Section A
Translate the underlined sentences in the following passage into Chinese. Remember to write the answers on the Answer Sheet.
Is the glass half-full or half-empty Depends whether you’re an optimist or a pessimist.
But those two words are more than casual labels: research has established that (91) optimists have a consistent and upbeat way of dealing with adversity and that they are more successful in work, health and life in general than pessimists.
Optimists bounce back from trying times, generally with good grace, and see failure as a stepping-stone to success. Any problem tends to be minimised and dealt with later while the rest of life goes on as usual.
(92) Their upbeat approach, resilience and perseverance makes them ideal for jobs in high- pressure areas where setbacks are part of the territory: sales, brokering, public relations, presenting, creative jobs and high burn-out posts. They are often a company’s visionaries.
Pessimists, however, risk unravelling and sinking into depression when one thread of their life breaks. They are less likely to cope well with setbacks; they give up early or seek excuses.
Both types can be identified through optimism profiling, based on the pioneering work of American psychologist Martin Seligman, of the University of Pennsylvania.
Various studies, quoted in Seligman’s book, Learned Optimism, found that pessimists have twice as many infectious diseases as optimists.
(93) In hundreds of studies, people with high optimism scores out-performed and out-produced those with low scores, equating in sales terms to 20 to 40 percent greater productivity.
More recent research shows optimistic and resilient people’s belief that they have control over seemingly uncontrollable s enables specific molecules to be released by the brain that increase stress resilience, reduce anxiety and make for a less vivid emotional memory of stressful s. (94) What you think and how you explain good and bad s to yourself is the key to resilience.
Heavy pessimism can be moderated. Among the techniques is "thought-stopping", a way of blocking unhelpful rumination--you make an appointment with yourself to worry about it, and the unconscious mind feels relieved of it. And in practice, people generally never get around to the appointment--the need to worry has gone. Another major technique is learning how to dispute one’s own critical internal explanations.
However, mild pessimism does have its place. (95) According to Seligman, the mildly downbeat do well in low-pressure settings on jobs requiring a keen sense of realism: design and safety engineering, contract negotiation, law, statistics, technical writing, quality control, industrial relations management, and technical and cost estimating.
Says Seligman: "The company also needs its pessimists; they must make sure grim reality intrudes upon the optimists. The treasurers, the business administrators, the safety engineers--all these need an accurate sense of how much the company can afford, and of er. "