大學(xué)英語(yǔ)綜合教程第四冊(cè) 4

[00:00.00] As the pace of life in today's world grows ever faster, we seem forever on the go. [00:07.65]With so much to do and so little time to do it in,how are we to cope? [00:14.94]Richard Tomkins sets about utangling the problem and comes up with an answer. [00:22.73]OLD FATHER TIME BECOMES A TERROR by Richard Tomkins [00:29.26]Once upon a time,technology,we thought, would make our lives easier.Machines were expected to do our work for us [00:38.92]leaving us with ever-increasing quantities of time to waste away on idleness and pleasure. [00:46.55]But instead of liberating us,technology has enslaved us.Innovations are occurring at a bewildering rate [00:56.37]as many now arrive in a year as once arrived in a millennium.And as each invention arrives,it eats further into our time [01:08.00]The motorcar,for example,promised unimaginable levels of personal mobitlity.But now [01:16.49]traffic in cities moves more slowly than it did in the days of the horse-drawn carriage [01:21.92]and we waste our lives stuck in traffic jams. [01:26.94]The aircraft promised new horizons,too.The trouble is,it delivered them.Its very existence [01:36.73]created a demand for time-consuming journeys that we would never previously have dreamed of undertaking [01:44.88]the transatlantic shopping expedition,for example,or the trip to a convention on the other side of the world [01:53.11]In most cases,technology has not saved time,but enabled us to do more things.In the home [02:02.51]washing machines promised to free women from having to toil over the laundry.In reality [02:10.56]they encouraged us to change our clothes daily instead of weekly,creating seven times as much washing and ironing [02:19.39]Similarly,the weekly bath has been replaced by the daily shower,multiplying the hours spent on personal grooming [02:28.98]Meanwhile,technology has not only allowed work to spread into our leisure time-the laptop-on-the beach [02:38.20]synfrome-but added the new burden of dealing with faxes,e-mails and voicemails [02:45.33]It has also provided us with the opportunity to spend hours fixing software glitches on our personal computers [02:53.69]or filling our heads with useless information from the Internet [02:58.49]Technology apart,the Internet points the way to a second reason why we feel so time-pressed:the information explosion [03:08.73]A couple of centuries ago,nearly all the world's accumulated learning could be contained in the heads of a few philosophers [03:18.37]Today,those heads could not hope to accommodate more than a tiny fraction of the information generated in a single day [03:27.93]News,facts and opinions pour in from every corner of the world.The television set offers 150channels [03:38.51]There are millions of Internet sites.Magazines,books and CD-ROMs proliferate [03:46.56]In the whole world of scholarship,there were only a handful of scientific journal in the 18th century [03:54.61]and the publication of a book was an event,says Edward Wilson,honorary curator in entomology [04:03.59]at Harvard University's museum of comparative zoology.Now,I find myself subscribing to 60 or 70 journals [04:13.44]or magazines just to keep me up with what amounts to a minute proportion of the expanding frontiers of scholarship [04:23.42]There is another reason for our increased time stress levels,too: [04:28.33]rising prosperity.As ever-larger quantities of goods and services [04:35.28]are produced,they have to be consumed.Driven on by advertising,we do our best to oblige:we buy more [04:46.22]travel more and play more,but we struggle to keep up [04:52.10]So we suffer from what Wilson calls discontent with super abundance-the confusion of endless choice [05:01.37]Of course,not everyone is overstressed.It's a convenient short-hand to say we're all time-starved [05:10.05]but we have to remember that it only applies to,say,half the population [05:17.02]says Michael Willmott,director of the Future Founkdation,a London research company [05:24.08]You've got people retiring early,you've got the unemployed,you've got other people [05:31.31]may be only peripherally involved in the economy who don't have this situation at all.If you're unemployed [05:40.24]your problem is that you've got too much time,not too little. [05:45.99]Paul Edwards,chairman of the London-based Henley Centre fore-casting group,points out [05:53.36]that the feeling of pressures can also be exaggerated,or self-imposed.Everyone talks about it so much [06:03.00]that about 50 percent of unemployed or retired people will tell you they never have enough time to get things done [06:11.80]he says.It's almost got to the point where there's stress envy.If you're not stressted,you're not succeeding [06:21.54]Everyone wants to have a little bit of this stress to show they're an important person [06:28.31]There is another aspect to all of this tooHour-by-hour logs kept by thousands of volunteers over the decades have shown that [06:38.63]in the U.K,working hours have risen only slightly in the last 10 years,and in theU.S.,they have actually fallen [06:48.37]even for those in professional and executive jobs,where the perceptions of stress are highest [06:56.44]In the U.S.,John Robinson,professor of sociology at the University of Maryland,and Geoffrey Godbey [07:06.19]professor of leisure studies at Penn State University found that,since the mid-1960s [07:13.08]the average American had gained five hours a week in [07:18.05]free time-that is time left after working,sleeping,commuting,caring for children and doing the chores [07:27.03]The gains,however,were unevenly distributed.The people who benefited the most were singles and empty-nesters [07:36.57]Those who gained the least-less than an hour-were working couples with pre-school children [07:43.91]perhaps reflecting the trend for parents to spend more time nurturing their off-spring [07:50.23]There is,of course, a gender is issue here,too [07:54.96]Advances in household appliances may hae encouraged women to take paying jobs:but as we have already noted [08:04.10]techonlogy did not end household chores.As a result, [08:09.72]we see appalling inequalites in the distribution of free time between the sexes [08:16.48]According to the Henley Center,working fathers in the UK average48hours of free time a week.Working mothers get14 [08:28.13]Inequalities apart,the perception of the time famine is widespread,and has provoked a variety of reactions [08:37.41]One is an attempt to gain the largest possible amount of satisfaction from the smallest possible investment of time [08:46.45]People today want fast food,sound bytes and instant gratification.And they become upset when time is wasted [08:56.58]People talk about quality time.They want perfect moments ,says the Henley Centre's Edwards [09:04.29]If you take your kids to a movie and McDonald's and it's not perfect,you've wasted an afternoon,and it's a sense [09:12.33]that you've lost something precious.If you lose some money you can earn some more [09:19.67]but if you waste time you can never get it back. [09:24.17]People are also trying to buy time.Anything that helps streamline our lives is a grown market [09:32.55]One example is what Americans call concierge services-domestic help,childcare,gardening and decorating [09:42.27]And on-line retailer are seeing big increases in sales-though not,as yet,profits [09:49.82]A third reaction to time famine has been the growth of the work-life debate.You hear more about people [09:58.62]taking early retirement or giving up high pressure jobs in favour of occupations with shorter working hours [10:07.69]And bodies such as Britain's National Work-Life Forum have sprung up [10:13.62]urging employers to end the long-hours culture among managers and to adopt family-friendly working policies [10:23.20]The trouble with all these reactions is that liberating time-whether by making better use of it,buying it form others [10:32.97]or reducing the amount spent at work-is futile if the hours gained are immediately diverted to other purposes [10:42.38]As Godbey points out,the stress we feel arises no from a shortage of time, [10:48.39]but from the surfeit of things we try to cram into it [10:53.87]It's the kid in the candy store,"he says. "There's just so many good things to do.The array of choices is stunning [11:03.80]Our free time is increasing,but not as fast as our sense of the necessary. [11:10.56]A more successful remedy may lie in understanding the problem rather than evading it. [11:17.83]Before the industrial revolution,peole lived in small communities with limited communications [11:25.66]Within the confines of their village,they could reasonably expect to know everything that was to be known [11:34.15]see everything that was to be seen,and do everything that was to be done [11:41.75]Today,being curious by nature,we are still trying to do the same [11:48.60]But the golbal village is a world of limitless possibilities,and we can never achieve our aim. [11:56.25]It is not more time we need:it is fewer desires. [12:01.48]We need to switch off the cell-phone and leave the children to play by themselves [12:08.58]We need to buy less,read less and travel less. [12:13.28]We need to set boundaries for ourselves,or be doomed to mounting despair [12:20.73]on the go cope set about untangle [12:26.88]繁忙 妥善處理 開(kāi)始 理順 [12:33.03]quantities/a large quantity of idleness enslave bewildering [12:41.27]許多的 閑散 奴役 費(fèi)解的 [12:49.51]millennium eat into motorcar aircraft [12:55.12]一千年 侵蝕 汽車 飛機(jī) [13:00.72]time-consuming transatlantic expedition convention [13:07.43]耗費(fèi)時(shí)間的 橫越大西洋的 探險(xiǎn) 慣例 [13:14.15]toil in reality multiply groom [13:19.71]辛苦地勞作 事實(shí)上 增加 梳妝 [13:25.28]laptop syndrome burden fax [13:31.77]便攜式電腦 綜合癥狀 負(fù)擔(dān) 傳真件 [13:38.26]voicemail software glitch fraction [13:43.69]語(yǔ)音郵件 軟件 失靈 少許 [13:49.13]pour in CD-ROM proliferate a handful of [13:55.70]大量涌入 光盤只讀存儲(chǔ)器 激增 少量 [14:02.27]journal publication honorary curator [14:08.26]日?qǐng)?bào) 出版 榮譽(yù)的 館長(zhǎng) [14:14.26]entomology comparative zoology amount to [14:20.60]昆蟲(chóng)學(xué) 比較的 動(dòng)物學(xué) 相當(dāng)于 [14:26.95]minute frontier stress prosperity [14:33.85]極少的 知識(shí)邊緣 壓力 繁榮 [14:40.74]oblige discontent abundance confusion [14:46.87]效勞 不滿足 豐富 迷亂 [14:53.00]shorthand unemployed peripherally economy [14:58.76]速記 失業(yè)的 邊緣地 經(jīng)濟(jì) [15:04.52]forecast self-imposed volunteer perception [15:11.22]預(yù)測(cè) 自己強(qiáng)加的 自愿者 觀念 [15:17.92]sociology unevenly singles empty-nester [15:24.07]社會(huì)學(xué) 不平坦地 未婚的人 廝守空巢者 [15:30.22]pre-school nurture offspring gender [15:35.91]學(xué)前的 養(yǎng)育 孩子 性別 [15:41.61]appliance appalling distribution famine [15:47.71]器具 駭人聽(tīng)聞的 分布 饑荒 [15:53.81]widespread provoke a variety of byte [16:00.16]遍布的 使產(chǎn)生 各種的 字節(jié) [16:06.50]gratification streamline growth concierge [16:12.21]滿意 使合理化 生長(zhǎng) 看門人 [16:17.92]domestic childcare on-line retailer [16:23.37]家庭的 兒童照管 在線的 零售商 [16:28.81]forum spring up futile divert [16:34.60]論壇 突然出現(xiàn) 無(wú)效的 轉(zhuǎn)移 [16:40.39]arise shortage surfeit cram [16:44.84]出現(xiàn) 缺少 過(guò)量 硬塞進(jìn) [16:49.29]candy evade confine reasonably [16:54.90]糖果 躲開(kāi) 范圍 合理地 [17:05.75]切斷 手機(jī) 注定

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