题型:任务型阅读 题类:模拟题 难易度:普通
上海市2020年高三下学期英语4月联考试卷
A. In a list ranking countries by the happiness of their citizens, it put tropical Fiji 50 places below freezing Iceland. B. The street sweeper can hold his head up high as he proudly does his job. C. Danish people aren't as suspicious as many other nations. D. Most Danes are used to seeing between 50-70% of their salary going to the government! E. People have nice things in their houses, but they're not mad about shopping and spending. F. And there's another advantage to those high taxes. |
Where do you think the world's happiest people live? Some where hot with sandy beaches? A country with a tradition of the fine food and culture? Not according to a recent study by the university of Leicester. Who are the happiest people on Earth? Those 5.5 million people who call Denmark their home. Surprised? Well you'll be more surprised when you hear that the Danes pay some of the highest taxes in the world. So what is the secret of their success?
Let's start with all that tax they pay. The Danish government provides its people with one of the finest education and health systems in the world. It spends more on children and elderly people per capital(人均) than other country.
Because a shop assistant's final salary is not that much less than someone who works in a bank, for example, Danes don't choose their careers based on money or status as people in other countries do. They choose the job they want to do. There's a philosophy in Denmark known as" Jante-lov", which translates as "you're no better than anybody else." But workers in other countries are not used to looking at life in this way.
Money doesn't seem as important in Denmark. It has been called a "post consumerist" society. What is more important is the sense of society and it's no surprise that Danes are very used to socializing. 92% of Danes belong to some kind of social club and these clubs are even paid for by the government.
They also show an amazing amount of trust in each other and their government. You can see sighs of this all over the country. You'll find vegetable stalls with no assistant. You take what you want and leave the money in a basket. Perhaps the bike is a good symbol for Denmark. The Danes can afford cars but they choose bikes—simple, economical, non-polluting machines that show no status and help keep people fit.
Pretending you're someone else can make you creative
One great irony(讽刺) about our collective fascination with creativity is that we tend to frame it in uncreative ways. That is to say, most of us marry creativity to our concept of self: We are either "creative" people or we aren't, without much of a middle ground.
Pillay, a tech businessman and Harvard professor has spent a good part of his career destroying these ideas. Pillay believes that the key to unlocking your creative potential is to dismiss the conventional advice that urges you to "believe in yourself". In fact, you should do the exact opposite: believe you are someone else.
In a recent column for Harvard Business Review, Pillay pointed to a 2016 study showing the impact of stereotypes(刻板印象)on one's behavior. The authors, education psychologists Denis Dumas and Kevin Dunbar, divided their college student subjects into three categories, instructing the members of one group to think of themselves as "eccentric(古怪的) poets" and the members of another to imagine they were "rigid librarians" (people in the third category, the control group, were left alone for this part). The researchers then presented participants with 10 ordinary objects, including a fork, a carrot, and a pair of pants, and asked them to come up with as many different uses as possible for each one. Those who were asked to imagine themselves as "eccentric poets" came up with the widest range of ideas for the objects, while those in the "rigid librarian" group had the fewest. Meanwhile, the researchers found only small differences in students' creativity levels across academic majors—in fact, the physics majors inhabiting(寄生) the personas(伪装的外表) of "eccentric poets" came up with more ideas than the art majors did.
These results, write Dumas and Dunbar, suggest that creativity is not an individual quality, but a "malleable(可塑的) product of context and perspective." Everyone can be creative, as long as they feel like creative people.
Pillay's work takes this a step further: He argues that identifying yourself with creativity is less powerful than the creative act of imagining you're somebody else. This exercise, which he calls "psychological halloweenism", refers to the conscious action of inhabiting another persona—an inner costuming of the self. It works because it is an act of "conscious unfocus", a way of positively stimulating the default mode(默认模式) network, a collection of brain regions that spring into action when you're not focused on a specific task or thought.
Most of us spend too much time worrying about two things: How successful/unsuccessful we are, and how little we're focusing on the task at hand. The former feeds the latter—an unfocused person is an unsuccessful one, we believe. Thus, we force ourselves into quiet areas, buy noise canceling headphones, and hate ourselves for taking breaks.
What makes Pillay's argument stand out is its healthy, forgiving realism: According to him, most people spend nearly half of their days in a state of "unfocus". This doesn't make us lazy people—it makes us human. The idea behind psychological halloweenism is: What if we stopped judging ourselves for our mental down time, and instead started using it? Putting this new idea on daydreaming means addressing two problems at once: You're making yourself more creative, and you're giving yourself permission to do something you'd otherwise feel guilty about. Imagining yourself in a new situation, or an entirely new identity, never felt so productive.
Title: Pretending you're someone else can make you creative
Some misleading ideas about creativity |
●Most of us are {#blank#}1{#/blank#} with the idea that we are either creative or we are not: there doesn't exist a middle ground in between. ●{#blank#}2{#/blank#} to popular belief, Pillay's suggestion is that you should believe you are someone else. |
Dumas and Dunbar's study |
●One group were asked to think of themselves as "eccentric poets", another "rigid librarians" and a third {#blank#}3{#/blank#} as the control group. The former two groups were required to come up with as many different uses as possible for each {#blank#}4{#/blank#} object. ●The level of students'{#blank#}5{#/blank#} is not always in direct proportion to the type of academic majors. ●Therefore, creativity is probably a product of context and perspective rather than something {#blank#}6{#/blank#}. |
Pillay's further study |
●The exercise of "psychological halloweenism" refers to the conscious action of being others by {#blank#}7{#/blank#} stimulating the default mode network. ●Pillay {#blank#}8{#/blank#} firmly to the idea of imaging you're someone else and advises us not to worry about how successful/unsuccessful we are. |
The {#blank#}9{#/blank#}significance of the exercise |
●We should start using it instead of stopping judging ourselves for our mental down time. ●We have every right to {#blank#}10{#/blank#} ourselves for being unfocused because it is not only human but also makes us more creative and productive. |
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