高三英语阅读培优训练：8

高三英语阅读培优训练洁净与道德：当身体的洁净变成道德的纯净【原文】ⅠWhen people are asked to list their favorite metaphor, they typically cite great works of poetry, literature or speech. Indeed, many metaphors are born from creative insight. But there is more to metaphor than this. Some metaphors are not literary creations at all—instead they seem to be built from the ground up, given to us by experience. Metaphors of this sort—linking the abstract to the concrete, perceptual, and instinctive—were studied systematically by the UC-Berkley cognitive linguist George Lakoff and philosopher Mark Johnson, at Brown University.ⅡWhat they and others realized is that our concepts are fundamentally shaped by the fact that our minds reside in fleshy, physical bodies. As a result, even our most abstract concepts often have an “embodied” structure. In a classic example, people seem to understand moral virtue as if it were similar to physical cleanliness. To be virtuous is to be physically clean and free from the impurity that is sin. As the University of Pennsylvania psychologist and disgust expert Paul Rozin has shown, experiencing morality in terms of the embodied dimension of infection can lead to some striking behaviors, such as the refusal to wear a sweater belonging to an evil person because it seems somehow contaminated by the evil essence of that person.ⅢIt's clear that people talk about morality in purity terms—whether explicitly expressing concerns about contamination b y evil or asserting that one's “conscience is clean”—but do they also experience morality that way? Could it be that the embodied structure of morality operates covertly to guide moral judgment and behavior?ⅣSimone Schnall, psychologist at the University of Plymouth, and her colleagues have demonstrated just how this can happen. Having shown in previous studies that inducing disgust or a sense of dirtiness can make people's moral judgments more severe, they set out to explore the opposite. Might physical cleanliness encourage less severe moral judgments? To test this idea, they had participants read brief vignettes describing morally questionable behaviors, such as falsifying information on a resume. Prior to reading and responding to these vignettes, “cleanliness” was induced either through the activation of purity-related concepts or through the direct experience of hand-washing.ⅤThey found that the experience of “cleanliness”—either through the subtle priming of concepts about cleanliness or by actual cleaning—reduced people's tendencies to see the behaviors described in the vignettes as morally wrong. Apparently, participants' sense of physical purity influenced their evaluations of the actions of others. When they themselves were clean and pure, so were others.ⅥThis finding contributes to our emerging understanding of the embodied structure of morality. As this finding illustrates, cleanliness—with all its physical manifestations—is part of the concept of virtue. However useful the metaphor of moral purity may be for talking about morality, it does much more—it also infuses the concept of morality itself and may even be fundamental to moral meaning. It's hard even to imagine a disembodied, purity-free conception of virtue. More than a rhetorical tool, embodied metaphor shapes the very way we experience the world.【词汇短语】1.metaphor [ˈmetəfə(r)] n. 暗喻；隐喻2.insight [ˈɪnsaɪt] n. 洞察力；领悟]3.from the ground up 自下而上，源自底层4.perceptual [pəˈseptʃuəl] a. 知觉的；感知的5.contaminate [kənˈtæmɪneɪt] v. 污染6.conscience [ˈkɒnʃəns] n. 良心7.falsify [ˈfɔ:lsɪfaɪ] v. 篡改，伪造8.activation [ˌæktɪ'veɪʃn] n. 激活9.disembodied [ˌdɪsɪmˈbɒdid] a. 无实体的10.*covertly ['kʌvətlɪ] ad. 暗中地，偷偷地11.*vignette [vɪnˈjet] n. 短文12.*priming ['praɪmɪŋ] n. 事先准备，事先指点（标*的为超纲词）【翻译点评】Ⅰ①When people are asked to list their favorite metaphor, they typically cite great works of poetry, literature or speech. ②Indeed, many metaphors are born from creative insight. ③But there is more to metaphor than this. ④Some metaphors are not literary creations at all—instead they seem to be built from the ground up, given to us by experience. ⑤Metaphors of this sort—linking the abstract to the concrete, perceptual, and instinctive—were studied systematically by the UC-Berkley cognitive linguist George Lakoff and philosopher Mark Johnson, at Brown University.翻译：当要求人们列出其最喜欢的比喻时，他们通常都会引用诗词，文学或是演讲中的名作。

诚然，许多比喻都来自于创造性的洞察力。

但是比喻远不止于此。

一些比喻根本不是文学创作——相反，它们似乎从最基本的开始生成，源于我们的经验所得。