2024年英语专业四级考试真题及答案解析

(1)Downturn's new spending habits show the way to greater satisfaction. (2)As the months passed, out went stacks of sweaters, shoes, pots and pans, even the television after a trial separation during which it was relegated to a closet. Eventually, Tammy Strobel and her husband Logan Smith, both 31, got rid of their cars, too. Her mother called her crazy. Today, three years after the couple began downsizing, they live in a studio with a nice-sized kitchen. They have money to travel and to contribute to the education funds of nieces and nephews. Because their debt is paid off, Ms. Strobel works fewer hours, giving her time to be outdoors and to volunteer.“The idea that you need to go bigger to be happy is false,"she says."I really believe that the acquisition of material goods doesn't bring about happiness." (3)While Ms. Strobel and her husband overhauled their spending habits before the recession, legions of other consumers have since had to adapt in ways that could ultimately make them happier. (4)New studies of consumption and happiness show, for instance, that people are happier when they spend money on experiences instead of material objects. (5)While the current round of stinginess may simply be a response to the economic downturn, some analysts say consumers may also be permanently adjusting their spending based on what they've discovered about what truly makes them happy or fulfilled. (6)“This actually is a topic that hasn't been researched very much until recently,”says Elizabeth Dunn, a psychology professor, who is at the forefront of research on consumption and happiness."There's massive literature on income and happiness. It's amazing how little there is on how to spend your money." (7)Studies over the last few decades have shown that money, up to a certain point, makes people happier because it lets them meet basic needs. The latest round of research is all about emotional efficiency: how to reap the most happiness for your dollar. (8)One major finding is that spending money for an experience—concert tickets, language lessons, dumpling-making classes—produces longer-lasting satisfaction than spending money on plain old stuff.“'It's better to go on a vacation than buy a new couch'is basically the idea,”says Professor Dunn. Jennifer Black, president of the retailing research company Jennifer Black&Associates, said:“I think people are realizing they don't need what they had. They're more interested in creating memories." (9)Unlike consumption of material goods, spending on leisure and services typically strengthens social bonds, which in turn helps amplify happiness, research suggests. Paying for experiences also gives us longer-lasting happiness, because we can reminisce about them, researchers say. That's true for even the most exasperating of experiences. That trip to Rome during which you waited in endless lines, broke your camera and argued with your spouse will typically be airbrushed with“rosy recollection”, says Professor Dunn.“Trips aren't all perfect, but we remember them as perfect." (10)And experiences can't be absorbed at once—it takes more time to adapt to them and engage with them than it does to put on a new leather jacket or turn on that shiny flat-screen TV. “We buy a new house, we get accustomed to it,”says Professor Lyubomirsky, who studies what psychologists call“hedonic adaptation”, a phenomenon in which people quickly become used to changes, great or terrible, in order to maintain a stable level of happiness.“We stop getting pleasure from it,"she says. And then, of course, we buy new things. Scholars have discovered that one way consumers combat hedonic adaptation is to buy many small pleasures instead of one big one. Instead of a new Jaguar, Professor Lyubomirsky advises, buy a massage once a week, have lots of fresh flowers delivered and make phone calls to friends overseas. Instead of a two-week long vacation, take a few three-day weekends.“We do adapt to the little things,"she says,"but because there's so many, it will take longer." (11)Ms. Strobel now writes about her own life choices on the Internet.“My lifestyle now would not be possible if I still had a huge two-bedroom apartment filled with stuff, two cars, and 30 grand in debt,"she says.“Give away some of your stuff. See how it feels."

(1)The five o'clock dads can only be seen on cable television these days. They eat dinner with their television families and provide counsel afterward in the den, exemplifying how men behave when they work eight hours a day. (2)The five o'clock dad has become an endangered species. A corporate culture that believes presence is productivity, in which people of ambition are afraid to be seen leaving the office, has lengthened his workday and shortened his home life. So has an economy that makes it difficult for families to take a break even at the end of the month. For the man who is paid by the hour, that means never saying no to overtime. For the man whose loyalty to the organization is measured in time at his desk, it means goodbye to nine to five. (3)To lots of small children it means a visiting father. The standard joke in one large corporate office is that the dads always say their children look like angels when they're sleeping .because that's the only way they ever see them. A survey taken several years ago showed that roughly 12 percent of the men surveyed with children under the age of six worked more than sixty hours a week, and an additional 25 percent worked between fifty and sixty hours. (4)No matter how you divide it up, those are twelve-hour days. When a talk show host adopted a baby recently, she said one reason she was not troubled by becoming a mother without becoming a wife was that many of her married female friends were“functionally single”, given the hours their husbands worked. The evening commuter rush is getting longer. The eight o'clock dad. The nine o'clock dad. (5)There's a horribly sad irony to this, that is, the quality of fathering is better than it was when the dads left work at five o'clock and came home to coffee pots and tuna casserole. The five o'clock dad was remote, a“wait till your father gets home"kind of dad with a newspaper for a face. The roles he and his wife had were clear: she did nurture and home, he did discipline and money. (6)The role fathers have carved out for themselves today is a vast improvement, a muddling of those old boundaries. Fathers today do seem to be more emotional with their children, more nurturing, more open. Many say,“My father never told me he loved me”and so they tell their own children all the time that they love them. (7)There are people who think that this is changing even now. A nonprofit organization advises corporations on how to balance personal and professional obligations and concerns, and its founder says she has noticed a change in the past few years. An increasing number of men have expressed their wishes to spend more time with their kids. (8)This change can be to the good, not only for women but especially for men, and for kids, too. The stereotypical five o'clock dad belongs in a picture, with his“Ask your mother"and his “Don't be a crybaby.”The father who believes hugs and kisses are sex-blind and a dirty diaper requires a change is infinitely preferable. What a joy it would be if he were around more. (9)“This is the man's half of having it all,”said Donald Long, a professor who teaches a course about men's relationships that drew 135 students this year for thirty-five places,“We're trying to do what women want of us, what children want of us, but we're not willing to transform the workplace."In other words, the hearts and minds of today's fathers are definitely in the right place, if only their bodies could be there, too.

(1)When a Southerner took the trouble to pack a trunk and travel twenty miles for a visit, the visit was seldom of shorter duration than a month, usually much longer. Southerners were as enthusiastic visitors as they were hosts, and there was nothing unusual in relatives coming to spend the Christmas holidays and remaining until July. Often when newly married couples went on the usual round of honeymoon visits, they lingered in some pleasant home until the birth of their second child. Frequently elderly aunts and uncles came to Sunday dinner and remained until they were buried years later. Visitors presented no problem, for houses were larger, servants numerous and the feeding of several extra mouths a minor matter in that land of plenty. All ages and sexes went visiting, honeymooners, young mothers showing off new babies, convalescents, the bereaved, girls whose parents were anxious to remove them from the dangers of unwise matches, girls who had reached the danger age without becoming engaged and who, it was hoped, would make suitable matches under the guidance of relatives in other places. Visitors added excitement and variety to the slow-moving Southern life and they were always welcome. (2)So Scarlett had come to Atlanta with no idea as to how long she would remain. If her visit proved as dull as those in Savannah and Charleston, she would return home in a month. If her stay was pleasant, she would remain indefinitely. But no sooner had she arrived than Aunt Pitty and Melanie began a campaign to induce her to make her home permanently with them. They brought up every possible argument. They wanted her for her own self because they loved her. They were lonely and often frightened at night in the big house, and she was so brave she gave them courage. She was so charming that she cheered them in their sorrow. Now that Charles was dead, her place and her son's place were with his kindred. Besides, half the house now belonged to her, through Charles'will. Last, the Confederacy needed every pair of hands for sewing, knitting, bandage rolling and nursing the wounded. (3)Charles'Uncle Henry Hamilton, who lived in bachelor state at the Atlanta Hotel near the depot, also talked seriously to her on this subject. Uncle Henry was a short, pot-bellied, irascible old gentleman with a pink face, a shock of long silver hair and an utter lack of patience with feminine timidities and vaporings. It was for the latter reason that he was barely on speaking terms with his sister, Mis Pitty. From childhood, they had been exact opposites in temperament and they had been further estranged by his objections to the manner in which she had reared Charles “Making a damn sissy out of a soldier's son!”Years before, he had so insulted her that now Miss Pitty never spoke of him except in guarded whispers and with so great reticence that a stranger would have thought the honest old lawyer a murderer, at the least. The insult had occurred on a day when Pitty wished to draw five hundred dollars from her estate, of which he was trustee, to invest in a non-existent gold mine. He had refused to permit it and stated heatedly that she had no more sense than a June bug and furthermore it gave him the fidgets to be around her longer than five minutes. Since that day, she only saw him formally, once a month, when Uncle Peter drove her to his office to get the housekeeping money. After these brief visits, Pitty always took to her bed for the rest of the day with tears and smelling salts. Melanie and Charles, who were on excellent terms with their uncle, had frequently offered to relieve her of this ordeal, but Pitty always set her babyish mouth firmly and refused. Henry was her cross and she must bear him. From this, Charles and Melanie could only infer that she took a profound pleasure in this occasional excitement, the only excitement in her sheltered life. (4)Uncle Henry liked Scarlett immediately because, he said, he could see that for all her silly affectations she had a few grains of sense. He was trustee, not only of Pitty's and Melanie's estates, but also of that left Scarlett by Charles.