Part C
Directions:
Read the following text carefully and then translate the underlined segments into Chinese. Your translation should be written clearly on ANSWER SHEET 2.(10 points)
We are always trying to understand why people do the things they do. It would help us to know much more about the machinery inside our brains. But lacking that knowledge, we're forced, instead, to invent simpler explanation. This often leads to ideas like these, to describe and explain our psychology: A basic "survival instinct" make us try to avoid fatal accidents. A basic "pleasure principle" forces us to seek enjoyment. Our aversion(strong dislike) to discomfort drives us to avoid annoyances. Our emotional systems try to reduce our conflicts and agitations.
Each such idea has virtues and deficiencies. (26) For example, that survival instinct hypothesis seems to "explain" much of what we do, but its basic idea is wonderfully false, because its cart is pushing its horse when it suggests that there's one central force that empowers all those behaviors. During evolution, our brains accumulated hundreds of different mechanisms, each of which serves in particular ways to protect us from certain kinds of harm. That "survival instinct" idea makes it harder for us to see why all those different "protective" effects could come from natural selection. (27) To understand how those systems work, we'll have to examine them one by one, instead of assuming some vital force that has no explanation.
Here's another "pop theory" of mind: we try to do the thing we like, and tend to avoid the ones we hate. (28) Of course we like to do things that we like, so this statement at first seems vacuous, but "liking" is really much more complex, as every athlete and thinker discovers when they learn to find pleasure in discomfort and stress. In this essay, we'll pursue this silly idea. I'll dispose it here in a challenging form in order to get your attention.
(29) This view of "culture versus technology" is not the popular one in which "culture surpasses technology because of its deeper, more human, and more spiritual character." (30) That's the view in which artists are more esteemed than nerds (unpleasant persons), boldness of imagination is venerated (regarded with deep respect) over critical understanding, and feeling is felt to be more genuine than thinking. My own view is that it's a category error to regard emotion as different from thinking. Instead, each motion is merely a different way to think. The conventional view of emotion and thought as opposites is a myth that I think we may have evolved to keep us from understanding ourselves. In any case, we are now moving into a new phase of life that will offer two great new alternatives.
