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Sometimes it's just hard to choosE.You're in a restaurant and the waiter has his pen at the ready. As you hesitate, he gradually begins to take a close interest in the ceiling, his fingernails, then in your dining partner. Each dish on the menu becomes a blur as you roll your eyes up and down in a growing paniC.Finally, you desperately opt for something that turns out to be what you hatE.
It seems that we need devices to protect us from our hopelessness at deciding between 57 barely differentiated varieties of stuff—be they TV channels, gourmet coffee, downloadable ring tones, or perhaps, ultimately even interchangeable lovers. This thought is opposed to our government's philosophy, which suggests that greater choice over railways, electricity suppliers and education will make us happy. In my experience, they do anything but.
Perhaps the happiest people are those who do not have much choice and aren't confronted by the misery of endless choicE.True, that misery may not be obvious to people who don't have a variety of luxuries. If you live in Madagascar, say, where average life expectancy is below 40 and they don't have digital TV or Starbucks, you might not be impressed by the anxiety and perpetual stress our decision-making paralysis causes.
Choice wasn't supposed to make people miserablE.It was supposed to be the hallmark of self-determination that we so cherish in capitalist western society. But it obviously isn't: ever more choice increases the feeling of missed opportunities, and this leads to self-blame when choices fail to meet expectations. What is to be done? A new book by an American social scientist, Barry Schwartz, called The Paradox of Choice, suggests that reducing choices can limit anxiety.
Schwartz offers a self-help guide to good decision making that helps us to limit our choices to a manageable number, and ultimately derive greater satisfaction from the choices we makE.This is a capitalist response to a capitalist problem.
But once you realize that your Schwartzian filters are depriving you of something you might have found enjoyable, you will experience the same anxiety as before, worrying that you made the wrong decision in drawing up your choice-limiting filters. Arguably, we will always be doomed to buyers' remorse and the misery it entails. The problem of choice is perhaps more difficult than Schwartz allows.
The waiter mentioned in ParA.1 would agree that given a variety of choice ______.
A.it is common for his customer to hesitate in ordering a meal
B.it is impolite for his customer to order with hesitation
C.it is difficult for his customer to expect quality food
D.it is possible to get know his customer's partner

A.B.
C.
D.
E.
F.
The
G.
A.it
H.it
I.it
J.it

【参考答案】

A
解析:细节题。第1段的结构很清楚,主题句是第1句:有时候要做出选择就是很难。接下来给出一个具体的场景:这个具......

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Many things make people think artists are weird—the odd hours, the nonconformity, the clove cigarettes. However, the weirdest may be this: artists' only jobs are to explore emotions, and yet they choose to focus on the ones that feel lousy. This wasn't always so. The earliest forms of art, like painting and music, are those best suited for expressing joy. But somewhere in the 19th(上标) century, more artists began seeing happiness as insipid, phony or, worst of all, boring. In the 20th(上标) century, classical music became more atonal, visual art more unsettling.Sure, there have been exceptions, but it would not be a stretch to say that for the past century or so, serious art has been at war with happiness. In 1824, Beethoven completed his 'Ode to Joy'. In 1962, novelist Anthoy Burgess used it in A Clockwork Orange as the favorite music of his ultra-violent antihero.You could argue that art became more skeptical of happiness because modern times have seen such misery. But the reason may actually be just the opposite: there is too much damn happiness in the world today.In the West, before mass communication and literacy, the most powerful mass medium was the church, which reminded worshippers that their souls were in peril and that they would someday be meat for worms. Today the messages that the average Westerner is bombarded with are not religious but commercial, and relentlessly happy. Since these messages have an agenda—to pry our wallets from our pockets—they make the very idea of happiness seem bogus (假的). 'Celebrate!' commanded the ads for the arthritis drug Celebrex, before we found out it could increase the risk of heart attack.What we forget—what our economy depends on our forgetting—is that happiness is more than pleasure without pain. The things that bring the greatest joy carry the greatest potential for loss and disappointment. Today, surrounded by promises of easy happiness, we need someone to tell us that it is OK not to be happy, that sadness makes happiness deeper. As the wine-connoisseur movie Sideways tells us, it is the kiss of decay and mortality that makes grape juice into Pinot Norway need art to tell us, as religion once did, that you will die, that everything ends, and that happiness comes not in denying this but in living with it. It's a message even more bitter than a clove cigarette, yet, somehow, is a breath of fresh air.What is most strange about artists?A.They wear special clothes.B.They rarely work in the daytimE.C.They mainly depict distressing things.D.They are liable to take illegal drugs.
A.B.
C.
D.
E.
What
F.They
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B.They
H.
C.They
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