全新版大学英语综合教程 B4 U6 文本.docx

1、全新版大学英语综合教程 B4 U6 文本Integrated Course Book 4 Unit 6Listen to the recording two or three times and then think over the following questions:1. Do you keep a diary? What sort of things do you write about?2. How does the singer treat his diary? Why?3. What does the singer think about how other people sp

2、end their time?4. Can we infer what attitude the singer takes towards the pace of life today? In the song you are about to listen to we hear what the singer is thinking as he writes his diary. Like many people who keep a diary, he treats it like a friend to whom he can pour out his inmost feelings.

3、From the confidences he entrusts to his diary we learn of what he thinks of the way most people live. He thinks they spend their days in a rush, so much so that they have no time for him. As he says:So many people by the score.Rushing around so senselessly.They dont notice theres people like me.Perh

4、aps hes right, perhaps people are too much in a rush to spare enough time for one another. Though one suspects they may have other reasons for not sparing the singer time. He sounds altogether self-centred, looking at the world only from his own narrow point of view. We hear this at the end of the s

5、ong, when he passes lightly over an H-bomb explosion as something of no concern to him as nobody he knew was involved. Given his outlook, it is probably just as well he has his diary as a friend, as others might find it a bit hard to put up with him.Dear DiaryThe Moody Blues Dear diary, what a day i

6、ts beenDear diary, its been just like a dreamWoke up too late. Wasnt where I should have beenFor goodness sake whats happening to meWrite lightly, yours truly, dear diaryIt was cold outside my doorSo many people by the scoreRushing around so senselesslyThey dont notice theres people like meWrite lig

7、htly, yours truly, dear diaryThey dont know what theyre playingTheyve no way of knowing what the game isStill they carry on doing what they canOutside me, yours politely, dear diaryIts over. Will tomorrow be the sameI know that theyre really not to blameIf they werent so blind then surely theyd seeT

8、heres a much better way for them to beInside me, yours truly, dear diarySomebody exploded an H-bomb todayBut it wasnt anyone I knewText A As the pace of life in todays world grows ever faster, we seem forever on the go. With so much to do and so little time to do it in, how are we to cope? Richard T

9、omkins sets about untangling the problem and comes up with an answer. 随着当今世界生活节奏日益加快，我们似乎一直在不停奔忙。事情那么多，时间却那么少，我们该怎么办？里查德汤姆金斯着手解决这一问题，并提出了建议。 Old Father Time Becomes a Terror Richard Tomkins 1 Once upon a time, technology, we thought, would make our lives easier. Machines were expected to do our work

10、 for us, leaving us with ever-increasing quantities of time to waste away on idleness and pleasure. 时间老人成了可怕的老人 理查德汤姆金斯 从前，我们以为技术发展会使我们的生活变得更安逸。那时我们觉得机器会替代我们工作，我们则有越来越多的时间休闲娱乐。 2 But instead of liberating us, technology has enslaved us. Innovations are occurring at a bewildering rate: as many now ar

11、rive in a year as once arrived in a millennium. And as each invention arrives, it eats further into our time. 但技术发展没有把我们解放出来，而是使我们成为奴隶。新技术纷至沓来，令人目不暇接：一年涌现的技术创新相当于以前一千年。而每一项新发明问世，就进一步吞噬我们的光阴。 3 The motorcar, for example, promised unimaginable levels of personal mobility. But now, traffic in cities mo

12、ves more slowly than it did in the days of the horse-drawn carriage, and we waste our lives stuck in traffic jams. 比如，汽车曾使我们希望个人出行会方便得让人难以想象。可如今，城市车辆运行得比马车时代还要慢，我们因交通堵塞而困在车内，徒然浪费生命。 4 The aircraft promised new horizons, too. The trouble is, it delivered them. Its very existence created a demand for

13、time-consuming journeys that we would never previously have dreamed of undertaking - the transatlantic shopping expedition, for example, or the trip to a convention on the other side of the world. 飞机也曾有可能为我们拓展新天地。问题是，飞机提供了新的天地。其存在本身产生了对耗时的长途旅行的需求，这种旅行，如越洋购物，或远道前往地球的另一半参加会议，以前我们是根本无法想象的。 5 In most ca

14、ses, technology has not saved time, but enabled us to do more things. In the home, washing machines promised to free women from having to toil over the laundry. In reality, they encouraged us to change our clothes daily instead of weekly, creating seven times as much washing and ironing. Similarly,

15、the weekly bath has been replaced by the daily shower, multiplying the hours spent on personal grooming. 在大多数情况下，技术发展并未节省时间，而是使我们得以做更多的事。在家里，洗衣机可望使妇女摆脱繁重的洗衣劳作。但事实上，它们促使我们每天，而不是每星期换一次衣服，这就使熨洗衣物的工作量变成原来的7倍。同样地，每周一次的沐浴为每日一次的淋浴所代替，使得用于个人穿着打扮的时间大大增加。 6 Meanwhile, technology has not only allowed work to s

16、pread into our leisure time - the laptop-on-the-beach syndrome - but added the new burden of dealing with faxes, e-mails and voicemails. It has also provided us with the opportunity to spend hours fixing software glitches on our personal computers or filling our heads with useless information from t

17、he Internet. 与此同时，技术发展不仅听任工作侵入我们的闲暇时间 带着便携式电脑去海滩综合症 而且添加了收发传真、电子邮件和语音邮件这些新的负担。技术发展还向我们提供机会，在个人电脑上一连几小时处理软件故障，或把因特网上那些无用的信息塞进自己的大脑。 7 Technology apart, the Internet points the way to a second reason why we feel so time-pressed: the information explosion. 除去技术发展，因特网指出了我们为何感到时间如此紧迫的第二个原因：信息爆炸。 8 A coup

18、le of centuries ago, nearly all the worlds accumulated learning could be contained in the heads of a few philosophers. Today, those heads could not hope to accommodate more than a tiny fraction of the information generated in a single day. 几个世纪以前，人类积累的几乎所有知识都能装在若干哲人的大脑之中。如今，这些大脑休想容纳下一天中产生的新信息中的小小一部分

19、。 9 News, facts and opinions pour in from every corner of the world. The television set offers 150 channels. There are millions of Internet sites. Magazines, books and CD-ROMs proliferate. 各种消息、事实和见解从世界各个角落大量涌入。电视机能收到150个频道。因特网网址多达千百万。杂志、书籍和光盘只读存储器的数量也激增。 10 In the whole world of scholarship, there

20、were only a handful of scientific journals in the 18th century, and the publication of a book was an event, says Edward Wilson, honorary curator in entomology at Harvard Universitys museum of comparative zoology. Now, I find myself subscribing to 60 or 70 journals or magazines just to keep me up wit

21、h what amounts to a minute proportion of the expanding frontiers of scholarship. “在18世纪，整个国际学术界总共只有屈指可数的几家科学刊物，出版一本书是件了不起的大事，”哈佛大学比较动物学博物馆昆虫馆名誉馆长爱德华威尔逊说。“如今，我本人就订阅了60或70种期刊杂志，以便自己跟上不断拓展的学术前沿中一个微小部分的发展动向。” 11 There is another reason for our increased time stress levels, too: rising prosperity. As eve

22、r-larger quantities of goods and services are produced, they have to be consumed. Driven on by advertising, we do our best to oblige: we buy more, travel more and play more, but we struggle to keep up. So we suffer from what Wilson calls discontent with super abundance - the confusion of endless cho

23、ice. 我们产生日益加重的时间紧迫感还有一个原因：日渐繁荣富足。由于生产的物品与提供的服务越来越多，我们必须去消费。在广告的推动下，我们努力照办：我们多多购买多多旅游多多玩儿，但得尽力坚持下去。于是我们就深受威尔逊所谓的对极大富足不满之苦 即无休止的选择所造成的困惑。 12 Of course, not everyone is overstressed. Its a convenient shorthand to say were all time-starved, but we have to remember that it only applies to, say, half the

24、population, says Michael Willmott, director of the Future Foundation, a London research company. 当然，并非人人感到时间过度紧迫。“说我们都缺少时间只是随意讲讲，我们应该记住，这种说法大约只适用于一半人，”未来基金公司 一家伦敦研究公司 的经理迈克尔威尔莫特说。 13 Youve got people retiring early, youve got the unemployed, youve got other people maybe only peripherally involved in

25、 the economy who dont have this situation at all. If youre unemployed, your problem is that youve got too much time, not too little. “有些人早早退休了，有些人失业了，有些人或许只与经济活动沾点边，根本不会有这种情况。如果失业了，那你的问题就是时间太多，而不是太少。” 14 Paul Edwards, chairman of the London-based Henley Centre forecasting group, points out that the

26、feeling of pressures can also be exaggerated, or self-imposed. Everyone talks about it so much that about 50 percent of unemployed or retired people will tell you they never have enough time to get things done, he says. Its almost got to the point where theres stress envy. If youre not stressed, you

27、re not succeeding. Everyone wants to have a little bit of this stress to show theyre an important person. 总部设在伦敦的亨利中心预测小组组长保罗爱德华兹指出，压力感也可能被夸大，或者被强加于自身。“人人都大谈压力，以至于多达半数的失业者或退休人员都会跟你说，他们根本来不及把事情做完，”他说。“这几乎是到了羡慕压力的程度。没有感到有压力，就不是成功者。人人都想表现几分时间紧迫感，以显示自己的重要。” 15 There is another aspect to all of this too.

28、 Hour-by-hour logs kept by thousands of volunteers over the decades have shown that, in the U.K. , working hours have risen only slightly in the last 10 years, and in the U.S., they have actually fallen - even for those in professional and executive jobs, where the perceptions of stress are highest.

29、 这一切还有另外一个方面。几十年来由数千名志愿者所作的钟点日志表明，英国在最近十年中工作时间只略微增加，而在美国，即使对工作压力最大的专业人士和管理人员而言，工作时间实际上减少了。 16 In the U.S., John Robinson, professor of sociology at the University of Maryland, and Geoffrey Godbey, professor of leisure studies at Penn State University found that, since the mid-1960s, the average Amer

30、ican had gained five hours a week in free time - that is, time left after working, sleeping, commuting, caring for children and doing the chores. 在美国，马里兰大学社会学教授约翰鲁宾逊和宾夕法尼亚州立大学研究闲暇问题的教授杰弗里戈德比发现，自20世纪60年代中期以来，普通美国人每周增加了5小时空余时间，即工作、睡眠、乘车上下班、照料孩子和家务劳动之余的时间。 17 The gains, however, were unevenly distribut

31、ed. The people who benefited the most were singles and empty-nesters. Those who gained the least - less than an hour - were working couples with pre-school children, perhaps reflecting the trend for parents to spend more time nurturing their offspring. 但增加的时间分配得并不均匀。受惠最多的是未婚者和子女不在身边的人。得益最少的 增加了不足1个小时 是有学前子女的双职工夫