新视界大学英语综合教程第3册Unit1Activereading课文及翻译.docVIP

Unit 1 Active reading Two kinds of judgement 1 There are two different ways people judge you. Sometimes judging you correctly is the end goal. But there’s a second much more common type of judgment where it isn’t. We tend to regard all judgments of us as the first type. We’d probably be happier if we realized which are and which aren’t. 2 The first type of judgment, the type where judging you is the end goal, includes court cases, grades in classes, and most competitions. Such judgments can of course be mistaken, but because the goal is to judge you correctly, there’s usually some kind of appeals process. If you feel you’ve been misjudged, you can protest that you’ve been treated unfairly. 3 Nearly all the judgments made on children are of this type, so we get into the habit early in life of thinking that all judgments are. 4 But in fact there is a second much larger class of judgments where judging you is only a means to something else. These include college admissions, hiring and investment decisions, and of course the judgments made in dating. This kind of judgment is not really about you. 5 Put yourself in the position of someone selecting players for a national team. Suppose for the sake of simplicity that this is a game with no positions, and that you have to select 20 players. There will be a few stars who clearly should make the team, and many players who clearly shouldn’t. The only place your judgment makes a difference is in the borderline cases. Suppose you screw up and underestimate the 20th best player, causing him not to make the team, and his place to be taken by the 21st best. You’ve still picked a good team. If the players have the usual distribution of ability, the 21st best player will be only slightly worse than the 20th best. Probably the difference between them will be less than the measurement error. 6 The 20th best player may feel he has been misjudged. But your goal here wasn’t to provide a service estimating people’s ability. It was to pick