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(单词翻译:双击或拖选)
Syme had vanished. A morning came, and he was missing from work: a few thoughtless people commented on his absence. On the next day nobody mentioned him. On the third day Winston went into the vestibule of the Records Department to look at the notice-board. One of the notices carried a printed list of the members of the Chess Committee, of whom Syme had been one. It looked almost exactly as it had looked before — nothing had been crossed out — but it was one name shorter. It was enough. Syme had ceased to exist: he had never existed.
The weather was baking hot. In the labyrinthine1 Ministry2 the windowless, air-conditioned rooms kept their normal temperature, but outside the pavements scorched3 one’s feet and the stench of the Tubes at the rush hours was a horror. The preparations for Hate Week were in full swing, and the staffs of all the Ministries4 were working overtime5. Processions, meetings, military parades, lectures, waxworks6, displays, film shows, telescreen programmes all had to be organized; stands had to be erected7, effigies8 built, slogans coined, songs written, rumours10 circulated, photographs faked. Julia’s unit in the Fiction Department had been taken off the production of novels and was rushing out a series of atrocity11 pamphlets. Winston, in addition to his regular work, spent long periods every day in going through back files of ‘The Times’ and altering and embellishing12 news items which were to be quoted in speeches. Late at night, when crowds of rowdy proles roamed the streets, the town had a curiously13 febrile air. The rocket bombs crashed oftener than ever, and sometimes in the far distance there were enormous explosions which no one could explain and about which there were wild rumours.
The new tune14 which was to be the theme-song of Hate Week (the Hate Song, it was called) had already been composed and was being endlessly plugged on the telescreens. It had a savage15, barking rhythm which could not exactly be called music, but resembled the beating of a drum. Roared out by hundreds of voices to the tramp of marching feet, it was terrifying. The proles had taken a fancy to it, and in the midnight streets it competed with the still-popular ‘It was only a hopeless fancy’. The Parsons children played it at all hours of the night and day, unbearably16, on a comb and a piece of toilet paper. Winston’s evenings were fuller than ever. Squads17 of volunteers, organized by Parsons, were preparing the street for Hate Week, stitching banners, painting posters, erecting18 flagstaffs on the roofs, and perilously19 slinging20 wires across the street for the reception of streamers. Parsons boasted that Victory Mansions21 alone would display four hundred metres of bunting. He was in his native element and as happy as a lark22. The heat and the manual work had even given him a pretext23 for reverting24 to shorts and an open shirt in the evenings. He was everywhere at once, pushing, pulling, sawing, hammering, improvising25, jollying everyone along with comradely exhortations26 and giving out from every fold of his body what seemed an inexhaustible supply of acrid-smelling sweat.
A new poster had suddenly appeared all over London. It had no caption27, and represented simply the monstrous28 figure of a Eurasian soldier, three or four metres high, striding forward with expressionless Mongolian face and enormous boots, a submachine gun pointed29 from his hip30. From whatever angle you looked at the poster, the muzzle31 of the gun, magnified by the foreshortening, seemed to be pointed straight at you. The thing had been plastered on every blank space on every wall, even outnumbering the portraits of Big Brother. The proles, normally apathetic32 about the war, were being lashed33 into one of their periodical frenzies34 of patriotism35. As though to harmonize with the general mood, the rocket bombs had been killing36 larger numbers of people than usual. One fell on a crowded film theatre in Stepney, burying several hundred victims among the ruins. The whole population of the neighbourhood turned out for a long, trailing funeral which went on for hours and was in effect an indignation meeting. Another bomb fell on a piece of waste ground which was used as a playground and several dozen children were blown to pieces. There were further angry demonstrations37, Goldstein was burned in effigy38, hundreds of copies of the poster of the Eurasian soldier were torn down and added to the flames, and a number of shops were looted in the turmoil39; then a rumour9 flew round that spies were directing the rocket bombs by means of wireless40 waves, and an old couple who were suspected of being of foreign extraction had their house set on fire and perished of suffocation41.
In the room over Mr Charrington’s shop, when they could get there, Julia and Winston lay side by side on a stripped bed under the open window, naked for the sake of coolness. The rat had never come back, but the bugs42 had multiplied hideously43 in the heat. It did not seem to matter. Dirty or clean, the room was paradise. As soon as they arrived they would sprinkle everything with pepper bought on the black market, tear off their clothes, and make love with sweating bodies, then fall asleep and wake to find that the bugs had rallied and were massing for the counter-attack.
Four, five, six — seven times they met during the month of June. Winston had dropped his habit of drinking gin at all hours. He seemed to have lost the need for it. He had grown fatter, his varicose ulcer44 had subsided45, leaving only a brown stain on the skin above his ankle, his fits of coughing in the early morning had stopped. The process of life had ceased to be intolerable, he had no longer any impulse to make faces at the telescreen or shout curses at the top of his voice. Now that they had a secure hiding-place, almost a home, it did not even seem a hardship that they could only meet infrequently and for a couple of hours at a time. What mattered was that the room over the junk-shop should exist. To know that it was there, inviolate46, was almost the same as being in it. The room was a world, a pocket of the past where extinct animals could walk. Mr Charrington, thought Winston, was another extinct animal. He usually stopped to talk with Mr Charrington for a few minutes on his way upstairs. The old man seemed seldom or never to go out of doors, and on the other hand to have almost no customers. He led a ghostlike existence between the tiny, dark shop, and an even tinier back kitchen where he prepared his meals and which contained, among other things, an unbelievably ancient gramophone with an enormous horn. He seemed glad of the opportunity to talk. Wandering about among his worthless stock, with his long nose and thick spectacles and his bowed shoulders in the velvet47 jacket, he had always vaguely48 the air of being a collector rather than a tradesman. With a sort of faded enthusiasm he would finger this scrap49 of rubbish or that — a china bottle-stopper, the painted lid of a broken snuffbox, a pinchbeck locket containing a strand50 of some long-dead baby’s hair — never asking that Winston should buy it, merely that he should admire it. To talk to him was like listening to the tinkling51 of a worn-out musical-box. He had dragged out from the corners of his memory some more fragments of forgotten rhymes. There was one about four and twenty blackbirds, and another about a cow with a crumpled52 horn, and another about the death of poor Cock Robin53. ‘It just occurred to me you might be interested,’ he would say with a deprecating little laugh whenever he produced a new fragment. But he could never recall more than a few lines of any one rhyme.
Both of them knew — in a way, it was never out of their minds that what was now happening could not last long. There were times when the fact of impending54 death seemed as palpable as the bed they lay on, and they would cling together with a sort of despairing sensuality, like a damned soul grasping at his last morsel55 of pleasure when the clock is within five minutes of striking. But there were also times when they had the illusion not only of safety but of permanence. So long as they were actually in this room, they both felt, no harm could come to them. Getting there was difficult and dangerous, but the room itself was sanctuary56. It was as when Winston had gazed into the heart of the paperweight, with the feeling that it would be possible to get inside that glassy world, and that once inside it time could be arrested. Often they gave themselves up to daydreams57 of escape. Their luck would hold indefinitely, and they would carry on their intrigue58, just like this, for the remainder of their natural lives. Or Katharine would die, and by subtle manoeuvrings Winston and Julia would succeed in getting married. Or they would commit suicide together. Or they would disappear, alter themselves out of recognition, learn to speak with proletarian accents, get jobs in a factory and live out their lives undetected in a back-street. It was all nonsense, as they both knew. In reality there was no escape. Even the one plan that was practicable, suicide, they had no intention of carrying out. To hang on from day to day and from week to week, spinning out a present that had no future, seemed an unconquerable instinct, just as one’s lungs will always draw the next breath so long as there is air available.
Sometimes, too, they talked of engaging in active rebellion against the Party, but with no notion of how to take the first step. Even if the fabulous59 Brotherhood60 was a reality, there still remained the difficulty of finding one’s way into it. He told her of the strange intimacy61 that existed, or seemed to exist, between himself and O’Brien, and of the impulse he sometimes felt, simply to walk into O’Brien’s presence, announce that he was the enemy of the Party, and demand his help. Curiously enough, this did not strike her as an impossibly rash thing to do. She was used to judging people by their faces, and it seemed natural to her that Winston should believe O’Brien to be trustworthy on the strength of a single flash of the eyes. Moreover she took it for granted that everyone, or nearly everyone, secretly hated the Party and would break the rules if he thought it safe to do so. But she refused to believe that widespread, organized opposition62 existed or could exist. The tales about Goldstein and his underground army, she said, were simply a lot of rubbish which the Party had invented for its own purposes and which you had to pretend to believe in. Times beyond number, at Party rallies and spontaneous demonstrations, she had shouted at the top of her voice for the execution of people whose names she had never heard and in whose supposed crimes she had not the faintest belief. When public trials were happening she had taken her place in the detachments from the Youth League who surrounded the courts from morning to night, chanting at intervals63 ‘Death to the traitors64!’ During the Two Minutes Hate she always excelled all others in shouting insults at Goldstein. Yet she had only the dimmest idea of who Goldstein was and what doctrines66 he was supposed to represent. She had grown up since the Revolution and was too young to remember the ideological67 battles of the fifties and sixties. Such a thing as an independent political movement was outside her imagination: and in any case the Party was invincible68. It would always exist, and it would always be the same. You could only rebel against it by secret disobedience or, at most, by isolated69 acts of violence such as killing somebody or blowing something up.
In some ways she was far more acute than Winston, and far less susceptible70 to Party propaganda. Once when he happened in some connexion to mention the war against Eurasia, she startled him by saying casually71 that in her opinion the war was not happening. The rocket bombs which fell daily on London were probably fired by the Government of Oceania itself, ‘just to keep people frightened’. This was an idea that had literally72 never occurred to him. She also stirred a sort of envy in him by telling him that during the Two Minutes Hate her great difficulty was to avoid bursting out laughing. But she only questioned the teachings of the Party when they in some way touched upon her own life. Often she was ready to accept the official mythology73, simply because the difference between truth and falsehood did not seem important to her. She believed, for instance, having learnt it at school, that the Party had invented aeroplanes. (In his own schooldays, Winston remembered, in the late fifties, it was only the helicopter that the Party claimed to have invented; a dozen years later, when Julia was at school, it was already claiming the aeroplane; one generation more, and it would be claiming the steam engine.) And when he told her that aeroplanes had been in existence before he was born and long before the Revolution, the fact struck her as totally uninteresting. After all, what did it matter who had invented aeroplanes? It was rather more of a shock to him when he discovered from some chance remark that she did not remember that Oceania, four years ago, had been at war with Eastasia and at peace with Eurasia. It was true that she regarded the whole war as a sham74: but apparently75 she had not even noticed that the name of the enemy had changed. ‘I thought we’d always been at war with Eurasia,’ she said vaguely. It frightened him a little. The invention of aeroplanes dated from long before her birth, but the switchover in the war had happened only four years ago, well after she was grown up. He argued with her about it for perhaps a quarter of an hour. In the end he succeeded in forcing her memory back until she did dimly recall that at one time Eastasia and not Eurasia had been the enemy. But the issue still struck her as unimportant. ‘Who cares?’ she said impatiently. ‘It’s always one bloody76 war after another, and one knows the news is all lies anyway.’
Sometimes he talked to her of the Records Department and the impudent77 forgeries78 that he committed there. Such things did not appear to horrify79 her. She did not feel the abyss opening beneath her feet at the thought of lies becoming truths. He told her the story of Jones, Aaronson, and Rutherford and the momentous80 slip of paper which he had once held between his fingers. It did not make much impression on her. At first, indeed, she failed to grasp the point of the story.
‘Were they friends of yours?’ she said.
‘No, I never knew them. They were Inner Party members. Besides, they were far older men than I was. They belonged to the old days, before the Revolution. I barely knew them by sight.’
‘Then what was there to worry about? People are being killed off all the time, aren’t they?’
He tried to make her understand. ‘This was an exceptional case. It wasn’t just a question of somebody being killed. Do you realize that the past, starting from yesterday, has been actually abolished? If it survives anywhere, it’s in a few solid objects with no words attached to them, like that lump of glass there. Already we know almost literally nothing about the Revolution and the years before the Revolution. Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book has been rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street and building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And that process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right. I know, of course, that the past is falsified, but it would never be possible for me to prove it, even when I did the falsification myself. After the thing is done, no evidence ever remains81. The only evidence is inside my own mind, and I don’t know with any certainty that any other human being shares my memories. Just in that one instance, in my whole life, I did possess actual concrete evidence after the event — years after it.’
‘And what good was that?’
‘It was no good, because I threw it away a few minutes later. But if the same thing happened today, I should keep it.’
‘Well, I wouldn’t!’ said Julia. ‘I’m quite ready to take risks, but only for something worth while, not for bits of old newspaper. What could you have done with it even if you had kept it?’
‘Not much, perhaps. But it was evidence. It might have planted a few doubts here and there, supposing that I’d dared to show it to anybody. I don’t imagine that we can alter anything in our own lifetime. But one can imagine little knots of resistance springing up here and there — small groups of people banding themselves together, and gradually growing, and even leaving a few records behind, so that the next generations can carry on where we leave off.’
‘I’m not interested in the next generation, dear. I’m interested in US.’
‘You’re only a rebel from the waist downwards,’ he told her.
In the ramifications83 of party doctrine65 she had not the faintest interest. Whenever he began to talk of the principles of Ingsoc, doublethink, the mutability of the past, and the denial of objective reality, and to use Newspeak words, she became bored and confused and said that she never paid any attention to that kind of thing. One knew that it was all rubbish, so why let oneself be worried by it? She knew when to cheer and when to boo, and that was all one needed. If he persisted in talking of such subjects, she had a disconcerting habit of falling asleep. She was one of those people who can go to sleep at any hour and in any position. Talking to her, he realized how easy it was to present an appearance of orthodoxy while having no grasp whatever of what orthodoxy meant. In a way, the world-view of the Party imposed itself most successfully on people incapable85 of understanding it. They could be made to accept the most flagrant violations86 of reality, because they never fully84 grasped the enormity of what was demanded of them, and were not sufficiently87 interested in public events to notice what was happening. By lack of understanding they remained sane88. They simply swallowed everything, and what they swallowed did them no harm, because it left no residue89 behind, just as a grain of corn will pass undigested through the body of a bird.
点击收听单词发音
1 labyrinthine | |
adj.如迷宫的;复杂的 | |
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2 ministry | |
n.(政府的)部;牧师 | |
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3 scorched | |
烧焦,烤焦( scorch的过去式和过去分词 ); 使(植物)枯萎,把…晒枯; 高速行驶; 枯焦 | |
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4 ministries | |
(政府的)部( ministry的名词复数 ); 神职; 牧师职位; 神职任期 | |
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5 overtime | |
adj.超时的,加班的;adv.加班地 | |
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6 waxworks | |
n.公共供水系统;蜡制品,蜡像( waxwork的名词复数 ) | |
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7 ERECTED | |
adj. 直立的,竖立的,笔直的 vt. 使 ... 直立,建立 | |
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8 effigies | |
n.(人的)雕像,模拟像,肖像( effigy的名词复数 ) | |
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9 rumour | |
n.谣言,谣传,传闻 | |
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10 rumours | |
n.传闻( rumour的名词复数 );风闻;谣言;谣传 | |
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11 atrocity | |
n.残暴,暴行 | |
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12 embellishing | |
v.美化( embellish的现在分词 );装饰;修饰;润色 | |
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13 curiously | |
adv.有求知欲地;好问地;奇特地 | |
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14 tune | |
n.调子;和谐,协调;v.调音,调节,调整 | |
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15 savage | |
adj.野蛮的;凶恶的,残暴的;n.未开化的人 | |
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16 unbearably | |
adv.不能忍受地,无法容忍地;慌 | |
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17 squads | |
n.(军队中的)班( squad的名词复数 );(暗杀)小组;体育运动的运动(代表)队;(对付某类犯罪活动的)警察队伍 | |
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18 erecting | |
v.使直立,竖起( erect的现在分词 );建立 | |
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19 perilously | |
adv.充满危险地,危机四伏地 | |
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20 slinging | |
抛( sling的现在分词 ); 吊挂; 遣送; 押往 | |
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21 mansions | |
n.宅第,公馆,大厦( mansion的名词复数 ) | |
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22 lark | |
n.云雀,百灵鸟;n.嬉戏,玩笑;vi.嬉戏 | |
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23 pretext | |
n.借口,托词 | |
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24 reverting | |
恢复( revert的现在分词 ); 重提; 回到…上; 归还 | |
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25 improvising | |
即兴创作(improvise的现在分词形式) | |
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26 exhortations | |
n.敦促( exhortation的名词复数 );极力推荐;(正式的)演讲;(宗教仪式中的)劝诫 | |
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27 caption | |
n.说明,字幕,标题;v.加上标题,加上说明 | |
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28 monstrous | |
adj.巨大的;恐怖的;可耻的,丢脸的 | |
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29 pointed | |
adj.尖的,直截了当的 | |
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30 hip | |
n.臀部,髋;屋脊 | |
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31 muzzle | |
n.鼻口部;口套;枪(炮)口;vt.使缄默 | |
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32 apathetic | |
adj.冷漠的,无动于衷的 | |
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33 lashed | |
adj.具睫毛的v.鞭打( lash的过去式和过去分词 );煽动;紧系;怒斥 | |
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34 frenzies | |
狂乱( frenzy的名词复数 ); 极度的激动 | |
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35 patriotism | |
n.爱国精神,爱国心,爱国主义 | |
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36 killing | |
n.巨额利润;突然赚大钱,发大财 | |
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37 demonstrations | |
证明( demonstration的名词复数 ); 表明; 表达; 游行示威 | |
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38 effigy | |
n.肖像 | |
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39 turmoil | |
n.骚乱,混乱,动乱 | |
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40 wireless | |
adj.无线的;n.无线电 | |
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41 suffocation | |
n.窒息 | |
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42 bugs | |
adj.疯狂的,发疯的n.窃听器( bug的名词复数 );病菌;虫子;[计算机](制作软件程序所产生的意料不到的)错误 | |
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43 hideously | |
adv.可怕地,非常讨厌地 | |
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44 ulcer | |
n.溃疡,腐坏物 | |
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45 subsided | |
v.(土地)下陷(因在地下采矿)( subside的过去式和过去分词 );减弱;下降至较低或正常水平;一下子坐在椅子等上 | |
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46 inviolate | |
adj.未亵渎的,未受侵犯的 | |
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47 velvet | |
n.丝绒,天鹅绒;adj.丝绒制的,柔软的 | |
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48 vaguely | |
adv.含糊地,暖昧地 | |
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49 scrap | |
n.碎片;废料;v.废弃,报废 | |
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50 strand | |
vt.使(船)搁浅,使(某人)困于(某地) | |
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51 tinkling | |
n.丁当作响声 | |
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52 crumpled | |
adj. 弯扭的, 变皱的 动词crumple的过去式和过去分词形式 | |
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53 robin | |
n.知更鸟,红襟鸟 | |
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54 impending | |
a.imminent, about to come or happen | |
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55 morsel | |
n.一口,一点点 | |
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56 sanctuary | |
n.圣所,圣堂,寺庙;禁猎区,保护区 | |
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57 daydreams | |
n.白日梦( daydream的名词复数 )v.想入非非,空想( daydream的第三人称单数 ) | |
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58 intrigue | |
vt.激起兴趣,迷住;vi.耍阴谋;n.阴谋,密谋 | |
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59 fabulous | |
adj.极好的;极为巨大的;寓言中的,传说中的 | |
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60 brotherhood | |
n.兄弟般的关系,手中情谊 | |
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61 intimacy | |
n.熟悉,亲密,密切关系,亲昵的言行 | |
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62 opposition | |
n.反对,敌对 | |
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63 intervals | |
n.[军事]间隔( interval的名词复数 );间隔时间;[数学]区间;(戏剧、电影或音乐会的)幕间休息 | |
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64 traitors | |
卖国贼( traitor的名词复数 ); 叛徒; 背叛者; 背信弃义的人 | |
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65 doctrine | |
n.教义;主义;学说 | |
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66 doctrines | |
n.教条( doctrine的名词复数 );教义;学说;(政府政策的)正式声明 | |
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67 ideological | |
a.意识形态的 | |
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68 invincible | |
adj.不可征服的,难以制服的 | |
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69 isolated | |
adj.与世隔绝的 | |
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70 susceptible | |
adj.过敏的,敏感的;易动感情的,易受感动的 | |
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71 casually | |
adv.漠不关心地,无动于衷地,不负责任地 | |
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72 literally | |
adv.照字面意义,逐字地;确实 | |
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73 mythology | |
n.神话,神话学,神话集 | |
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74 sham | |
n./adj.假冒(的),虚伪(的) | |
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75 apparently | |
adv.显然地;表面上,似乎 | |
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76 bloody | |
adj.非常的的;流血的;残忍的;adv.很;vt.血染 | |
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77 impudent | |
adj.鲁莽的,卑鄙的,厚颜无耻的 | |
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78 forgeries | |
伪造( forgery的名词复数 ); 伪造的文件、签名等 | |
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79 horrify | |
vt.使恐怖,使恐惧,使惊骇 | |
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80 momentous | |
adj.重要的,重大的 | |
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81 remains | |
n.剩余物,残留物;遗体,遗迹 | |
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82 witty | |
adj.机智的,风趣的 | |
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83 ramifications | |
n.结果,后果( ramification的名词复数 ) | |
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84 fully | |
adv.完全地,全部地,彻底地;充分地 | |
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85 incapable | |
adj.无能力的,不能做某事的 | |
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86 violations | |
违反( violation的名词复数 ); 冒犯; 违反(行为、事例); 强奸 | |
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87 sufficiently | |
adv.足够地,充分地 | |
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88 sane | |
adj.心智健全的,神志清醒的,明智的,稳健的 | |
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89 residue | |
n.残余,剩余,残渣 | |
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