet the region remained poor. It was also the case that local guilds and merchant associations were extremely powerful and legislated against anything that undermined their monopolies. In villages throughout the region, guilds blocked labour migration and resisted changes that might reduce their influence.
Ogilvie希望在接下来几年的时间里能够开始寻找这些问题的答案。一件事情已经很明确，她说，教育与经济增长之间的关系远不简单。“说德语的中欧是测试经济增长理论的绝佳实验室”，她解释到。1600年到1900年之间，该区域的识字率和图书拥有量很高，但却仍然贫困。同时，当地协会和商人组织的力量极为强大，会通过立法对抗任何破坏它们统治地位的行为。在该区域所有的村庄中，协会阻止工人迁徙，拒绝可能削弱它们影响力的改变。
‘Early findings suggest that the potential benefits of education for the economy can be held back by other barriers, and this has implications for today,’ says Ogilvie. ‘Huge amounts are spent improving education in developing countries, but this spending can fail to deliver economic growth if restrictions block people – especially women and the poor – from using their education in economically productive ways. If economic institutions are poorly set up, for instance, education can’t lead to growth.’
“早期发现表明，教育对经济的潜在好处会受到其他障碍的影响。这点对今天仍有意义”，Ogilvie说。“发展中国家在提升教育上投入巨大，但如果存在限制阻碍人们 – 尤其是女性和穷人 – 以一种富有经济成效的方式利用他们的教育的话，这种投入可能无法促进经济增长。例如，如果经济机构设立的很差，那么教育就无法带来增长”。
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