问答题
Since thin people can't enjoy life, we eke out
pleasure by telling fat people how to lose weight, as if they don't know. Cook!
Plant a garden! Read this posting of fast-food-menu calories! Buy fresh produce!
Bike to work! Do stuff skinny folk would never do. So I wasn't
surprised when two recent studies concluded that obesity isn't reduced by
opening supermarkets in poor areas—the so-called food deserts without access to
affordable fresh produce that food writer Michael Pollan has railed against and
the Obama Administration has funded an initiative to fix. Sure, people can't eat
healthy if there isn't a store nearby selling pomegranate seeds and kale. But
most obesity isn't caused by a lack of access to affordable produce or time to
cook. It's the result of short-term over long-term thinking. Cooking sucks.
Eating a salad takes forever. Fast food is delicious, easy, fun, cheap, reliable
and can be scarfed down so quickly there isn't time to fight with your family.
One Thanksgiving meal does more emotional damage than a lifetime of
Wendy's. The times when I've felt stuck in my life, I've made
horrible decisions—avoiding work, blowing deadlines, going on seven dates with a
woman during which I watched a movie on her bed and met her parents and yet did
not kiss her once, there by starting, I'm sure, a rumor that I'm either gay or
lack a working tongue. And my version of being stuck was hating my Manhattan
magazine fact-checking job and living at home with my newly divorced dad. So,
less like being poor and more like being in a 1980s sitcom. But
if you're living in an impoverished community where the future doesn't look like
a rewarding adventure and instead requires all your energy to figure out how to
get by this month, you're unlikely to focus on activities with long-term
benefits such as studying, saving, marriage, being drug-free and spicing up
quinoa. In their 1988 paper "A Theory of Rational Addiction", economists Gary
Becker and Kevin Murphy argued that shooting heroin is a logical choice when all
you're giving up is a crappy existence. It also explains why so many people do
drugs when listening to Phish. When I ran my theory by Marie
Gallagher, the researcher who invented the term "food desert", she actually
agreed with me. "That's why we don't have to combat food deserts but jobs
deserts, crime and so many other things," she said. I asked
Charles Duhigg—whose brilliant book The Power of Habit is about how to trick
your brain into making better decisions—what a better solution is. He said
telling people to eat well so they'll live longer is idiotic. "The No. 1 way not
to form a good habit is to say, 'In three months I'm going to look a lot
thinner.' There is no way you can say the long-term reward is going to outweigh
a sugar rush," he said. "If you see doughnuts on the counter, it will feel
really urgent that you need a doughnut. That's your basal ganglia." One proven
way of turning people off doughnuts is to talk about basal ganglia.
I asked A. J. Jacobs, who lost a bunch of weight for his hilarious new
book, Drop Dead Healthy, how he did it. Jacobs, who has never been
poor, used to think fatalistically about his future, as a poor person might: "I
rationalized it and said even if you eat right and go to the gym three times a
week, you get hit by a bus, so what's the point?" In his head, Jacobs lived a
chaotic, violent Upper West Side life where young homies were constantly being
iced by the M79 crosstown. So Jacobs tricked himself into
thinking long-term results were immediate. "I try to visualize what that
doughnut would do to my body. I do that CSI thing where you go inside your body
like a bullet, and you visualize the arteries and a big chunk of doughnut
blocking the artery," he said. He also stuck a computerized image of himself at
80 on his refrigerator. He agreed to start a company with me that would create
an app that updates the elderly-you photo in real time, depending on how much
you eat and exercise. Jacobs spent that evening looking for
food at the airport, which is the only food desert rich people run into. "I went
to a place called something like the Health Shack. They sold gummy bears
and chocolate-chip cookies," he said. Jacobs resisted temptation. Though if this
book doesn't sell, next time he probably won't.
问答题
What is the real cause of obesity according to the author?
【正确答案】The author doesn't think the existence of the so-called food deserts or people's lack of time to cook is the real cause. He believes, however, that most obesity is the result of bad long-term thinking. To be specific, when people are tempted by delicious, easy and cheap fast food, they are more willing to gain the instant gratification than the long-term reward of eating healthily.
【答案解析】[解析] 对文章基本内容和主题的理解能力。相关内容见文章前两段。作者以风趣的口吻开篇，并列举了一些通常概念中的减肥方法，第二段中则亮出了其个人观点，即short-term over long-term thinking才是造成人们肥胖的根本原因。
问答题
Why does the author mention the times when he'd felt stuck in his life and made awful decisions in paragraph 3?
【正确答案】The author mentioned his own experience as a starting point to introduce his theory that when people are living under bad conditions, it is unrealistic and difficult for them to consider the long-term effects of an immediate decision.
问答题
How did A. J. Jacobs lose weight successfully? Cite an example.
【正确答案】Jacobs lost weight successfully by making himself believe that the long-term results of eating unhealthily affect his health right away. For instance, he would do this by imagining how a doughnut would block his artery and sticking a computerized picture of himself at 80 on his refrigerator. This approach helped him see the long-term effects immediately and made the effects more concrete, thus enabling him to abandon the idea of eating something unhealthy.