2020수능특강 영어독해연습 2강 본문

 

2강

1

Your comfort zone is like an invisible barrier around you, inside which if you stay, you feel comfortable. Your comfort zone and your confidence are linked together. Step outside it and you feel uncomfortable and fearful. However, your comfort zone is not fixed. If you constantly stay within your comfort zone it shrinks, filling you with fear of what is outside it, and then your confidence reduces. If you step outside your comfort zone, and do something you are fearful or nervous about doing, then your comfort zone expands and your confidence increases. Try something new to expand your comfort zone and increase your confidence. Trying something new reduces your limitations and you’ll live your life with fewer barriers.

 

2

Given our unique life‑scripted beliefs about how things should be: our expectations—differences in preferences, attitudes, and beliefs are inevitable, and not all of them need to be resolved. Many, in fact, add the spice to relationships. But sometimes you cannot just agree to disagree. Some issues impact each of you and perhaps others (your children or coworkers) in ways that require a clear, unambiguous resolution. You and your partner may need to decide where you will live and whether to rent or purchase a home. A decision must be made, or you may find yourselves living in the backseat of your car. Often you can’t have things both ways, so a choice must be made. For example, you can’t practically visit your mother in Florida and your father in Connecticut on Thanksgiving Day. So coping with conflicts as we traverse the ups and downs of daily life is not just a useful tool; it is absolutely necessary for the kinds of successful relationships and outcomes we most desire.

 

3

The personal computer has done more to alter work methods and procedures than any other innovation of the past several decades. Computers have replaced typewriters and other office machines almost completely, and they have dramatically changed the way many jobs are performed. Unfortunately, the computers—and tablets and smart phones and other electronic devices—have also opened wide a door to a variety of time‑wasting personal uses including games and nonbusiness e‑mail (personal correspondence, jokes, inspirational messages, anecdotes, etc.). It is not unreasonable to conclude that much of the efficiency gained through the use of such devices is cancelled out by their misuse. The personal computer may well be the most useful and versatile tool ever to come into common organizational use, but by many who spend hours at keyboard and screen the computer is treated more as a toy than a tool.

 

4

In the circumstances of entertainment and aesthetic engagement, overt manifestations of the perception‑action cycle are often blocked or transformed. Watching films and television, looking at paintings or sculptures in a gallery, and listening to music in a concert hall deliberately place perceivers in a relationship with the objects of perception that prevents them from acting upon or exploring those objects in an unhindered fashion. Many of the reactions that people have to these special circumstances (reaching out to touch a sculpture; foot‑ and finger‑tapping in response to music) are a residue of the more usual relationship between perception and action, as are the specific conventions that regulate these reactions (“Please do not touch” signs at exhibitions, socially enforced silence and immobility at concerts, applause at regulated moments). The interruption or suspension of the perception‑action cycle that characterizes some forms of aesthetic engagement is, of course, culturally specific; it is at its most extreme in some of the “high” art forms of the West and in circumstances in which formal ceremony and aesthetics interact.

 

5

People from more individualistic cultural contexts tend to be motivated to maintain self‑focused agency or control as these serve as the basis of one’s self‑worth. With this form of agency comes the belief that individual successes depend primarily on one’s own abilities and actions, and thus, whether by influencing the environment or trying to accept one’s circumstances, the use of control ultimately centers on the individual. The independent self may be more driven to cope by appealing to a sense of agency or control. However, people from more interdependent cultural contexts tend to be less focused on issues of individual success and agency and more motivated towards group goals and harmony. Research has shown that East Asians prefer to receive, but not seek, more social support rather than seek personal control in certain cases. Therefore, people who hold a more interdependent self‑construal may prefer to cope in a way that promotes harmony in relationships.

 

6

Severe depression is not something people can pull themselves out of any more than they can pull themselves out of congestive heart failure, kidney disease, or gallstones. When patients with congestive heart failure develop difficulty breathing, they are usually grateful for treatment that relieves their distress. They rarely believe they can handle such illnesses themselves because they have no sense of being in control over the workings of their heart. We also do not sense our brains at work, but we feel in control of our minds. This sense of being in control of our minds allows those with depression to believe they can pull themselves out of the severe depression. In my experience, once older adults understand that depression is a disease of the brain, and not something they have control over, they become more open to considering treatment. It’s not that they can’t handle their problems any longer; rather, their brain has let them down. I often say to my patients, “It’s not you; it’s your brain.”

 

7

In the process of selling your property, you may hear the phrase “real property” and “personal property.” Real property is fixed and attached; personal property is usually mobile and unattached. Where this is likely to come up is in regard to items within your property. Most refrigerators that can roll out, be unplugged, and taken with you, are considered personal property. If a refrigerator is somehow permanently attached to the home (such as a built‑in model), it is real property and stays. When selling a property, it is assumed that you are selling all real property. Ripping things like banisters, fireplaces, etc. off their moorings and taking them with you is not only boorish behavior, it would most likely be a violation of your sales contract. Even if it is possible to remove them, the buyer is assuming all real property to be his.

 

8

Much prosocial behavior is stimulated by others, such as when someone acts more properly because other people are watching. Dogs will stay off the furniture and out of the trash when their owners are present, but they casually break those rules when alone. Humans may have more of a conscience, but they also still respond to the presence or absence of others. Public circumstances generally promote prosocial behavior. Participants in a study by Kay L. Satow sat alone in a room and followed tape‑recorded instructions. Half believed that they were being observed via a one‑way mirror (public condition), whereas others believed that no one was watching (private condition). At the end of the study, the tape‑recorded instructions invited the participant to make a donation by leaving some change in the jar on the table. The results showed that donations were seven times higher in the public condition than in the private condition. Apparently, one important reason for generous helping is to make (or sustain) a good impression on the people who are watching.

 

9

Say you’re driving down the interstate at sixty‑five miles an hour with three friends from out of town, and you suddenly say to them, “Hey, there’s that amazing Pink House!” What happens? Probably there’s a lot of sudden head swiveling, and someone’s elbow ends up in someone else’s ribs, and maybe one of your friends gets a glimpse, but probably nobody really gets a chance to see it (and somebody might not believe you if she didn’t see it for herself!). What if you had said instead, “Hey, coming up on the right here in about two miles, there’s an amazing huge neon Pink House: watch for it”? They’d be ready, they’d know where to look and what to look for, and they’d see what you wanted them to see. Writers need to advise their readers in a similar way. That advice doesn’t always need to be in a thesis statement or a topic sentence, but it does need to happen regularly so that readers don’t miss something crucial.

 

10

So far as diet is concerned, I belong to no school; I have learned something from each one, and what I have learned from a trial of them all is to be shy of extreme statements and of hard and fast rules. To my vegetarian friends who argue that it is morally wrong to take sentient life, I answer that they cannot go for a walk in the country without committing that offense, for they walk on innumerable bugs and worms. We cannot live without asserting our right to subject the lower forms of life to our purposes; we kill innumerable germs when we swallow a glass of grape juice, or for that matter a glass of plain water. I shall be much surprised if the advance of science does not some day prove to us that there are basic forms of consciousness in all vegetable life; so we shall justify the argument of Mr. Dooley, who said, in reviewing “The Jungle,” that he could not see how it was any less a crime to cut off a young tomato in its prime or to murder a whole cradleful of baby peas in the pod!

 

11

Indeed, one of the most problematic aspects of global warming from the point of view of social policy stems from the fact that the phenomenon has so far manifested itself very unevenly around the world. Some places have had little warming in the past century, and some have even experienced cooling. “For extensive regions of the Earth, the warming of the past 80 years has deviated strongly from the global average,” notes climate expert Ken Hare. “This fact raises major difficulties for political action: in many countries, future temperatures will differ strongly from the global norm and global warming will seem like a fiction to local politicians.” He points out, for example, that the lack of a strong warming trend in the United States accounted in part for the reluctance of the U.S. government to support the 1992 international convention on climate change. “If you’re considering political action, you have to remember that you’re asking a considerable number of people in the world to take on faith that this is a truly global effect,” he said.

 

12

In the fifth century B.C.E., the Greek philosopher Protagoras pronounced, “Man is the measure of all things.” In other words, we feel entitled to ask the world, “What good are you?” We assume that we are the world’s standard, that all things should be compared to us. Such an assumption makes us overlook a lot. Abilities said to “make us human”―empathy, communication, grief, toolmaking, and so on—all exist to varying degrees among other minds sharing the world with us. Animals with backbones (fishes, amphibians, reptiles, birds, and mammals) all share the same basic skeleton, organs, nervous systems, hormones, and behaviors. Just as different models of automobiles each have an engine, drive train, four wheels, doors, and seats, we differ mainly in terms of our outside contours and a few internal tweaks. But like naive car buyers, most people see only animals’ varied exteriors.