A Professional Essay to Consider
bastard什么意思Read the following professional essay. Then answer the questions and read the comments that follow.
Taming the Anger Monster （by Anne Davidson）
Laura Hour remembers the day with embarrassment.
名词性物主代词 “My mother was visiting from Illinois,” she says. “We'd gone out to lunch and done some shopping. On our way home, we stopped at an interction. When the light changed, the guy ahead of us was looking at a map or something and didn't move right away. I leaned on my horn and automatically yelled—well, what I generally yell at people who make me wait. I didn't even think about what I was doing. One moment I was talking and laughing with my mother, and the next I was shouting curs at a stranger. Mom's jaw just dropped. She said, ‘Well, I guess you've been living in the city too long.’ That's when I realized that my anger was out of control.”
Laura has plenty of company. Here are a few examples plucked from the headlines of recent newspapers:
∙Amtrak's Washington–New York train: When a woman begins to u her cell phone in a designated “quiet car,” her atmate grabs the phone and smashes it against the wall.
∙Reading, Mass.: Arguing over rough play at their ten-year-old sons' hockey practice, two fathers begin throwing punches. One of the dads beats the other to death.
垃圾邮件英语∙Westport, Conn.: Two supermarket shoppers get into a fistfight over who should be first in a just-opened checkout line.
Reading the stories and countless others like them which happen daily, it's hard to escape the conclusion that we are one angry society. An entire vocabulary has grown up to describe situations of out-of-control fury: road rage, sideline rage, computer rage, biker rage, air rage. Bookstore shelves are filled with authors' advice on how to deal with our anger. Court-ordered anger management class have become commonplace, and anger-management workshops are advertid in local newspapers.
Human beings have always experienced anger, of cour. But in earlier, more civil decades, public displays of anger were unusual to the point of being aberrant. Today, however, whether in petty or deadly forms, episodes of unrepresd rage have become part of our daily landscape.enjoy的用法
What has happened to us? Are we that much angrier than we ud to be? Have we lost all inhibitions about expressing our anger? Are we, as a society, literally losing our ability to control our tempers?
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Why Are We So Angry? courtesy
According to Sybil Evans, a conflict-resolution expert in New York City, there are three components to blame for our societal bad behavior: time, technology and tension.
google file systemWhat's eating up our time? To begin with, Americans work longer hours and are rewarded with less vacation time than people in any other industrial society. Over an average year, for example, most British employees work 250 hours less than most Americans; most Ger
mans work a full 500 hours less. And most Europeans are given four to six weeks vacation every year, compared to the average American's two weeks. To make matters wor, many Americans face long stressful commutes at the beginning and end of each long workday.
Once we Americans finally get home from work, our busy day is rarely done. We are involved in community activities; our children participate in sports, school programs, and extracurricular activities; and our hous, yards and cars cry out for maintenance. To make matters wor, we are reluctant to u the little bit of leisure time we do have to catch up on our sleep. Compared with Americans of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, most of us are chronically sleep deprived. While our ancestors typically slept nine-and-a-half hours a night, many of us feel lucky to get ven. We're critical of “lazy” people who sleep longer, and we associate naps with toddlerhood. (In doing so, we ignore the example of successful people including Winston Churchill, Albert Einstein, and Napoleon, all of whom were devoted to their afternoon naps.)teabag
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The bottom line: we are time-challenged and just plain tired—and tired people are cranky people. We're ready to blow—to snap at the slow-moving cashier, to tap the bumper of the slowpoke ahead of us, or to do something far wor.
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Technology is also to blame for the bad behavior so widespread in culture. Amazing gadgets were suppod to make our lives easier—but have they? Sure, technology has its positive aspects. It is a blessing, for instance, to have a cell phone on hand when your car breaks down far from home or to be able to “instant message” a friend on the other side of the globe. But the downsides are many. Cell phones, pagers, fax machines, handheld computers and the like have robbed many of us of what was once valuable downtime. Now we're always available to take that urgent call or act on that last-minute demand. Then there is the endless pressure of feeling we need to keep up with our gadgets' latest technological developments. For example, it's not sufficient to u your cell phone for phone calls. Now you must learn to u the phone for text-messaging and downloading games. It's not enough to take still photos with your digital camera. You should know how to shoot ultra high-speed fast-action clips. It's not enough to have an en
viable CD collection. You should be downloading new songs in MP3 format. The computers in your hou should be connected by a wireless router, and online via high-speed DSL rvice. In other words, if it's been more than ten minutes since you've updated your technology, you're probably behind.
