올림포스 독해의 기본 15강 요약문 완성 | 한줄 해석 | 문장별 음원 쉐도잉 연습

올림포스 독해의 기본 1

 

Unit 15

 

Analysis

 

In a study at Stanford University,

 

four-year-olds at a nursery school were offered a marshmallow.

 

They were told they could either eat the marshmallow immediately or wait.

 

If they waited to eat the marshmallow that sat before their eyes

 

until the experimenter returned (about 15 minutes),

 

they would receive two marshmallows.

 

Walter Mischel, a psychologist studying delaying gratification,

 

had three daughters who attended the nursery school;

 

they and their classmates participated in the study.

 

Over the years, he would ask his daughters about their friends,

 

and in doing so he detected a relationship

 

between an ability to delay gratification in preschool and excelling in adolescence.

 

Mischel and his colleagues located the participants in the initial study

 

to more formally track their progress as they matured.

 

They noticed that the children who ate the single marshmallow right away

 

were likely to have problems in the areas of behavior, friendships, and attention.

 

In contrast, those who were able to delay gratification

 

had higher SAT scores and coped better with stress.

 

According to Mischel’s study, children who could put off their desire

 

showed superior achievements in adolescence,

 

while those who sought instant satisfaction tended to have various troubles.

 

 

Practice 1

 

Our instincts tell us the higher we climb up the ladder,

 

the more stress we feel and the weaker our feeling of safety.

 

Consider the stereotype of the high-strung executive facing relentless pressure

 

from shareholders, employees and the firm’s largest customers.

 

We are hardly surprised when one of them suddenly drops dead of a heart attack before fifty.

 

Decades ago, scientists in Britain set out to study this link

 

between an employee’s place on the corporate ladder and stress.

 

Known collectively as the Whitehall Studies,

 

the studies’ findings were both astounding and profound.

 

Researchers found that workers’ stress was not caused

 

by a higher degree of responsibility and pressure usually associated with rank.

 

It is not the demands of the job that cause the most stress,

 

but the lack of control workers feel they have throughout their day.

 

The studies also found that the effort required by a job is not in itself stressful,

 

but rather the imbalance between the effort we give and the reward we feel.

 

According to the Whitehall Studies,

 

the stress does not come from people’s position at work or work demands,

 

but from the situations which cannot be done exactly as they want.

 

 

Practice 2

 

According to philosopher Radcliffe Richards,

 

it is incoherent to think that something’s real nature is revealed

 

when it is in its correct environment.

 

First of all, the whole notion of a ‘correct environment’ is problematic.

 

Isn’t the notion of what is correct relative to various concerns?

 

The correct environment for a salmon when cooking one is perhaps a heated oven.

 

The correct environment for its spawning is something else again.

 

But more importantly, knowing something’s nature is to know how it is in a variety of environments.

 

Iron’s nature, for example, is most fully understood

 

if we know how it behaves when it is hot, cold, smashed, left in water and so on.

 

Knowing how iron behaves

 

when left in conditions optimal to its continued, unchanged existence

 

only gives a partial view of its nature.

 

The notion of ‘correct environment’ is improper in understanding something’s nature,

 

but its behavior in various conditions best reveals its nature.

 

 

Practice 3

 

Programs of economic development often lead to changes in people’s dietary habits.

 

In some cases these dietary changes are voluntary

 

to the extent that some new foods, associated with powerful outsiders, are status symbols.

 

But more often than not, diets change because of circumstances

 

associated with the objectives of economic development

 

that are beyond the control of the local people.

 

For example, in an attempt to grow more cash crops

 

(which help to raise wages and bring in foreign exchange capital),

 

non-Western people often divert time and energy from growing their normal subsistence crops.

 

The result is that they spend much of their hard-earned cash on foods that are both costly and nutritionally inferior to feed their families.

 

People may change their dietary habits voluntarily,

 

but they may also change them because of the demands associated with economic development,

 

which can pressure non-Western people to grow cash crops and consume expensive and undernourished foods.