1、2006 年 12 月 一、 In a purely biological sense, fear begins with the bodys system for reacting to things that can harm us - the so-called fight-or-flight response. “ 从纯生物角度来说，恐惧始于人体系统对会伤害我们的事情的反应 -即所谓的“战斗或逃脱”反应。 An animal that cant detect danger cant stay alive,“ says Joseph LeDoux. Like animals, human
2、s evolved with an elaborate mechanism for about potential threats. “不能觉察到危险的动物无法生存” Jeseph LeDoux。像动物一样，人类进化过程中形成了一个精巧的机制，以处理潜在威胁的信息。 At its core is a cluster of neurons (神经元 ) deep in the brain known as the amygdala (扁桃核 ). 该机制的核心是大脑内部的一束被称为扁桃核的神经元。 LeDoux studies the way animals and humans respond
3、 to threats to understand how we form memories of significant events in our lives. Ledoux 研究了动物和人类对危险的反应方式，以理解我们对于生活中重要事件是如何形成记忆的。 The amygdala receives input from many parts of the brain, including regions responsible for retrieving memories. 扁桃核从大脑的很多部位中接受输入的信息，包括负责回收记忆的部位。 Using this information,
4、 the amygdala appraises a situation - I think this charging dog wants to bite me - and triggers a response by radiating nerve signals throughout the body. 使用该信息，扁桃核对情景进行分析 -我觉得这只充满攻击性的狗想咬我 -进而通过体内神经信号的辐射启动效应。 These signals produce the familiar signs of distress: trembling, perspiration and fast-movi
5、ng feet, just to name three. 这些信号产生与危险相似的信号：颤抖、流汗和快步逃跑，这仅是其中的三种反应。 This fear mechanism is critical to the survival of all animals, but no one can say for sure whether beasts other than humans know theyre afraid. 恐惧机制对所有动物的生存都是至关重要的，但是没有人敢肯定地说除了人以外，动物是否感受到了恐惧。 That is, as LeDoux says, “if you put tha
6、t system into a brain that has consciousness, then you get the feeling of fear.“ 正如 Ledoux 所言：“如果你把该机制放进一个有知觉的大脑中，你就会有恐惧的感觉” Humans, says Edward M. Hallowell, have the ability to call up images of bad things that happened in the past and to anticipate future events. Edward M.Hallowell 说人 类拥有回忆过去发生的不
7、好事情的图像和预测未来的能力。 Combine these higher thought processes with our hardwired danger-detection systems, and you get a near-universal human phenomenon: worry. 把这些高级思维过程与我们固有的危险探测系统结合在一起，你将会获得一个几乎是人类所共有的现象：担忧。 Thats not necessarily a bad thing, says Hallowell, “When used properly, worry is an incredible d
8、evice,“ he says. Hallowell 说，这未必是件坏事。“如果使用恰当，担忧式中难以置信的设计”他说。 After all, a little healthy worrying is okay if it leads to constructive action - like having a doctor look at that weird spot on your back. 毕竟，稍许健康的担忧是未尝不可的，如果担忧可以带来建设性的行为 -如让医生检查一下你背上奇怪的斑点。 Hallowell insists, though, that theres a right
9、way to worry. 但是 Hallowell 坚持认为，担忧存在着一种正确的模式。 “Never do it alone, get the facts and then make a plan,“ he says. “永远不要只是担忧，要获取事实，然后指定计划”他说。 Most of us have survived a recession, so were familiar with the belt-tightening strategies needed to survive a slump. 我们中的大多数都有从衰退中熬过来的精力，所以我们都熟知度过低潮所需要的节约政策。 Un
10、fortunately, few of us have much experience dealing with the threat of terrorism, so its been difficult to get facts about how we should respond. 不幸的是，我们中仅有少数人有处理恐怖主义危险的经验，所以要获取我们应该如何应对的信息变得十分困难。 Thats why Hallowell believes it was okay for people to indulge some extreme worries last fall by asking
11、doctors for Cipro (抗炭疽菌的药物 ) and buying gas masks. 这就是为什么 Hallowell 认为在去年秋天的时候，人们向医生获取抗炭疽菌的药物和购买防毒面具并由此深陷于某种极度担忧中的行为是可以理解的。 二、 Amitai Etzioni is not surprised by the latest headings about scheming corporate crooks (骗子 ). Amitai Etzioni 并没有对最新的关于行骗团伙的阴谋的报纸标题感到惊奇。 As a visiting professor at the Harvar
12、d Business School in 1989, he ended his work there disgusted with his students overwhelming lost for money. 作为 1989 年哈佛大学商学院的访问学者，他在结束工作时对于他的学生对金钱的绝大欲望感到厌恶。 “ They re taught that profit is all that matters,” he says. “ Many schools don t even offer ethics (伦理学 ) courses at all.” “他们被教育金钱就是一切。他说 ,“很对
13、学校甚至不提供任何伦理学的课程。” Etzioni expressed his frustration about the interests of his graduate students. Etzioni 说他对他的研究生们的兴趣所在感到沮丧。 “ By and large, I clearly had not found a way to help classes full of MBAs see that there is more to life than money, power, fame and self-interest.” He wrote at the time. To
14、day he still takes the blame for not educating these “ business-leaders-to-be.” “ I really like I failed them,” he says. “ If I was a better teacher maybe I could have reached them.”“很长时间，很明显我 找不到一个方法让一个 MBA 班的学员认识生活不但是金钱，全力，名声和私立”他那时候写道。现在她仍然自责当初没有好好教导这群“未来的商业领袖”“我真的觉得我让他们失望了”他说：“如果我当初是个更好的老师，或许就能够
15、影响他们” Etzioni was a respected ethics expert when he arrived at Harvard. 初到哈佛的时候， Etzioni 是一位受人尊敬的伦理学专家。 He hoped his work at the university would give him insight into how questions of morality could be applied to places where self-interest flourished. 他希望他在哈佛的工作可以帮他弄明白如何让道德问题应用于充满私立的地方。 What he fou
16、nd wasn t encouraging. 他的研究结果很难让人兴奋。 Those would be executives had, says Etzioni, little interest in concepts of ethics and morality in the boardroom and their professor was met with blank stares when he urged his students to see business in new and different ways. Etzioni 说，那些未来的经理们对于董事会里的伦理和道德概念没有
17、什么兴趣 -当他尝试促使他的学生用一种新的，不同的方式看待商业的时候，教授看到的是空洞的眼神。 Etzioni sees the experience at Harvard as an eye-opening one and says there s much about business schools that he d like to change. Etzioni 把在哈佛的经历看作开了一次眼界，并称他觉得商学院需要作出很多改变。 “ A lot of the faculty teaching business are bad news themselves,” Etzioni say
18、s. From offering classes that teach students how to legally manipulate contracts, to reinforcing the notion of profit over community interests, Etzioni has seen a lot that s left him shaking his head. “很多教商业的教职人员本身就是坏消息” Etzioni 说。从提供教授学生如何合法操作合同，到强化利润高于公众利益的观念。 Etzioni 看到了 很多让他摇头叹息的事情。 And because
19、of what he s seen taught in business schools, he s not surprised by the latest rash of corporate scandals. 由于他目睹了商学院所教授的内容，所以在看到公司一连串最新的丑闻时，他一点也不觉得奇怪。 “ In many ways things have got a lot worse at business schools, I suspect,” says Etzioni. “从很多方面来说，我怀疑商学院里的情形变的更糟了” Etzioni 说。 Etzioni is still teach
20、ing the sociology of right and wrong and still calling for ethical business leadership. Etzioni 仍然在教授关于是与非的社会学，仍然在奔走号召复合伦理的商业领导学。 “ People with poor motives will always exist.” He says. “ Sometimes environments constrain those people and sometimes environments give those people opportunity.” “怀有不良动机
21、的人总会存在”他说。“有时候环境限制了那些人，有时候环境给那些人创造了生命” Etzioni says the booming economy of the last decade enabled those individuals with poor motives to get rich before getting in trouble. Etzioni 说，最近十年经济的高速发展让那些心怀不轨的人在遇上麻烦之前发了财。 His hope now: that the cries for reform will provide more fertile soil for his long-
22、standing messages about business ethics. 他现在希望：对改革的呼吁会让他一直提出的商业伦理的信息可以得到肥沃的土壤。 2007 年 6 月 一、 Google is a world-famous company, with its headquarters in Mountain View, California. Google(谷歌）是一家享誉世界的公司，其总部位于加州山景区。 It was set up in a Silicon Valley garage in 1998, and inflated (膨胀 ) with the Internet b
23、ubble. 1998 年始建于硅谷的一间车房里，随着互联网泡沫的膨胀发展。 Even when everything around it collapsed the company kept on inflating. 即使当与互联网相关的一切开始破裂的时候，它仍然飞速发展。 Googles search engine is so widespread across the world that search became Google, and google became a verb. Google 的搜索引擎在全球范围内流传，以至于 Google 成了搜索的代名词，而 google 也
24、成为一个动词。 The world fell in love with the effective, fascinatingly fast technology. 世界爱上了这项迷人而快捷的技术。 Google owes much of its success to the brilliance of S. Brin and L. Page, but also to a series of fortunate events. Google 的成功很大程度上归功于 S.Brin 和 L.Page 的才华，但同时也是一连串幸运事件的结果。 It was Page who, at Stanford
25、in 1996, initiated the academic project that eventually became Googles search engine. 1996 年， Page 在斯坦福大学作一个学术项目，最终成为 google 的搜索引擎。 Brin, who had met Page at a student orientation a year earlier, joined the project early on. Brin 在之前的一 年的新生介绍会上认识了 Page，随后加入了 Google 搜索引擎的项目。 They were both Ph.D. cand
26、idates when they devised the search engine which was better than the rest and, without any marketing, spread by word of mouth from early adopters to, eventually, your grandmother. 当时他们都是博士研究生，但他们 设计的搜索引擎要优于其他的，而且没有做任何市场推广，仅靠交口相传，就从最初的使用者最终传到了你祖母的耳中。 Their breakthrough, simply put, was that when thei
27、r search engine crawled the Web, it did more than just look for word matches, it also tallied (统计 ) and ranked a host of other critical factors like how websites link to one another. 简单来说，他们的突破发生在搜索引擎在网络上慢慢传播的时候，引擎提供的不仅仅是找寻匹配的词语，还可以根据一些关键指标如网页如何相连对主页进行统计和排序。 That delivered far better results than an
28、ything else. 引擎得到的结果比其他的都好。 Brin and Page meant to name their creation Googol (the mathematical term for the number 1 followed by 100 zeroes), but someone misspelled the word so it stuck as Google. Brin 和 Page 用 googol(数学术语，指前面有 100 个零的数字）命名他们的作品，但是有人把这个单词错拼成了 Google。 They raised money from prescien
29、t (有先见之明的 ) professors and venture capitalists, and moved off campus to turn Google into business. 他们从有先见之明的教授和风险投资者那里筹集资金，让 google 从校园走向商业化。 Perhaps their biggest stroke of luck came early on when they tried to sell their technology to other search engines, but no one met their price, and they buil
30、t it up on their own. 或许他们最 大的运气是在早期，那是他们尝试出售自己的技术给其他引擎公司，但没有人能够满足他们的价位，于是他们决定自己创业。 The next breakthrough came in 2000, when Google figured out how to make money with its invention. 第二次突破是在 2000 年，当时 google 提出如何利用发明盈利。 It had lots of users, but almost no one was paying. Google 有众多用户，但几乎 没有人付费。 The s
31、olution turned out to be advertising, and its not an exaggeration to say that Google is now essentially an advertising company, given that thats the source of nearly all its revenue. 最终的解决方法是做广告，毫不夸张的说， Gooogle 现在实际上就是一家广告公司，因为几乎其所有的收入都是源于广告。 Today it is a giant advertising company, worth $100 billi
32、on 现在 Google 是一家巨型广告公司，其市值达到一千亿美元。 二、 You hear the refrain all the time: the U.S. economy looks good statistically, but it doesnt feel good. 你一直重复听到：美国的经济从数据上看很不错，但实际上并不觉得很好。 Why doesnt ever-greater wealth promote ever-greater happiness? 为什么不断增加的财富却没有促进不断提高的幸福程度呢？ It is a question that dates at leas
33、t to the appearance in 1958 of The Affluent(富裕的 ) Societyby John Kenneth Galbraith, who died recently at 97. 这个问题最早要追溯到 1958 年富足社会一书的出现，其作者 John Kenneth Galbraith 最近去世了，享年 97 岁。 The Affluent Society is a modern classic because it helped define a new moment in the human condition. 富足社会是一本现代名著，因为书中定义了
34、人类境况的一个新时期。 For most of history, “hunger, sickness, and cold” threatened nearly everyone, Galbraith wrote. 在历 史上的大多数时期，“饥寒交迫和疾病”几乎威胁了每一个人。 Galbraith 写道： “Poverty was found everywhere in that world. Obviously it is not of ours.” “贫穷出现在那个世界的任何角落。但这显然与我们无关” After World War II, the dread of another Grea
35、t Depression gave way to an economic boom. In the 1930s unemployment had averaged 18.2 percent; in the 1950s it was 4.5 percent. “二战”后，对于新的一次大衰退的恐惧让位于一次经济繁荣。在二十世纪三十年代，失业率高达 18.2%，而在二十世纪五十年代，失业率为 4.5%。 To Galbraith, materialism had gone mad and would breed discontent. 对于 Galbraith 而言，物质主义已经疯狂，并且会滋生不满
36、。 Through advertising, companies conditioned consumers to buy things they didnt really want or need. 公司通过广告让消费者购买他们不需要或者不想要的东西。 Because so much spending was artificial, it would be unfulfilling. 如此多的花费是虚假的，所以肯定会有不满 Meanwhile, government spending that would make everyone better off was being cut down
37、 because people instinctivelyand wronglylabeled government only as “a necessary evil.” 同时，能让每个人生活得更好的政府开销却减少了，因为人们本能地、错误地为政府贴上了“必要的恶魔”的标签。 Its often said that only the rich are getting ahead; everyone else is standing still or falling behind. 人们常说只有富人在前行，其他人都停留在原地或者落在后面。 Well, there are many undeser
38、ving richoverpaid chief executives, for instance. 例如，是有很多人不应富有的人 But over any meaningful period, most peoples incomes are increasing. 工资过高的首席执行官。但是在经历了很多重要时期之后，大多数人的收入在上升。 From 1995 to 2004, inflation-adjusted average family income rose 14.3 percent, to $43,200. 从 1995 年到 2004 年，针对通货膨胀进行调整的普通家庭收入上升了
39、 14.3%，达到了 43，200 美元。 People feel “squeezed” because their rising incomes often dont satisfy their rising wantsfor bigger homes, more health care, more education, faster Internet connections. 人们觉得“被压榨”，是因为他们增加的收入不能满足他们上升的欲望 -更大的房子，更多医疗保健，更多教育，更快的网络连接。 The other great frustration is that it has not e
40、liminated insecurity. 另外一大沮丧是不安全感并没有被消除。 People regard job stability as part of their standard of living. 人们把工作的稳定性看成生活标准的一部分。 As corporate layoffs increased, that part has eroded. 随着公司裁员的增加了，这部分被腐蚀了。 More workers fear theyve become “the disposable American,” as Louis Uchitelle puts it in his book b
41、y the same name. 更过的员工害怕自己会成为“被处理的美国人”，这一说法来自于 LouisUchtelle 的同名著作。 Because so much previous suffering and social conflict stemmed from poverty, the arrival of widespread affluence suggested utopian (乌托邦式的 ) possibilities. 因为前面提到的痛苦和社会冲突都来源于贫穷，大范围富裕的来临暗示了乌托邦式的可能。 Up to a point, affluence succeeds. T
42、here is much les physical misery than before. People are better off. Unfortunately, affluence also creates new complaints and contradictions. 从某种意义来说，富裕成功了。比起以前，身体上的痛苦大大减少。人们比以前更富于了。不幸的是，富足同样创造了新的抱怨和矛盾。 Advanced societies need economic growth to satisfy the multiplying wants of their citizens. 现金的社会
43、需要经济增长，以满足市民日益多样化的需要。 But the quest for growth lets loose new anxieties and economic conflicts that disturb the social order. 但是对增长的追求却产生了新的焦虑和经济冲突，扰乱了社会秩序。 Affluence liberates the individual, promising that everyone can choose a unique way to self-fulfillment. 富裕解放了个人，承诺每个人可以选择独特方式来达成自己的愿望。 But the
44、 promise is so extravagant that it predestines many disappointments and sometimes inspires choices that have anti-social consequences, including family breakdown and obesity (肥胖症 ). 但是承诺是如此的奢侈，以至于注定会有失望，有时还会引起带来反社会的选择，包括家庭破裂和肥胖症。 Statistical indicators of happiness have not risen with incomes. 数据表明，
45、幸福并没有随着收入的增长而增长。 Should we be surprised? Not really. Weve simply reaffirmed an old truth: the pursuit of affluence does not always end with happiness. 我们是不是应该感到惊讶？不必。我们仅是重新印证了一句老话：对富裕的追求并不会总是以幸福为结局。 2007 年 12 月 一、 Like most people, Ive long understood that I will be judged by my occupation, that my
46、profession is a gauge people use to see how smart or talented I am. 像大多数人一样， 我早就知道我的职业将左右别人对我的判断，我的工作室人们可以用来衡量我的聪明和材质的标准。 Recently, however, I was disappointed to see that it also decides how Im treated as a person. 但是最近，我非常失望地发现工作也决定了别人怎样对待我。 Last year I left a professional position as a small-town
47、 reporter and took a job waiting tables. 去年我辞去了小镇记者的工作，该做了一名侍者。 As someone paid to serve food to people. I had customers say and do things to me I suspect theyd never say or do to their most casual acquaintances. 在这份为人们提供食物的工作中，我遇到的一些顾客对我说了一些话、做了一些事情，这些话和是我认为他们从来不会向哪怕是他们最熟悉的人去说或做的。 One night a man t
48、alking on his cell phone waved me away, then beckoned (示意 ) me back with his finger a minute later, complaining he was ready to order and asking where Id been. 有一天晚上，一个正在打电话的男人先是打手势把我赶走，一分钟后又用他的手指示我回来，对我抱怨说他正在准备点菜，问我究竟去了哪里。 I had waited tables during summers in college and was treated like a peon(勤杂
49、工 ) by plenty of people. 上大学期间，在暑假我就做过侍者，但是就被很多人当勤杂工。 But at 19 years old. I believed I deserved inferior treatment from professional adults. 但是那时 19 岁的我认为那些职场中的成年人对我差一点也理所当然。 Besides, people responded to me differently after I told them I was in college. 此外，当我告诉他们我在读大学时，我得到的对待又有所不同。 Customers would joke that one day Id be sitting at their table, waiting to be served. 顾客们开玩笑说，总有一天我会坐在他们的位置上，等候服务。 Once I graduated I took a job at a community newspaper. 毕业之后我在社区的报社找到一份工作。 From my first day, I heard a respectful tone from everyone w
