大学英语综合教程 第四册 Unit6A

[00:00.00]As the pace of life in today's world grows ever faster, we seem forever on the go.
[00:07.65]With so much to do and so little time to do it in,how are we to cope?
[00:14.94]Richard Tomkins sets about utangling the problem and comes up with an answer.
[00:22.73]OLD FATHER TIME BECOMES A TERROR                                by Richard Tomkins
[00:29.26]Once upon a time,technology,we thought, would make our lives easier.Machines were expected to do our work for us
[00:38.92]leaving us with ever-increasing quantities of time to waste away on idleness and pleasure.
[00:46.55]But instead of liberating us,technology has enslaved us.Innovations are occurring at a bewildering rate
[00:56.37]as many now arrive in a year as once arrived in a millennium.And as each invention arrives,it eats further into our time
[01:08.00]The motorcar,for example,promised unimaginable levels of personal mobitlity.But now
[01:16.49]traffic in cities moves more slowly than it did in the days of the horse-drawn carriage
[01:21.92]and we waste our lives stuck in traffic jams.
[01:26.94]The aircraft promised new horizons,too.The trouble is,it delivered them.Its very existence
[01:36.73]created a demand for time-consuming journeys that we would never previously have dreamed of undertaking
[01:44.88]the transatlantic shopping expedition,for example,or the trip to a convention on the other side of the world
[01:53.11]In most cases,technology has not saved time,but enabled us to do more things.In the home
[02:02.51]washing machines promised to free women from having to toil over the laundry.In reality
[02:10.56]they encouraged us to change our clothes daily instead of weekly,creating seven times as much washing and ironing
[02:19.39]Similarly,the weekly bath has been replaced by the daily shower,multiplying the hours spent on personal grooming
[02:28.98]Meanwhile,technology has not only allowed work to spread into our leisure time-the laptop-on-the beach
[02:38.20]synfrome-but added the new burden of dealing with faxes,e-mails and voicemails
[02:45.33]It has also provided us with the opportunity to spend hours fixing software glitches on our personal computers
[02:53.69]or filling our heads with useless information from the Internet
[02:58.49]Technology apart,the Internet points the way to a second reason why we feel so time-pressed:the information explosion
[03:08.73]A couple of centuries ago,nearly all the world's accumulated learning could be contained in the heads of a few philosophers
[03:18.37]Today,those heads could not hope to accommodate more than a tiny fraction of the information generated in a single day
[03:27.93]News,facts and opinions pour in from every corner of the world.The television set offers 150channels
[03:38.51]There are millions of Internet sites.Magazines,books and CD-ROMs proliferate
[03:46.56]In the whole world of scholarship,there were only a handful of scientific journal in the 18th century
[03:54.61]and the publication of a book was an event,says Edward Wilson,honorary curator in entomology
[04:03.59]at Harvard University's museum of comparative zoology.Now,I find myself subscribing to 60 or 70 journals
[04:13.44]or magazines just to keep me up with what amounts to a minute proportion of the expanding frontiers of scholarship
[04:23.42]There is another reason for our increased time stress levels,too:
[04:28.33]rising prosperity.As ever-larger quantities of goods and services
[04:35.28]are produced,they have to be consumed.Driven on by advertising,we do our best to oblige:we buy more
[04:46.22]travel more and play more,but we struggle to keep up
[04:52.10]So we suffer from what Wilson calls discontent with super abundance-the confusion of endless choice
[05:01.37]Of course,not everyone is overstressed.It's a convenient short-hand to say we're all time-starved