剑桥雅思13Test1阅读passage2真题+翻译(2)

剑桥雅思13Test1阅读passage2真题+翻译(2) 关于这个问题下面小编就来为各个考生解答下。

剑桥雅思13Test1阅读passage2真题+翻译

READING PASSAGE 2

You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 14-26, which are based on Reading Passage 2 on pages 21 and 22.

Why being bored is stimulating 一 and useful, too

为何厌倦有刺激性和功能性?

This most common of emotions is turning out to be more interesting than we thought

厌倦这种最常见的情绪竟比我们想象得更有趣

Psychologist John Eastwood at York University in Toronto, Canada, isn’t convinced. ‘If you are in a state of mind-wandering you are not bored，’ he says. ‘In my view, by definition boredom is an undesirable state.’ That doesn’t necessarily mean that it isn’t adaptive, he adds. ‘Pain is adaptive 一 if we didn’t have physical pain, bad things would happen to us. Does that mean that we should actively cause pain? No. But even if boredom has evolved to help us survive, it can still be toxic if allowed to fester.’ For Eastwood, the central feature of boredom is a failure to put our ‘attention system’ into gear. This causes an inability to focus on anything, which makes time seem to go painfully slowly. What’s more, your efforts to improve the situation can end up making you feel worse. ‘People try to connect with the world and if they are not successful there’s that frustration and irritability,' he says. Perhaps most worryingly, says Eastwood, repeatedly failing to engage attention can lead to a state where we don’t know what to do any more, and no longer care.

加拿大多伦多约克大学的心理学教授John Eastwood不同意她的理论，“如果你的神志在突发奇想的游离状态，那你就不是无聊厌倦的。”他说，“在我的概念里，厌倦是一种不受欢迎的情绪。”当然这也不一定意味着它是非适应进化的，他补充道。“疼痛是适应进化的--如果没有生理痛感，我们可能会陷入麻烦。但这是要我们主动去触发疼痛吗?不是。但尽管厌倦情绪进化出来是为了帮助我们生存下去，若是由着它恶化，它一样是有害的。”在Easiwood的概念里，厌惓情绪最核心的特质是阻止我们的“注意力系统”正常运转。这导致我们无法集中精力做任何事，而时间 流逝也因此缓慢得令人难以忍受。更严重的是，你若试图改变现状，最终会让情况变得更糟。“人们尝试着去和这个 世界建立联系，如果他们失敗了，等待他们的是挫敗感和暴怒，”他说。而令人担忧的可能是，Eastwood说，试图集中精神却总是徒劳，会导致我们走到—个不知何以为继的状态，并且也毫不在意了 。

Eastwood's team is now trying to explore why the attention system fails. It’s early days but they think that at least some of it comes down to personality. Boredom proneness has been linked with a variety of traits. People who are motivated by pleasure seem to suffer particularly badly. Other personality traits, such as curiosity, are associated with a high boredom threshold. More evidence that boredom has detrimental effects comes from studies of people who are more or less prone to boredom. It seems those who bore easily face poorer prospects in education, their career and even life in general. But of course, boredom itself cannot kill - it’s the things we do to deal with it that may put us in danger. What can we do to alleviate it before it comes to that? Goetz’s group has one suggestion. Working with teenagers, they found that those who ‘approach’ a boring situation - in other words, see that it’s boring and get stuck in anyway - report less boredom than those who try to avoid it by using snacks, TV or social media for distraction.

Easrwood的团队现在正在研究为何我们无法集中注意力。虽然还处于调研的初级阶段，但他们认为至少有一部分原因在于性格。厌倦的出现与一系列的性格特征相关联。那些寻欢作乐的人群尤其容易遭殃。拥有其他性格特征的人，如好奇心强的人，较不容易产生厌倦情绪。对于厌倦的有害性，更多的证据来自对那些或多或少容易产生厌倦情绪的人的研究。看上去更易受到厌倦影响的人，在教育、事业，甚至人生方面的前景更加暗淡。但当然，厌倦本身并不会出人命，而是我们应对厌倦的方式会致我们于险境。但在产生厌倦之前，我们能如何减轻这些状况呢?Goetz的团队有这样一个建议。他们通过调查研究青少年的行为发现，那些主动去“接近”一个无聊情形的人(换句话说就是明知这个事情很无聊，还是选择投身其中的人)，其厌倦程度会比那些尝试用吃零食、看电视或用社交媒体来转移注意力的人要低。

Psychologist Francoise Wemelsfelder speculates that our over-connected lifestyles might even be a new source of boredom. ‘In modern human society there is a lot of overstimulation but still a lot of problems finding meaning,，she says. So instead of seeking yet more mental stimulation, perhaps we should leave our phones alone, and use boredom to motivate us to engage with the world in a more meaningful way.

心理学家Francoise Wemelsfelder猜测，交互过密的生活方式可能是厌倦感的新源头。“当今社会有越来越多的过度刺激，也导致了越来越多的问题。”她说。所以，比起寻找更多的精神刺激，或许我们应当把手机放一边，用厌倦来驱使我们用更有意义的方式参与到世界中来。

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