首页
外语
计算机
考研
公务员
职业资格
财经
工程
司法
医学
专升本
自考
实用职业技能
登录
外语
Time, as we know it, is a very recent invention. The modern time-sense is hardly older than the United States. It is a by-produc
Time, as we know it, is a very recent invention. The modern time-sense is hardly older than the United States. It is a by-produc
admin
2011-05-29
59
问题
Time, as we know it, is a very recent invention. The modern time-sense is hardly older than the United States. It is a by-product of industrialism--a sort of psychological analogue of synthetic perfumes and aniline dyes.
Time is our tyrant. We are chronically aware of the moving minute hand, even of the moving second hand. We have to be. There are trains to be caught, clocks to be punched, tasks to be done in specified periods, records to be broken by fractions of a second, machines that set the pace and have to be kept up with.
Another time-emphasizing entity is the factory and its dependent, the office. Factories exist for the purpose of getting certain quantities of goods made in a certain time. The old artisan worked as it suited him with the result that consumers generally had to wait for the goods they had ordered from him. The factory is a device for making workmen hurry. The machine revolves so often each minute; so many movements have to be made, so many pieces produced each hour. Result: the factory worker (and the same is true of the office worker) is compelled to know time in its smallest fractions. In the hand-work age there was no such compulsion to be aware of minutes and seconds.
Our awareness of time has reached such a pitch of intensity that we suffer acutely whenever our travels take us into some corner of the world where people are not interested in minutes and seconds. The unpunctuality of the Orient, for example, is appalling to those who come freshly from a land of fixed meal-times and regular train services. For a modern American or Englishman, waiting is a psychological torture. An Indian accepts the blank hours with resignation, even with satisfaction. He has not lost the fine art of doing nothing. Our notion of time as a collection of minutes, each of which must be filled with some business or amusement, is wholly alien to the Oriental, just as it was wholly alien to the Greek. For the man who lives in a pre-industrial world, time moves at a slow and easy pace; he does not care about each minute, for the good reason that he has not been made conscious of the existence of minutes.
This brings us to a seeming paradox. Acutely aware of the smallest constituent particles of time--of time, as measured by clock-work and train arrivals and the revolutions of machines--industrialized man has to a great extent lost the old awareness of time in its larger divisions. The time of which we have knowledge is artificial, machine-made time. Of natural, cosmic time, as it is measured out by sun and moon, we are for the most part almost wholly unconscious. Pre-industrial people know time in its daily, monthly and seasonal rhythms. They are aware of sunrise, noon and sunset; of the full moon and the new; of equinox and solstice; of spring and summer, autumn and winter.
Industrialism and urbanism have changed all this. One can live and work in a town without being aware of the daily march of the sun across the sky; without ever seeing the moon and stars. Even changes of season affect the townsman very little. He is the inhabitant of an artificial universe that is, to a great extent, walled off from the world of nature. Outside the walls, time is cosmic and moves with the motion of sun and stars. Within, it is an affair of revolving wheels and is measured in seconds and minutes--at its longest, in eight-hour days and five-day weeks. We have a new consciousness; but it has been purchased at the expense of the old consciousness.
One expression the author uses to describe time is ______ .
选项
A、machine-made
B、pre-industrial
C、industrialized
D、alien
答案
A
解析
转载请注明原文地址:https://kaotiyun.com/show/H16O777K
0
考博英语
相关试题推荐
•Readtheannualreportaboutacompany.•Choosethebestwordtofillineachgap,fromA,BorC.•Foreachquestion(29-40
Lookatthechartsbelow.Theyshowprofitsbeforetaxandprofitmarginsforeightdifferentcompaniesfrom1998to2002Which
ReadthemagazinearticleaboutbusinessEnglish.ChoosethecorrectwordtofilleachgapfromA,BorC.Foreachquestion(29
Areyoualwayssureyouknowwhatpeoplemeanwhentheytrytodescribetheirfeelingstoyou?Weusebothwordsandgesturesto
Influencedbytheenvironment,children’sminds______bitsandpiecesofdatawhentheygrowup.
TheUnitedStateswastryinghardtosmoketheenemyoutoftheholesinthetargetcountry.
Earlwasbalancinghimselfontopofthefencewhenhelosthis______andfelloff.
Growingeconomicproblemswerehighlightedbyaslowdowninoiloutput.
A theincidenceofmesotheliomaisextremelylowB whichmayextendfrom25to30yearafterinitialexposureC whereasthel
Practicallyspeaking,theartistematuringofthecinemawasthesingle-handedachievementofDavidW.Griffith(1875~1948).Bef
随机试题
________?这是党史观的重大问题。一个马克思主义政党对自己的错误所抱的态度,是衡量这个党是否真正履行对人民群众所负责任的一个最重要最可靠的尺度。我们党对自己包括领袖人物的失误和错误历来采取郑重的态度,一是敢于承认,二是正确分析,三是坚决纠正,从而使失
Virchow淋巴结指的是
牙酸蚀症是指在有细菌参与的情况下,接触牙面的酸或其螯合物的化学侵蚀作用而引起的一种慢性的病理性的牙体硬组织丧失。()
下列关于信用卡的表述中,符合规定的有( )。
保险公司的( )管理是指在企业预定目标的主导下,将公司内部和外部的,包括产品风险、展业风险、承保风险等在内所有风险纳入到统一的风险管理体系当中,对各种风险因素进行识别、估测、评价,在此基础上选择合适的风险管理技术进行有效管理的全过程性、全业务性和全员性的
求下列极限
设有两个事务T1和T2,其并发操作序列如下表所示。下列说法中正确的是________。
下列字符串中可以用作C++标识符的是()。
下列叙述中,正确的是()。
Ithappenstoeverymedicalstudentsoonerorlater.Yougetacoughthatpersistsforawhile.Ordinarily,you,wouldjustigno
最新回复
(
0
)