2020수능특강 영어독해연습 5강 본문

5강

1

If you have become much less active, spending a lot of time alone focused on feeling depressed, think about activities that engage your attention and that require a moderate level of concentration and effort. Driving, for example, is probably not ideal, because it is such an automatic behavioral sequence for most people that it siphons off only a small amount of attention. Something like strenuous aerobic exercise may be much more effective, because it captures more attention. But you would not want to choose exceedingly complex, demanding tasks, such as studying for a math exam, because any difficulties you have doing such a task could reinforce negative, self‑critical thinking. When you are feeling depressed, a mentally demanding task may become overwhelming, and then you will start ruminating about failing the task (e.g., “Depression is going to ruin me, because I can’t even concentrate on this simple math”). Thus moderately engaging activities are probably the best distracters for rumination. Take some time to discover the positive activities that are most effective in reducing or eliminating your bouts of rumination.

 

2

Body water is involved in several functions critical to performance. The body’s chemical processes that provide the energy for muscle work occur in water. All of the transport functions of oxygen, nutrients, and body wastes are carried on in body water. Of most importance to the exercising athlete is the fact that a large amount of heat generated by exercising muscles is transported by water in the blood to the skin, where water is essential for the production of sweat. Body heat is dissipated most efficiently through the evaporation of sweat on exposed skin surfaces. An abundant supply of body water, first to transport muscle‑generated heat and then to produce the sweat needed for evaporative cooling, is the best insurance against the complications of heat cramps, heat exhaustion, and life‑threatening heat stroke.

 

3

Sport sends some messages that support socioeconomic inequities. For example, winning is the most prevalent organizing theme in newspaper stories and telecasts of sporting events. Winning is usually attributed to self‑discipline, talent, and hard work. If an athlete or a team doesn’t win, then we assume that the player or the team was lazy or lacked talent and so didn’t deserve to win. Such beliefs underscore the American conception of merit—we often link hard work and talent to financial success. The flip side is that if someone fails financially, it must be because she or he isn’t talented or didn’t work hard. This reasoning allows us to hold the belief that the rich and poor both deserve whatever money they have. The point here is not that merit is a bad idea. The problem is that this logic often leads us to overlook the societal barriers (e.g., poor nutrition, neighborhood gang violence, poor access to libraries and computers, dysfunctional families, lack of child care) that prevent poor people from developing themselves to the fullest and becoming valuable members of society.

 

4

According to Wikipedia, of the countries that have adopted color television, twenty‑nine had done so by 1969. The vast majority of these were in Europe and North America. The rise in the use of television in the 1950s opened up the creativity of advertising within a more emotional and powerful medium. The addition of color must have been seen as a powerful boost if used wisely. Though, no doubt, early color commercials were likely simply reshot black‑and‑white spots, creative directors at agencies from New York to London to Paris and beyond must have seen this new technology as an advantage in promoting brands. In many ways, this transition from black and white to color must have been similar to the challenges facing actors when sound was introduced to movies. For advertising agencies in the 1960s, an entire world of new possibilities and requirements put them back to square one: they could either understand how to use color effectively or face losing clients.

 

5-6

In the business world, large bureaucratic organizations are sometimes unable to compete against smaller, innovative firms, particularly in industries that are changing quickly. This situation occurs partly because innovative firms tend to have flatter and more democratic organizational structures. Compare the flat network structure in smaller, innovative firms with the traditional bureaucratic structure in large bureaucratic organizations. Note that the network structure has fewer levels than the traditional bureaucratic structure. Moreover, in the network structure, lines of communication link all units. In the traditional bureaucratic structure, information flows only upward. Much evidence suggests that flatter bureaucracies with decentralized decision making and multiple lines of communication produce more satisfied workers, happier clients, and bigger profits. Some of this evidence comes from Sweden and Japan. Beginning in the early 1970s, Volvo and Toyota were at the forefront of bureaucratic innovation in these countries. They began eliminating middle‑management positions. They allowed worker participation in a variety of tasks related to their main functions and delegated authority to autonomous teams of a dozen or so workers that were allowed to make many decisions themselves. They formed “quality circles” of workers to monitor and correct defects in products and services. Consequently, product quality, worker morale, and profitability improved. Today, these ideas have spread well beyond the Swedish and Japanese automobile industries and are evident in many large North American companies, both in the manufacturing and in the service sectors.

 

7

The lesson of ecology is that, as species of the planet, we are all connected in a web of life. A Buddhist parable brings to life this rather stark and scientific lesson from ecology. During his meditation, a devotee fantasizes that he is eating a leg of lamb, an act proscribed by Buddhism where strict adherence to vegetarianism is required. His spiritual master suggests that when this fantasy comes to him he draws a cross on the leg of lamb. The devotee follows the advice and, on returning to self‑consciousness, is amazed to find the cross on his own arm. A more prosaic way of reaching the same sense of connection is to think about a time when you might have hit an animal or bird when driving your car. The sense of shock and horror that you have destroyed something so precious is the same, no matter how insignificant the animal appears.

 

8

The distinctions—between mind and body, and war and peace—appear to have lost credibility altogether, with the result that we now experience conflict intruding into everyday life. Since the 1990s, rapid advances in neuroscience have elevated the brain over the mind as the main way by which we understand ourselves, demonstrating the importance of emotion and physiology to all decision making. Meanwhile, new forms of violence have emerged, in which states are attacked by non‑state groups, interstate conflicts are fought using nonmilitary means (such as cyberwarfare), and the distinction between policing and military intervention becomes blurred. As society has been flooded by digital technology, it has grown harder to specify what belongs to the mind and what to the body, what is peaceful dialogue and what is conflict. In the obscure space between mind and body, between war and peace, lie nervous states: individuals and governments living in a state of constant and heightened alertness, relying increasingly on feeling rather than fact.

 

9

The obvious problems being caused by economic growth have not been ignored by academics: they were noticed by some in the economics profession, who then attempted to incorporate these concerns into their discipline. This led to the development of environmental economics, and also the related study of natural‑resource economics. Conventional economics considers environmental impact to be an ‘externality’, something outside its concern. Environmental economists were keen to bring these negative impacts back within the discipline. However, they still approached the subject in a scientific and measurement‑based way, for example, using shadow pricing to measure how much people were concerned about noise pollution or the loss of habitat. In other words, the way in which economics traditionally marginalizes or ignores something that cannot be priced was still adhered to, but the response was to attempt to evaluate in some way aspects of life which economics had ignored. Green economists would consider this to be a category error; in other words, they believe it is important to accept that some aspects of life have social or spiritual worth that simply cannot be measured.

 

10

Until fairly recently, human beings lived in kin bands of usually no more than twenty people, loosely associated into tribes of perhaps a few hundred. Open to nature and each other, they knew each other more intimately than we can imagine today. Speech may have been superfluous, as it often is between lovers, or between mother and baby. When we know someone that well, we know without asking what they are thinking and feeling. All the more in prelinguistic times, when our empathetic faculties were yet unclouded by the mediatory apparatus of language. Spend some time alone with a person or small group in silence, and observe whether, after just a few days or even hours, you feel more intimately connected with them than if you’d been talking. The empathy and intuitive understanding of others that develops in such circumstances is amazing.

 

11-12

When students in a civilian college are found to be cheating on an examination, it does not make a story in the national media—not even headlines in the local papers and probably not a story in the college newspaper. The students may have a hearing before a student/faculty disciplinary board, and a penalty may be imposed if the verdict is that the students are guilty. The penalty may be a failure in the course or a brief suspension from the institution; often it is less severe than either of these. The West Point scandal of 1976 made front‑page news across the country. Military students were cheating, which violated the honor code. That event, a most serious matter, was followed by student dismissals and lengthy editorial comment. In the junior class, 184 students were formally accused of cheating, and 152 of those were expelled. Similar cheating “scandals” at the Naval Academy in Annapolis and at the Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs have also been given the most serious attention. Why is cheating by an officer candidate taken more seriously than cheating by a civilian student at the same educational level? The question almost answers itself. Civilian schools have honor codes, but moral education is usually not a conscious educational goal. The Military Academy at West Point has a well‑known honor code requiring that “a Cadet will not lie, cheat or steal, nor tolerate anyone who does.” The experience of living by such a code, we hope, will help produce officers who can be trusted to avoid moral individualism. They will have consciously practiced the reflex of honesty, of consistently doing what they promised to do, regardless of temptation. The thought and temptations of individualism are always in the mind, but we assume that people can be found who consciously adopt another moral style.