大学英语专业综合教程 第三册 Unit 11课文及单词

1. If your friend is in a new dress or buys a new mobile phone which you dislike intensely, and asks for your opinion about it, what will you say? Why do you think people lie?

2. If somebody lies to you for your own good, how would you feel?

At the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, psychology professor Bella DePaulo got 77 students and 70 townspeople to volunteer for an unusual project. All kept diaries for a week, recording the numbers and details of the lies they told.

One student and six Charlottesville residents professed to have told no falsehoods. The other 140 participants told 1535.

The lies were most often not what most of us would call earth-shattering. Someone would pretend to be more positive or supportive of a spouse or friend than he or she really was, or feign agreement with a relative's opinion. According to DePaulo, women in their

interactions with other women lied mostly to spare the other's feelings. Men lied to other men generally for self-promoting reasons.

Most strikingly, these tellers-of-a-thousand-lies reported that their deceptions caused them \preoccupation or regret.\Perhaps. But there is evidence that this attitude towards casual use of prevarication is common. For example, 20,000 middle-and high-schoolers were surveyed by the Josephson Institute of Ethics — a

nonprofit organization in Marina del Rey, California, devoted to character education. Ninety-two per cent of the teenagers admitted having lied to their parents in the previous year, and 73 per cent characterized themselves as \weekly. Despite these admissions, 91 per cent of all respondents said they were \ethics and character.\

Think how often we hear the expressions \call you\he stepped out.\— lawyers, pundits, public relations consultants — whose members seem to specialize in shaping or spinning the truth to suit clients' needs.

Little white lies have become ubiquitous, and the reasons we give each other for telling fibs are familiar. Consider, for example, a corporate executive whom I'll call Tom. He goes with his wife and son to his

mother-in-law's home for a holiday dinner every year. Tom dislikes her \Invariably he tells her how wonderful it is, to avoid hurting her feelings.

\

Josephson, president of the Josephson Institute. It's a question we might all ask.

Josephson replied by asking Tom to consider the lie from his mother-in-law's point of view. Suppose that one day Tom's child blurts out the truth, and she discovers the deceit. Will she tell her son-in-law, \

to feel hurt and say, \could you have misled me all these years? And what else have you lied to me about?\ And what might Tom's mother-in-law now suspect about her own daughter? And will Tom's boy lie to his parents and yet be satisfied with his own character? How often do we compliment people on how well they look, or express our appreciation for gifts, when we don't really mean it? Surely, these \harmless and well-intended, a necessary social

lubricant. But, like Tom, we should remember the words of English novelist Sir Walter Scott, who wrote, \a tangled web we weave, when first we practice to deceive.\

Even seemingly harmless falsehoods can have unforeseen consequences. Philosopher Sissela Bok warns us that they can put us on a slippery slope. \the first lies, others can come more easily,\her book Lying: Moral Choice in Public and Private Life. \barriers wear down; the ability to make more distinctions can coarsen; the liar's perception of his chances of being caught may warp.\

Take the pumpkin-pie lies. In the first place, it wasn't just that he wanted his mother-in-law to feel good. Whether he realized it or not, he really wanted her to think highly of him. And after the initial deceit he needed to tell more lies to cover up the first one. Who believes it anymore when they're told that the person they want to reach by phone is \By itself, that kind of lie is of no great consequence.

Still, the endless proliferation of these little prevarications does matter.

Once they've become common enough, even the small untruths that are not meant to hurt encourage a certain cynicism and loss of trust. \[trust] is damaged,\warns Bok, \it is destroyed, societies falter and collapse.\ Are all white lies to be avoided at all costs? Not necessarily. The most understandable and forgivable lies are an exchange of what ethicists refer to as the principle of trust for the principle of caring, \telling children about the tooth fairy, or deceiving someone to set them up for a surprise party,\Josephson says. \to give our friends and associates the authority to lie to us whenever they think it is for our own good.\ Josephson suggests a simple test. If someone you lie to finds out the truth, will he thank you for caring? Or will he feel his long-term trust in you has been undermined?

And if you're not sure, Mark Twain has given us a good rule of thumb. \will confound your enemies and astound your friends.\

New words:

volunteer

v. to give or offer (one's help, a suggestion, etc.) willingly or without being paid

profess

v. to make a claim feign

v. to pretend to have or be

preoccupation

n. the state of constantly thinking or worrying about something

prevarication

n. the state of avoiding giving a direct answer or making a firm decision serial

a. of, in or forming a number of things, events, etc. of a similar kind, especially placed or occurring one after another ethics

n. moral correctness; moral principles

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