close /klәuz/

Finally, figures close to the Franch government have murmured, euro-zone members should agree to some fiscal and social harmonisation: e.g., curbing competition in corporate-tax rates or labour costs.

最后，法国政府内部人士表示，欧元区成员国应达成财政和社会政策的协调统一，例如限制在公司税率或劳动力成本方面的竞争。

But if the district is essentially giving a pass to students who do not do their homework because of complicated family lives, it is going riskily close to the implication that standards need to be lowered for poor children.

但如果该地区基本上对因家庭生活复杂而未能完成家庭作业的学生网开一面，那就意味着要冒着对贫困儿童降低标准的暗示风险。

Justice Anthony Kennedy, joined by Chief Justice John Roberts and the Court's liberals, ruled that the state flew too close to the federal sun.

安东尼·肯尼迪大法官，连同首席大法官约翰·罗伯茨和最高法院的自由派法官，裁定该州过于接近联邦政府的权力范围。

This has created “a paradox” in that recruiting first-generation students, but then watching many of them fail, means that higher education has “continued to reproduce and widen, rather than close” an achievement gap based on social class, according to the depressing beginning of a paper forthcoming in the journal Psychological Science.

根据即将发表在《心理科学》期刊上的一篇论文令人沮丧的开头，这种做法创造了一个‘悖论’：招收第一代大学生，但随后却看到其中许多人失败，这意味着高等教育‘继续复制并扩大，而非缩小’了基于社会阶层的成就差距。

But the article is actually quite optimistic, as it outlines a potential solution to this problem, suggesting that an approach (which involves a one-hour, next-to-no-cost program) can close 63 percent of the achievement gap (measured by such factors as grades) between first-generation and other students.

但这篇文章实际上相当乐观，因为它概述了解决这一问题的潜在方案，提出一种方法（涉及一个几乎不花成本的一小时项目）可以缩小第一代大学生与其他学生之间63%的成就差距（以成绩等因素衡量）。