英语听力文摘 English Digest 251、扶手争夺战

　　Farewell to Arms
Fly often? If you do, who gets the arm rest? You? Or your neighbor?
Good afternoon, this is your captain speaking. We are at cruising¹ altitude and will be in flight for another three hours, so you’d better get comfortable.
That means figuring out who gets the arm rest — you, or your neighbor in the next seat. Oh, I know the seats are built so that one arm rest is shared by two passengers. Sure, we could have given all the seats their own arm rests, but then airplane flights would be so much less interesting from a social psychology² point of view. And hey — you don’t really mind, do you?
Turns out you do. In a study conducted by three social psychologists, 426 pairs of people were observed on some twenty flights to see if there is a pattern to who gets the disputedarmrest. The subjects observed were always one male seated next to one female³. Guess who got the armrest most of the time?
Yep, the men. Twice as often? Three times? Try five times as often. Men dominated⁴ the social space that didn’t clearly belong to either person. Adjusting the experiment to only include people of equal size, that number dropped. But the men still took the arm rest three times as often as the women.
In post-flight interviews, 68 percent of the men said they were bothered when the other person took the armrest, while only 42 percent of the women felt annoyed.
So…are all men just pushy⁵ cads? Well, one can debate what these data show. But this much is clear: that little strip⁶ of plastic is a mini-battleground.

　　译文：
扶手争夺战
下午好，我是机长。我们现在正处于巡航高度，还会飞行3个小时，希望你旅途愉快。
这意味着谁将会得到扶手-你或者你旁边的邻居。噢，我知道椅子这样设计就是为了让两个乘客共用一个扶手。当然，我们可以给所有的座位配有自己单独的扶手，但是从社会心理学的角度看，飞机航班就会减少很多乐趣。所以你不会介意的是吧？
实际上你很介意。3名社会心理学家对20架航班上的426对乘客关于谁应该得到饱受争议的扶手进行了研究，观察的对象一般是坐在女性旁边的男性。猜猜是谁大部分时间使用扶手？
是的，男性。有两倍？还是三倍？恐怕是五倍。男性主宰着这个没有明确归属的社会空间。如果把实验面向相同体型的人，这个数据将会下降。尽管如此，男性使用扶手的频率仍然是女性的三倍。
在飞行后的采访中，68%的男性表示他们为别人霸占扶手而感到烦恼，而女性只有42%有此同感。
那么，是不是所有男性都如此不绅士呢？你可以质疑这些数据显示的结果，但是有一点是不容质疑的：小小的塑料扶手已成为了一个争夺战场。

1 cruising   

adj.巡航的v.乘船巡游( cruise的现在分词 )；以快而平稳的速度长距离行驶；巡航；轻而易举赢得（或获得）

参考例句：

• The car was cruising along at 100 kilometres an hour. 这辆汽车平稳地以每小时100公里的速度行驶。 来自《简明英汉词典》
• They will go cruising in the Mediterranean. 他们将在地中海上巡游。 来自《简明英汉词典》

2 psychology   

n.心理，心理学，心理状态

参考例句：

• She has a background in child psychology.她受过儿童心理学的教育。
• He studied philosophy and psychology at Cambridge.他在剑桥大学学习哲学和心理学。

3 female   

adj.雌的，女(性)的；n.雌性的动物，女子

参考例句：

• We only employ female workers.我们只雇用女工。
• The animal in the picture was a female elephant.照片上的动物是头母象。

4 dominated   

受控的 -tive

参考例句：

• As a child he was dominated by his father. 他小时候由父亲主宰一切。
• His personality dominated over the other members of the committee. 他的人格影响委员会的其他成员。

5 pushy   

adj.固执己见的，一意孤行的

参考例句：

• But she insisted and was very pushy.但她一直坚持,而且很急于求成。
• He made himself unpopular by being so pushy.他特别喜欢出风头，所以人缘不好。

6 strip   

n.长条，条状；连环漫画；n.脱衣舞；vt.脱衣，剥夺；挤干(牛奶)；vt.拆卸；去除(烟叶的茎)；vi.脱衣，表演脱衣舞；剥落

参考例句：

• I need one more strip of cloth to finish this decoration.我还要一根布条来完成这个装饰品。
• We had to strip the old paint from the doors.我们只好把门上的旧漆刮掉。