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.
各种消息、事实和见解从世界各个角落大量涌入。电视机能收到150个频道。因特网网址多达千百万。杂志、书籍和光盘只读存储器的数量也激增。
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世纪，整个国际学术界总共只有屈指可数的几家科学刊物，出版一本书是件了不起的大事，”哈佛大学比较动物学博物馆昆虫馆名誉馆长爱德华·威尔逊说。“如今，我本人就订阅了60或70种期刊杂志，以便自己跟上不断拓展的学术前沿中一个微小部分的发展动向。”
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.
我们产生日益加重的时间紧迫感还有一个原因：日渐繁荣富足。由于生产的物品与提供的服务越来越多，我们必须去消费。在广告的推动下，我们努力照办：我们多多购买多多旅游多多玩儿，但得尽力坚持下去。于是我们就深受威尔逊所谓的对极大富足不满之苦――即无休止的选择所造成的困惑。
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.
当然，并非人人感到时间过度紧迫。“说我们都缺少时间只是随意讲讲，我们应该记住，这种说法大约只适用于一半人，”未来基金公司――一家伦敦研究公司――的经理迈克尔·威尔莫特说。
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，有些人失业了，有些人或许只与经济活动沾点边，根本不会有这种情况。如果失业了，那你的问题就是时间太多，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."
总部设在伦敦的亨利中心预测小组组长保罗·爱德华兹指出，压力感也可能被夸大，或者被强加于自身。“人人都大谈压力，以至于多达半数的失业者或退休人员都会跟你说，他们根本来不及把事情做完，”他说。“这几乎是到了羡慕压力的程度。没有感到有压力，就不是成功者。人人都想表现几分时间紧迫感，以显示自己的重要。”
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.
这一切还有另外一个方面。几十年来由数千名志愿者所作的钟点日志表明，英国在最近十年中工作时间只略微增加，而在美国，即使对工作压力最大的专业人士和管理人员而言，工作时间实际上减少了。
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.
在美国，马里兰大学社会学教授约翰·鲁宾逊和宾夕法尼亚州立大学研究闲暇问题的教授杰弗里·戈德比发现，自20世纪60年代中期以来，普通美国人每周增加了5小时空余时间，即工作、睡眠、乘车上下班、照料孩子和家务劳动之余的时间。
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.
但增加的时间分配得并不均匀。受惠最多的是未婚者和子女不在身边的人。得益最少的――增加了不足1个小时――是有学前子女的双职工夫妇，这或许反映了父母在抚养子女方面花费更多时间这一倾向。
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