2023考研英语：《经济学人》中英读译Day159

英语阅读能力依靠什么？必然是词汇的积累，但，仅仅是词汇的积累是不够了，更应该了解英语句式，不同句型所表达意义。如何培养自己的阅读语感呢？那么就跟着聚创考研网小编每天学一点英语，一起为考研筑起坚实的地基。阅读是需要积累的，就像我们需要经常和人沟通才会促进我们的表达能力一样~小伙伴跟着小编一起，每天坚持打卡，培养英语阅读能力及语感，了解文章一些经典词汇的用法。

经济学人:七日星期制统治了我们的生活

In the autumn of 1853 Thomas Butler Gunn got lost -- temporally rather than physically.On a visit to Mammoth Cave in Kentucky, and isolated from the outside world, his diary quickly slipped the moorings of chronological reality.Wednesdays are repeated and days go mislabelled.It took around a fortnight, and renewed contact with civilisation, for Gunn to restore his weekly bearings.

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1853年秋天，托马斯·巴特勒·葛恩迷失了——只是暂时的，不是根本上的。在一次访问肯塔基州的猛犸洞穴时，由于与外界隔绝，他的日记很快就脱离了现实中的时间秩序。重复的星期三，标错的日期。葛恩花了大约两个星期的时间，重新与文明世界连结，才恢复了按周生活的时间方向。

 

The episode, says David Henkin, suggests how fragile a sense of time can be -- especially when it comes to weeks.Unlike months or years, these seven-day groupings have no real basis in astronomy.People from Nigeria to China have thrived without them.And yet the week has become the measure not only of routine, but even of sanity."Weekly rhythms have become so thoroughly absorbed into ordinary human experience", Mr Henkin writes, "that forgetting what day it is constitutes a singular symptom and feeling of disorientation."His new book shows how the week came to rule the world.Until the 19th century, he explains, the other days were a preamble to the Sabbath for many Protestants.Catholics followed a cycle of feast days and fasts.

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大卫·亨金说，这段经历表明时间意识是如此的脆弱——尤其是在“周”这个概念上。与月或年不同，这些七天的分组在天文学上没有实际的存在依据。从尼日利亚到中国，人们曾在没有它的情况下过得很好。然而，“周”不仅成为了衡量生活日程的标准，甚至也成了衡量精神健全程度的标准。亨金写道：“‘周’的节奏已经彻底融入了普通人类的经验中，以至于忘记这一天是星期几被视为一种独特的症状和方向感迷失。”他的新书指出了“周”是如何统治世界的。他解释道，直到19世纪，对许多新教徒来说，其他日子都只是安息日的前奏。天主教徒遵循一个进食和禁食的循环周期。

 

When newspapers, factory schedules and weekly paydays were all rarer, the weekly structure was less important.People got muddled, not just underground.As late as 1866, the Louisville Courier mentioned a man getting drunk on Friday because he thought it was Saturday.In outline, the story is one of urban development.As towns grew and society became more sophisticated, citizens "became differently and more intensely week-oriented, in ways we can now recognise as modern".

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当报纸、工厂时间表和每周发薪日都很少见的时候，“周”的结构也就不那么重要了。人们都被搞糊涂了，不仅仅在地下会糊涂。直到1866年，《路易斯维尔信使报》还提到过有一个人在星期五喝醉了，因为他以为那天是星期六。概括来说，这是一个关于城市发展的故事。随着城镇的发展，社会变得越来越复杂，市民们“变得不同，更加强烈地以周为导向，以我们如今认为是现代的方式”。

 

When his local benevolent society met on Wednesdays in 1859, and choral concerts were scheduled for Fridays, James Fiske of Massachusetts couldn't afford to mix up his days.When Every Saturday magazine landed in New York each weekend in 1866, Bayard Taylor was expecting it.Later anecdotes illustrate the "distinctive air" that individual days came to develop -- the particular associations each subliminally carries.Philadelphians once used chains to block horse traffic on Sundays.The advent of washing machines disrupted the weekly cleaning schedule.

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1859年，马萨诸塞州的詹姆斯·菲斯克的本地慈善协会每周三聚会，每周五有合唱音乐会，他可不能打乱自己的日程。1866年，当《每周六》杂志于周末到达纽约，贝亚德·泰勒正期待着它的到来。后来的一些趣闻轶事说明了每一天都在发展出“独特的气氛”——每一天都被赋予潜意识里的特定联想。费城人曾在周日用铁链阻断马匹运输。洗衣机的出现打乱了每周的清洁计划。

 

In due course Westerners exported these feelings to the world.Japan formally adopted the seven-day system only in 1873; all the same, a character in a novel by Haruki Murakami is as sure of something "as I am that today is Wednesday".That sort of conviction is now crumbling.French and Russian revolutionaries ultimately failed in their attempts to abolish the seven-day week, but for many people the pandemic has squashed the weekly rhythm into an interminable present.Monday, runs the joke, has been replaced by Noneday.As Netflix offers entertainment on a whim, and morning newspapers become obsolete, Mr Henkin argues that "the hold of the week on our lives loosens, and our place in the cycle becomes in turn less memorable."Everyone may soon start to feel a bit like Thomas Butler Gunn.

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在适当的时候，西方人向世界输出了这些情感。日本直到1873年才正式采用七天制；尽管如此，村上春树小说中的一个人物在表达对某件事非常确定时却说，“就像我对今天是星期三一样有把握”。这种信念如今正在瓦解。尽管法国和俄罗斯革命者试图废除7日星期制的努力最终以失败告终，但对许多人来说，新冠疫情把“周”的节奏挤压成了一个没完没了的现在。有个笑话是这样讲的，“星期一”已经被“星期零”取代。随着网飞公司心血来潮提供娱乐节目，早报变得过时，亨金认为，“‘周’对我们生活的控制开始松动，我们在周循环中的位置也变得不再那么值得记住。”每个人可能很快就会开始觉得自己有点像托马斯·巴特勒·葛恩了。