Unit5TheRealTruthAboutLies课文翻译综合教程三.docx

Unit5TheRealTruthAboutLies课文翻译综合学习教程三 Unit5TheRealTruthAboutLies课文翻译综合学习教程三 PAGE / NUMPAGES Unit5TheRealTruthAboutLies课文翻译综合学习教程三 Unit 5 The Real Truth about Lies Randy Fitzgerald At the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, psychology professor Bella DePaulo got 77 students and 70 townspeople to volunteer for an unusual project. All kept diaries for a week, recording the numbers and details of the lies they told. One student and six Charlottesville residents professed to have told no falsehoods. The other 140 participants told 1,535. The lies were most often not what most of us would call earth-shattering. Someone would pretend to be more positive or supportive of a spouse or friend than he or she really was, or feign agreement with a relative's opinion. According to DePaulo, women in their interactions with other women lied mostly to spare the other's feelings. Men lied to other men generally for self-promoting reasons. Most strikingly, these tellers-of-a-thousand-lies reported that their deceptions caused them "little preoccupation or regret". Might that, too, be a lie Perhaps. But there is evidence that this attitude toward casual use of prevarication is common. For example, 20,000 middle- and high-schoolers were surveyed by the Josephson Institute of Ethics--a nonprofit organization in Marina del Rey, California, devoted to character education. Ninety-two percent of the teenagers admitted having lied to their parents in the previous year, and 73 percent characterized themselves as "serial liars", meaning they told lies weekly. Despite these admissions, 91 percent of all respondents said they were "satisfied with my own ethics and character". Think how often we hear the expressions "I'll call you" or "The check is in the mail ” or "I'm sorry, but he stepped out". And then there are professions-- lawyers, pundits, PR consultants--whose members seem to specialize in shaping or spinning the truth to suit clients' needs. Little white lies have become