劍橋雅思13 Test1 Passage2閱讀原文翻譯

劍橋雅思13 Test1 Passage2閱讀原文翻譯

段落A

We all know how it feels – it’s impossible to keep your mind on anything, time stretches out, and all the things you could do seem equally unlikely to make you feel better. But defining boredom so that it can be studied in the lab has proved difficult. For a start, it can include a lot of other mental states, such as frustration, apathy, depression and indifference. There isn’t even agreement over whether boredom is always a low-energy, flat kind of emotion or whether feeling agitated and restless counts as boredom, too. In his book, Boredom: A Lively History, Peter Toohey at the University of Calgary, Canada, compares it to disgust – an emotion that motivates us to stay away from certain situations. ‘If disgust protects humans from infection, boredom may protect them from “infectious” social situations,’ he suggests.

我們都知道這種感覺——無法集中注意力到任何事情上，時(shí)間變得格外遲緩，所有事情都似乎無法讓自己感覺好受一些。但要定義厭煩這種情緒，以便它可以在實(shí)驗(yàn)室里接受研究，卻被證明十分困難。首先，它包含許多其他精神狀態(tài)，如沮喪、冷漠、壓抑和漠不關(guān)心。人們甚至對于“厭煩是否總是一種低能量、平淡的情緒狀態(tài)”，或者“焦躁不安、坐立不寧是否算作厭煩”都存在爭議。加拿大卡爾加里大學(xué)的Peter Toohey在其著作《厭煩：一段鮮活的歷史》中將它與厭惡（一種促使我們脫離特定情景的情緒）進(jìn)行了比較。 他提出：“如果厭惡保護(hù)人類免受感染，那么厭煩可能保護(hù)他們遠(yuǎn)離“感染性”的社會(huì)情景。

段落B

By asking people about their experiences of boredom, Thomas Goetz and his team at the University of Konstanz in Germany have recently identified five distinct types: indifferent, calibrating, searching, reactant and apathetic. These can be plotted on two axes – one running left to right, which measures low to high arousal, and the other from top to bottom, which measures how positive or negative the feeling is. Intriguingly, Goetz has found that while people experience all kinds of boredom, they tend to specialise in one. Of the five types, the most damaging is ‘reactant’ boredom with its explosive combination of high arousal and negative emotion. The most useful is what Goetz calls ‘indifferent’ boredom: someone isn’t engaged in anything satisfying but still feels relaxed and calm. However, it remains to be seen whether there are any character traits that predict the kind of boredom each of us might be prone to.

通過詢問人們厭煩的經(jīng)歷，德國康斯坦茨大學(xué)的Thomas Goetz及其團(tuán)隊(duì)最近界定出五種不同的類型：漠不關(guān)心，搖擺不定，有所期待、應(yīng)激反應(yīng)和無動(dòng)于衷。這些類型可以被置于兩條坐標(biāo)軸中：一條從左到右，表示從低到高的情感激發(fā)；另一條從上到下，表示情緒的積極或消極程度。有趣的是，Goetz發(fā)現(xiàn)，雖然人們會(huì)體驗(yàn)各種各樣的厭煩情緒，但他們常常集中于其中一種。在五種類型中，最具破壞性的是“應(yīng)激反應(yīng)型”厭煩。它綜合了高應(yīng)激反應(yīng)和消極情緒的爆發(fā)式力量。最有用的類型是被Goetz稱為“漠不關(guān)心型”的厭煩，即某人并沒有從事任何讓人滿足的活動(dòng)，但依然感到放松和平靜。然而，是否存在一些可以預(yù)示我們更加傾向于哪種厭煩類型的性格特點(diǎn)仍然有待研究。

段落C

Psychologist Sandi Mann at the University of Central Lancashire, UK, goes further. ‘All emotions are there for a reason, including boredom,’ she says. Mann has found that being bored makes us more creative. ‘We’re all afraid of being bored but in actual fact it can lead to all kinds of amazing things,’ she says. In experiments published last year, Mann found that people who had been made to feel bored by copying numbers out of the phone book for 15 minutes came up with more creative ideas about how to use a polystyrene cup than a control group. This article is from Laokaoya website. Mann concluded that a passive, boring activity is best for creativity because it allows the mind to wander. In fact, she goes so far as to suggest that we should seek out more boredom in our lives.

英國蘭卡斯特中央大學(xué)的心理學(xué)家-Sandi Mann更進(jìn)一步。她說：“所有情緒的存在都有其原因，厭煩也不例外”。Mann發(fā)現(xiàn)，厭煩可以使我們更具創(chuàng)造性。“我們都害怕處于厭煩之中，但實(shí)際上，它能導(dǎo)向各種各樣奇妙的事情”。在去年發(fā)布的實(shí)驗(yàn)中，Mann發(fā)現(xiàn)，與對照組相比，那些被要求從電話簿中連抄15分鐘數(shù)字，從而感到厭煩的實(shí)驗(yàn)對象在如何使用一個(gè)聚苯乙烯杯子上提出了更加有創(chuàng)意的想法。Mann總結(jié)到，無聊的活動(dòng)最有利于創(chuàng)造性的發(fā)揮，因?yàn)樗屗季S得以發(fā)散開來。事實(shí)上，她甚至建議我們應(yīng)該在生活總尋找更多的無聊。

段落D

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 – 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 ‘a(chǎn)ttention 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 anymore, and no longer care.

加拿大多倫多約克大學(xué)的心理學(xué)家John Eastwood并沒有被說服。他說，“如果你處于思維發(fā)散的狀態(tài)，那么你并沒有感到無聊。在我看來，無聊從定義上來講是種不良的狀態(tài)”。這并不必然意味著它無法被適應(yīng)，他補(bǔ)充道?！巴纯嗄軌虮贿m應(yīng) – 如果我們感受不到身體疼痛的話，壞事就會(huì)發(fā)生。這難道意味著我們應(yīng)該主動(dòng)觸發(fā)疼痛嗎？不。但即便無聊已經(jīng)進(jìn)化到可以幫助我們生存，如果任由其發(fā)展的話，仍然是有害的”。對于Eastwood來說，無聊的核心特征是無法正常運(yùn)轉(zhuǎn)我們的注意力系統(tǒng)。這導(dǎo)致我們無法將注意力集中在任何事情上，使得時(shí)間似乎慢的讓人痛苦。此外，改善該情況的努力可能反而讓你感覺更差?！叭藗兣εc世界聯(lián)系，如果失敗的話，就會(huì)感到沮喪和易怒”，他說。Eastwood認(rèn)為，或許最讓人擔(dān)心的是，集中注意力反復(fù)失敗會(huì)導(dǎo)致一種不知道該做什么，也不再關(guān)心的狀態(tài)。

段落E

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 ‘a(chǎn)pproach’ a boring situation-in other words, see that it’s boring and get stuck in any way -report less boredom than those who try to avoid it by using snacks, TV or social media for distraction.

Eastwood的團(tuán)隊(duì)如今正在努力探索為什么注意力系統(tǒng)會(huì)失效。雖然為時(shí)尚早，但他們認(rèn)為至少部分原因可以歸結(jié)為性格。無聊傾向已經(jīng)與多種性格特點(diǎn)聯(lián)系起來。受到快樂驅(qū)動(dòng)的人們似乎尤其糟糕。其他性格特點(diǎn)，比如好奇，則不那么容易無聊。更多無聊有害的證據(jù)來自于對那些或多或少有無聊傾向的人群的研究。大體而言，似乎那些容易無聊的人在教育、職業(yè)發(fā)展、甚至生活方面的前景更差。但當(dāng)然，無聊自身并沒有負(fù)面影響 – 反而是那些我們?yōu)榱藨?yīng)對它而做的事情可能將我們置于危險(xiǎn)之中。那么在它達(dá)到這種程度之前，我們能做些什么來緩解呢？Goetz的團(tuán)隊(duì)給出如下建議，跟青少年待在一起。他們發(fā)現(xiàn)與那些利用零食、電視或社交媒體分散注意力從而努力避免無聊的人群相比，那些“接近”無聊狀態(tài)的人 – 換句話說，認(rèn)為其無聊，但仍然身陷其中的人 – 更少感到無聊。

段落F

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.

心理學(xué)家Francoise Wemelsfelder推測，我們過度連接的生活方式可能成為新的無聊來源。“現(xiàn)代人類社會(huì)存在許多過度刺激，但在尋找意義方面仍然有許多問題”，她說。因此，與其尋求更多的精神刺激，或許我們應(yīng)該將手機(jī)放在一邊，利用無聊來促使我們跟世界建立更有意義的聯(lián)系。

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