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9 News, facts and opinions pour in from every corner of the world. The television set offers 150 channels. There are millions of Internet sites. Magazines, books and CD-ROMs proliferate.
各種消息、事實和見解從世界各個角落大量涌入。電視機能收到150個頻道。因特網網址多達千百萬。雜志、書籍和光盤只讀存儲器的數量也激增。
10 "In the whole world of scholarship, there were only a handful of scientific journals in the 18th century, and the publication of a book was an event," says Edward Wilson, honorary curator in entomology at Harvard University's museum of comparative zoology. "Now, I find myself subscribing to 60 or 70 journals or magazines just to keep me up with what amounts to a minute proportion of the expanding frontiers of scholarship."
“在18世紀，整個國際學術界總共只有屈指可數的幾家科學刊物，出版一本書是件了不起的大事，”哈佛大學比較動物學博物館昆蟲館名譽館長愛德華·威爾遜說。“如今，我本人就訂閱了60或70種期刊雜志，以便自己跟上不斷拓展的學術前沿中一個微小部分的發展動向。”
11 There is another reason for our increased time stress levels, too: rising prosperity. As ever-larger quantities of goods and services are produced, they have to be consumed. Driven on by advertising, we do our best to oblige: we buy more, travel more and play more, but we struggle to keep up. So we suffer from what Wilson calls discontent with super abundance -- the confusion of endless choice.
我們產生日益加重的時間緊迫感還有一個原因：日漸繁榮富足。由于生產的物品與提供的服務越來越多，我們必須去消費。在廣告的推動下，我們努力照辦：我們多多購買多多旅游多多玩兒，但得盡力堅持下去。于是我們就深受威爾遜所謂的對極大富足不滿之苦――即無休止的選擇所造成的困惑。
12 Of course, not everyone is overstressed. "It's a convenient shorthand to say we're all time-starved, but we have to remember that it only applies to, say, half the population," says Michael Willmott, director of the Future Foundation, a London research company.
當然，并非人人感到時間過度緊迫。“說我們都缺少時間只是隨意講講，我們應該記住，這種說法大約只適用于一半人，”未來基金公司――一家倫敦研究公司――的經理邁克爾·威爾莫特說。
13 "You've got people retiring early, you've got the unemployed, you've got other people maybe only peripherally involved in the economy who don't have this situation at all. If you're unemployed, your problem is that you've got too much time, not too little."
“有些人早早退休了，有些人失業了，有些人或許只與經濟活動沾點邊，根本不會有這種情況。如果失業了，那你的問題就是時間太多，而不是太少。”
14 Paul Edwards, chairman of the London-based Henley Centre forecasting group, points out that the feeling of pressures can also be exaggerated, or self-imposed. "Everyone talks about it so much that about 50 percent of unemployed or retired people will tell you they never have enough time to get things done," he says. "It's almost got to the point where there's stress envy. If you're not stressed, you're not succeeding. Everyone wants to have a little bit of this stress to show they're an important person."
總部設在倫敦的亨利中心預測小組組長保羅·愛德華茲指出，壓力感也可能被夸大，或者被強加于自身。“人人都大談壓力，以至于多達半數的失業者或退休人員都會跟你說，他們根本來不及把事情做完，”他說。“這幾乎是到了羨慕壓力的程度。沒有感到有壓力，就不是成功者。人人都想表現幾分時間緊迫感，以顯示自己的重要。”
15 There is another aspect to all of this too. Hour-by-hour logs kept by thousands of volunteers over the decades have shown that, in the U.K. , working hours have risen only slightly in the last 10 years, and in the U.S., they have actually fallen -- even for those in professional and executive jobs, where the perceptions of stress are highest.
這一切還有另外一個方面。幾十年來由數千名志愿者所作的鐘點日志表明，英國在最近十年中工作時間只略微增加，而在美國，即使對工作壓力最大的專業人士和管理人員而言，工作時間實際上減少了。
16 In the U.S., John Robinson, professor of sociology at the University of Maryland, and Geoffrey Godbey, professor of leisure studies at Penn State University found that, since the mid-1960s, the average American had gained five hours a week in free time -- that is, time left after working, sleeping, commuting, caring for children and doing the chores.
在美國，馬里蘭大學社會學教授約翰·魯賓遜和賓夕法尼亞州立大學研究閑暇問題的教授杰弗里·戈德比發現，自20世紀60年代中期以來，普通美國人每周增加了5小時空余時間，即工作、睡眠、乘車上下班、照料孩子和家務勞動之余的時間。
17 The gains, however, were unevenly distributed. The people who benefited the most were singles and empty-nesters. Those who gained the least -- less than an hour -- were working couples with pre-school children, perhaps reflecting the trend for parents to spend more time nurturing their offspring.
但增加的時間分配得并不均勻。受惠最多的是未婚者和子女不在身邊的人。得益最少的――增加了不足1個小時――是有學前子女的雙職工夫婦，這或許反映了父母在撫養子女方面花費更多時間這一傾向。
