【答案解析】超市旨在引诱消费者尽可能在店里多逗留一段时间。理由十分简单：你在超市里待的时间越长，你看到的东西就会越多，而你看到的东西越多，会购买的也就越多。超市里商品种类众多。据美国食品营销研究所统计，一家普通的超市大概有44000种不同种类的商品，有很多超市还要多上几万种。光是可供选择的商品数量就足以让消费者陷入信息过载的状态。根据脑部扫描实验显示，需要快速做出这么多决定会令我们难以承受。在购物大约40分钟之后，大多数人就不再试图去理性地选择商品，取而代之的就是情绪购物—而就在这时，购物车中装了一半我们从来不曾打算购买的商品了。 [解析] ① The supermarket is designed to lure customers into spending as much time as possible within its doors. ② The reason for this is simple: The longer you stay in the store, the more stuff you"ll see, and the more stuff you see, the more you"ll buy. ③ And supermarkets contain a lot of stuff: ④ The average supermarket，according to the Food Marketing Institute, carries some 44,000 different items, and many carry tens of thousands more. ⑤ The sheer volume of available choice is enough to send shoppers into a state of information overload. ⑥ According to brain-scan experiments, the demands of so much decision- making quickly become too much for us. ⑦ After about 40 minutes of shopping, most people stop struggling to be rationally selective, and instead begin shopping emotionally—which is the point at which we accumulate the 50 percent of stuff in our cart that we never intended buying.
第①句的lure译为“引诱，诱惑”。第②句中采用了the more… the more…这一句型，译为“越……就越……”；该句中的stuff指的是超市中的商品。第④句末尾的and many carry tens of thousands more省略了与前面一个分句相同的句子成分，其完整的形式应为and many supermarkets carry tens of thousands more items。第⑤句中information overloaded可译为“信息过载”。第⑥句中become too much for us直译为“对我们来说太多了”，这里可意译为“令我们难以承受”。第⑦句中包含了which引导的定语从句，第一个which指代的是购物40分钟后人们不再理性选择商品，而开始情绪购物这样一种状态，第二个which的先行词是point，翻译时要注意理清句子的层次和逻辑。