单选题
Like many writers, I've been kicking around an idea for a
novel for years. I wrote part of my tale during a less busy time in my life
years ago. But I couldn't {{U}}build momentum{{/U}}. I'd write a bit, then abandon
the project for months. This is a problem many people face, I
learned while writing about workday schedules for my recent book. We have grand
ideas for where to take our careers someday, but immediate deadlines or meetings
or aggressive coworkers always seem to take precedence on Monday morning.
Internal motivation is powerful, but it's easier to say no to ourselves rather
than the rest of the world. So what do successful people do?
They create external motivations for things they want to do but that life has a
way of crowding out. They create accountability systems that boost important but
not urgent items to the top of their priority lists—ideally in a way that makes
failure really uncomfortable. Nika Stewart, for instance, owns
a social media marketing business. She's also part of an accountability group
called the 7-Figure Club. Every Monday, each entrepreneur checks in online to
determine the amount of a week's work that will advance her toward her annual
goals. Then on Friday, everyone checks back in to say whether she met her goal.
If Stewart's weekly goal, shared with the group on Monday, was to send out 10
proposals, she tells me, "Thursday night, if I didn't do it, I might stay up and
do it." Why? She doesn't want to look lazy to people whose opinion she cares
about. I knew I needed an accountability system for myself, or
my novel would never get written. Late last year, I found my partner Katherine
Reynolds Lewis. I'm almost embarrassed to say how effective this little shift in
approach was. Being accountable to Katherine made me want to write 2,000 words,
just so I could e-mail her saying I'd written them. There weren't any real
consequences to failing, but the part of my brain that learned to turn in papers
on time in school years ago leapt to attention once it had an
assignment. "Write 2,000 words" got a spot on my to-do list. In
10 weeks, I had enough words (20,000) to have a sense of how I intended to shape
the second half of the book. By April 15,! had my draft.
单选题
In Paragraph 1, "build momentum" refers to ______.
A. find enough time for writing
B. form a good habit of writing
C. keep on writing my novel
D. decide on the plot of my novel
【正确答案】
C
【答案解析】第一段作者说和很多作家一样，多年来一直没把写小说的事太放在心上。有不少文字还是前些年不太忙的时候写的，但自己不能保持写作的势头，常常会写一点就放在一边，然后一连几个月不再动笔。momentum的意义是strength or force that keeps growing，经常与动词gain连用，也就是gain momentum。build momentum的含义是“积累不断前进的动力”。