2020수능특강 영어독해연습 4강 본문

4강

1

Opera is conventional. Nobody sings all the time in the real world. Nobody has an orchestra that begins to play whenever he feels emotional. Conventions are of course necessary in the theater, and even more so in opera. We like conventions, provided that we understand, accept, and desire them. Conventions are simply the result of participants’ agreeing on the rules, of simplifying a complex world so that we can concentrate on what interests us. We are accustomed, for example, to detective novels, television situation comedies, and western movies. We understand how each genre works, and we know that not every murder has six suspects who can be gathered in one room in the last chapter by a brilliant detective. Yet we gladly accept the unreality of the situation because of the pleasure it provides us.

 

2

One great danger of intellectual property lies in the threat to liberty. When a group of scientists stop working on a protein molecule because there are too many intellectual property rights that surround the use of the molecule, a basic freedom, the freedom to research, has been interfered with. The liberty cost of intellectual property rights may seem remote because most of us do not carry out research on proteins. But we all have an interest in seeing public research programmes into diseases and health being carried out. We want, for example, public researchers to continue working on the genes for breast and ovarian cancer and helping to develop cheaper, more effective clinical tests. We do not want them obstructed by announcements like the following: ‘This important patent solidifies Myriad’s dominant proprietary position on the BRCA1 and BRCA2 genes’ (the genes linked to breast and ovarian cancer). Companies are entitled to protect their treatments for disease but not, through use of their patents, to prevent others from access to genes which are linked to the origins of disease.

 

3

Too much choice is overwhelming for many people and results in consumers who are less satisfied with the shopping experience, which ultimately hurts retail profitability. Consider, for example, a consumer who wants a product to relieve her cold symptoms. First, she has to decide where to shop for such a product. Over‑the‑counter pharmaceuticals are now commonly available in a variety of locations ranging from hotel gift shops and convenience stores to drug and grocery stores. Once she has chosen a store and is standing in front of the shelf, the consumer faces a dizzying array of products from a variety of brands with a broad spectrum of ingredients. Even within a particular brand, she can choose products that vary in when they should be taken, how they can be taken, and what symptoms they treat. Ironically, all this is enough to make a healthy person ill.

 

4

In today’s business environment, firms may face competition from companies located in their own home market as well as from those based halfway around the world. Also, customer trends which take root in one country may quickly spread to other parts of the world, creating either new marketing opportunities or potential threats to a firm’s established products and business models. In addition, political and economic crises in one region may have important implications for consumer and business confidence around the world. One need look no further than the sovereign debt crisis in Europe that began to unfold in 2009 or the sub‑prime mortgage crisis in the USA, to appreciate the impact of such events on economic growth, consumer spending and prosperity. Economic and political events taking place around the world may have a profound effect on a company’s prospects for survival and growth. It should be noted that whether or not a firm elects to operate internationally, it is still vulnerable to changes taking place in the global marketplace.

 

5

Clarity is often a difficult thing for a leader to obtain. Concerns of the present tend to loom larger than potentially greater concerns that lie farther away. Some decisions by their nature present great complexity, whose many variables must align a certain way for the leader to succeed. Compounding the difficulty is what ergonomists call information overload, where a leader is overrun with inputs—via e‑mails, meetings, and phone calls—that only distract and clutter his thinking. Alternatively, the leader’s information might be only fragmentary, which might cause her to fill in the gaps with assumptions—sometimes without recognizing them as such. And the merits of a leader’s most important decisions, by their nature, typically are not clear‑cut. Instead, those decisions involve “a process of assigning weights to competing interests, and then determining, based upon some criterion, which one predominates. The result is one of judgment, of shades of gray; like saying that Beethoven is a better composer than Brahms.”

 

6

Many women find their inner critic speaks up most loudly around their most deeply felt dreams for their lives and work, because they feel particularly vulnerable about them. They experience the most panicky, overwhelming self‑doubt when they are moving toward what they truly long to do. The inner critic is like a guard at the edge of your comfort zone. As long as you don’t venture forth out of that zone, the inner critic can leave you alone—like a guard taking a nap. Yet when you approach the edge of your comfort zone, test old beliefs, contemplate change, or stretch into playing bigger, you wake the sleeping guard. The inner critic recites its lines in an attempt to get you to go back into the familiar zone of the status quo. Many women find that the more strongly the inner critic shows up, the louder and meaner and more hysterical its voice, the closer they are to a breakthrough or the more likely they are to be on the edge of taking a very important step. In this sense, when you hear a major inner critic attack, it likely means you are playing bigger.

 

7

Researchers of the Earth’s system have been focused, appropriately, on developing a better understanding of the vast and interconnected processes that create our environment, and they have made a great deal of progress since the publication of A Sand County Almanac, a 1949 non‑fiction book by Aldo Leopold. Although there are many problems left to solve, knowledge about planetary life‑support systems has progressed far more rapidly than society’s willingness to use this knowledge. The biggest challenge facing humanity is that our political, social, and economic systems are shortsighted. Long‑term planning typically considers years or decades, but the global environmental processes we are now influencing play out over centuries, millennia, or more. We need to instill a sense of geologic time into our culture and our planning, to incorporate truly long‑term thinking into social and political decision making. This is what “thinking like a mountain” should come to mean in the Anthropocene. If we succeed in transforming our culture, residents of the later Anthropocene will look back on the early twenty‑first century as a time of human enlightenment, when people learned to truly think like mountains by anticipating their long‑lasting and complex effects on the world.

 

8

From the early twentieth century through the beginning of the 1970s, the sociological analysis of cultural objects took one of two competing paths, which interestingly shared a core assumption. The products of mediated culture, whether books, songs, or fashion, were thought to be expressive symbols that changed in lockstep with evolutions in society. For example, in 1919 the anthropologist Alfred Kroeber argued that the hemlines of women’s dresses were prescribed through “civilizational determinism”; they were a window into macro‑level cultural values and belief systems. In turn, by the mid‑1920s the economist George Taylor argued that instead the hemlines of dresses go up with rises and go down with declines in the stock market. For Taylor, hemlines were determined by macro‑level economic, not cultural, shifts. While these “nothing‑but” arguments quibbled on the direction of the association between culture and the economy, they both assumed that hemline lengths in women’s fashion were reflections of outsized societal forces.

 

9

It is clear that even a single initial encounter with a word can potentially leave a memory trace of its use. Why is this clear? Consider the counterfactual: if no memory trace could exist after a single exposure, then the second time the word was encountered would be exactly the same as the first time. But then no memory trace of the word would be left upon this second encounter. This situation could be repeated ad infinitum without any memory trace of the meaning being retained. If this were the case, we would be utterly unable to learn any words. Therefore, it must be possible for an initial memory trace to exist in order for it to be strengthened upon subsequent exposure. Fortunately, we know that human brains have a vast capacity for implicit memory, even though memories may not readily be brought to consciousness (they are not always easy to recall or make explicit).

 

10

Consider for a moment a fish. Fish belong in the water, and when it is in the place where it belongs, it dominates all other things that do not belong there that may try to compete with it. Man is no match for the fish as long as it remains in the water, so in order for us to have any power over the fish, we have to capture it by using tools and many forms of trickery to get it out of the place of its dominance. We understand that man versus fish in the water, fish wins. But if we can succeed in taking it out of the water, the fish will lose every time. The thought that I am trying to convey to you is that, once you discover who you are and operate in that realm, you will always come out successful. But if you follow the guile of other things that may seem attractive and leave the place of your power, you will never win. Life is about winning, not necessarily about winning against others but winning at being you, and the way to win is to figure out who you are and do it.

 

11

For a while, people thought that 10,000 hours of practice was what it took to become an expert at something. But now we know that this figure is a gross oversimplification, because the quality of practice matters even more than the quantity. Expert practicers get better faster. They have learned to pick out the difficult parts of what they are trying to do, and work especially hard on those. They make good use of recordings and videos of their own performance. They know what time of day works best for them, when to push on through tiredness or confusion, and when to take a break. A pianist knows that sometimes it helps to play a piece at half speed, to get the fingering exactly right, and sometimes it is worth trying to play it at double speed, mistakes and all, to get a better feel for the flow and cadence of the piece. A footballer is able to suggest to the coach a new way of practicing an attacking maneuver.

 

12

Today companies frequently require of their employees a different level and quality of engagement with the company. In earlier periods, employees were often treated like machines, but their private lives, consisting in their leisure time, passions, and beliefs, remained largely unaffected. Nowadays, employees frequently contribute more than physical labor; they are required to innovate, make decisions, and work effectively as a team. As a result, they no longer leave work when they go home but instead continue at some level nonstop. The fact that workers are being asked to contribute collectively to the production of goods and services has begun to reweave the fabric of the social, from one based in the distinction between public and private spaces to one in which networks of associations and the advantages they may offer to move ahead now function as the organizing force in most daily interactions. As Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri describe it, we have transitioned from a society in which there are factories to a factory society in which the entire social performs as a factory.