阅读教程 1 Unit 4 答案

阅读教程Book 1 Unit 4答案

Exercises

I. Reading for information

A. Reading to find main ideas

1-6: BCADBC

II. Translation

Translate the following sentences into Chinese.

1 In his free time, he runs a charity that helps war veterans adjust to life after traumatic injury.

在业余时间，他管理着一家慈善机构，帮助遭受过战争创伤的退伍军人适应新的生活。

2 Still, a large and growing proportion of the population can lay claim to this problem.

然而，很多人都宣称自己有拖延症，而且人数还在不断上升。

3 Procrastination is considered a needless, often irrational delay of someimportant task in favor of

a less important, but seemingly more rewarding, task.

拖延症是指对重要任务不必要的、往往还是毫无道理的拖延，拖拉者宁愿做一些无关紧要但看似更有意义的事情。

4 As with many problems that arise from the fundamental human condition,procrastination has not been easy to fix.

跟许多由于人类的根本状态产生的问题一样，拖延始终是个难以解决的问题。

5 Because they believe expectancy of success is essentially a measure of confidence. The more confident you are, the less likely you are to put off a task.

因为他们认为对成功的期望在本质上是衡量自信心的尺度，越是自信的人，越不可能做事拖拉。

III. Summary

Complete the following statements with words and expressions from the box. Use their proper forms.

1 Robert Capp is a 38-year-old publishing executive at the top of his field. He’s overseen everything from major magazines to major Internet sites.

2 It’s impossible to be in a rel ationship with a chronic procrastinator because procrastination has affected every part of his life.

3 Laziness involves a lack of desire; with procrastination, the desire to start that project is there, but it consistently loses out to our appetite for delay.

4 Modern life furnishes an abundance of endlessly reinforcing demands for our attention, such as the streams of tweets you subscribe to.

5 However much procrastination reflects a mismatch between our stone-age brains and the highly sophisticated environments those same brains have created, it reaches deep into our being.

6 The solution to procrastination, argues Pychyl, centers around deploying some skills of emotion management.

Part II Reading for Pleasure

Exercises

Answer the following questions.

1 Why did Akerlof find it difficult to deal with the box of clothes left by his friend?

Because it would take him an entire workday and a whole lot of trouble to send the box off due to his clumsiness in such matters and the inefficiency of the Indian postal service.

2 What did procrastination reveal according to Akerlof?

He argued that procrastination revealed something important about the limits of rational thinking and that it could teach useful lessons about phenomena as Student’s Book 81 diverse as substance abuse and savings habits.

3 When does procrastination as a serious problem seem to have emerged?

It seems to have emerged in the early modern era. The term itself entered the English language in the sixteenth century, and, by the eig hteenth, Samuel Johnson described it as “one of the general weaknesses” that “prevail to a greater or less degree in every mind.”

4 Why is procrastination also a surprisingly costly problem?

Each year, Americans waste hundreds of millions of dollars because of their habit of procrastinating, such as when many fail to file their tax returns on time.

5 For what reason are some philosophers interested in procrastination?

Philosophers are interested in procrastination because it’s a powerful example of what the Greeks called akrasia —doing something against one’s own better judgment.