Unit 4 Astronomy：the science of the stars 同步练习4.docVIP

Unit 4 Astronomy: the science of the stars 同步练习4 .阅读理解 Nowadays more and more people are trapped in too busy work to relax themselves. We have no time to tell a bedtime story to our children, or enjoy a nice dinner with our family, or take a break to think about how we live the precious life, or even meet friends. All we notice is that the distinctions that used to guide and steady us—between Sunday and Monday, public and private, here and there－are gone. We have more ways to communicate, but less and less to say, partly because we’re so busy communicating. Maybe that’s why more and more people I know, even if they have no religious commitment, seem to be turning to yoga, or meditation(打坐),or Tai Chi(太极)．Some friends of mine try to go on long walks every Sunday, or to “forget” their cellphones at home. A series of tests in recent years has shown that after spending time in quiet rural settings, subjects exhibit greater attentiveness, stronger memory and generally improved cognition. Their brains become both calmer and sharper. More than that, sympathy, as well as deep thought, depends on neural processes that are inherently slow, the very ones our high-speed lives have little time for. In my own case, I often turn to unusual and extreme measures to try to keep my good sense and ensure that I have time to do nothing at all .I’ve not yet used a cellphone and I’ve never entered Facebook. I try not to go online till my day’s writing is finished, and I moved from Manhattan to rural Japan. None of this is a matter of principle or asceticism (苦行主义):it’s just pure selfishness. Nothing makes me feel better, calmer, clearer and happier than being in one place, absorbed in a book, a conversation, a piece of music. It’s actually something deeper than mere happiness: it’s joy, which the monk Brother David Steindl-Rast describes as “that kind of happiness that doesn’t depend on what happens”．That is the highest of the highest we have been longing for—The Joy of Quiet. 【文章大意】　忙碌的工