【英语语言学习】失信的人数

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UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN #1: Fifty-two.

UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN #2: Four-hundred-and-fifty-three.

UNIDENTIFIED MAN #1: Twenty-five.

RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:

Time for some number crunching¹ from our data expert, Mona Chalabi of fivethirtyeight.com. She has given us this number of the week.

UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN #3: Thirty-seven million.

MARTIN: That is the estimated number of users of Ashley Madison. It's an online site that makes infidelity as easy as posting an online profile. Last week, hackers³ said they had stolen data from the company and threatened to release all customer records. The hack² made us wonder just how many people out there cheat and what motivates them. Lucky for us, Mona Chalabi is here to sort through the numbers on infidelity. Hey, Mona.

MONA CHALABI, BYLINE⁴: Hi, Rachel.

MARTIN: All right, well, what do we know about how many people cheat? And is this something people are actually honest about when asked by pollsters or researchers?

CHALABI: The most recent research on this suggests that people are actually pretty willing to be honest and confess when they're asked anonymously⁵. In May this year, the polling company YouGov surveyed about a thousand Americans. And they found that 21 percent of men and 19 percent of women admitted that they had cheated on their partners. But it's also worth mentioning that about another 7 percent said they would prefer not to answer the question. So you can read into that what you will.

MARTIN: OK, but still, 1 in 5 Americans, that seems like a lot. Does any research out there tell us about who is more likely to cheat and why?

CHALABI: It's probably easiest to start off with age because there was a study last year that actually used Ashley Madison data to get at this question. But just to be clear, this wasn't part of the leak. This was just a kind of separate study. And this data was obtained with the consent of Ashley Madison's owners. So instead of looking at age groups, the researchers looked at specific ages, each individual year, and found that men who were nine-enders - that means men who were 29, 39, 49, or 59 - were much more likely to be on the site looking for extramarital affair than people who weren't about to begin a new decade of their lives. Eighteen percent more of them were on the site than what you'd expect by chance alone. It's also worth noting - in fact, I think it's really crucial to note - that dating sites don't verify the age of users. So maybe this data is a little bit flawed if those men were kind of fibbing about their age to just knock themselves down to a decade lower.

MARTIN: Yeah, right 'cause that's what we do when we're kind of fudging our age. So it's people on the cusp of some kind of big perceived life change, maybe.

CHALABI: Exactly, yeah.

MARTIN: How does that break down by gender⁷?

CHALABI: When asked, have you thought about cheating, 28 percent of women say yes compared to 41 percent of men.

MARTIN: It's more complicate⁸ than just age and gender though, right? I mean, I remember you and I talked a while ago about women who earn more than their partners. And you found that men who are financially dependent on these women are more likely to cheat on them. So we know money comes into it as well - other factors, Mona?

CHALABI: Yeah. There's definitely quite a few. And we know that personality comes into it a little bit. It's kind of difficult to build up a specific profile of exactly who a cheater is. If that was the case then I think we would find dating a lot easier. But we do have some research on this again. So a 2011 study published in the Archives of Sexual Behavior found about 1 in 5 of the thousand people in heterosexual couples they interviewed had cheated. But what it did was it took a closer look at those individual to see what factors were most likely to predict their sexual infidelity. It found that for both men and women, sexual personality characteristics - so that's things like being adventurous⁹ and not having performance anxiety - were far more important than demographic stuff, like marital⁶ status or religiosity, when it comes to actually predicting whether or not someone's going to be faithful.

MARTIN: OK, so we've been talking about heterosexual couples here. Any research out there about same-sex or bisexual couples?

CHALABI: Not much. This is something I run into all the time. So much of the research is just focused on heterosexual couples. But I did find a 2012 study in the Journal of Marital and Family Therapy. And what they did was they looked at the way that people felt about infidelity. And it found that all participants, regardless of sexual orientation¹⁰ - because they did include different couples in there - found that sexual infidelity elicited¹¹ more distressing¹² feelings actually than emotional infidelity.

MARTIN: Emotional infidelity - that brings up another question. Does some of this have to do with how people define cheating, Mona? I mean, does there have to be a sexual relationship to constitute cheating for most people?

CHALABI: Not for everyone, actually. And that's what's really, really interesting. There are clear differences between men's and women's perceptions of this. So 76 percent of women, when asked, felt that it was cheating to send flirty¹³ messages to someone else. But only 59 percent of men think the same. Now, when it comes to kind of more extreme examples, like having a one-night stand, the genders¹⁴ tend to agree. So 93 percent of women think a one-night stand is cheating, and 91 percent of men think the same. But, what's interesting is actually when it came to being asked, how would you feel if your partner had shared deep, emotional, intimate informational with someone else, people basically felt the same whether that had occurred online or off-line, which is one reason why I'm pretty sure that Ashley Madison's users aren't feeling too great right now that their information is being held by a third party that's threatening to release it.

MARTIN: Mona Chalabi of fivethirtyeight.com. Thanks so much, Mona.

CHALABI: Thanks, Rachel.

1 crunching   

v.嘎吱嘎吱地咬嚼( crunch的现在分词 )；嘎吱作响；（快速大量地）处理信息；数字捣弄

参考例句：

• The horses were crunching their straw at their manger. 这些马在嘎吱嘎吱地吃槽里的草。 来自《简明英汉词典》
• The dog was crunching a bone. 狗正嘎吱嘎吱地嚼骨头。 来自《简明英汉词典》

2 hack   

n.劈，砍，出租马车；v.劈，砍，干咳

参考例句：

• He made a hack at the log.他朝圆木上砍了一下。
• Early settlers had to hack out a clearing in the forest where they could grow crops.早期移民不得不在森林里劈出空地种庄稼。

3 hackers   

n.计算机迷( hacker的名词复数 )；私自存取或篡改电脑资料者，电脑“黑客”

参考例句：

• They think of viruses that infect an organization from the outside.They envision hackers breaking into their information vaults. 他们考虑来自外部的感染公司的病毒，他们设想黑客侵入到信息宝库中。 来自《简明英汉词典》
• Arranging a meeting with the hackers took weeks againoff-again email exchanges. 通过几星期电子邮件往来安排见面，他们最终同意了。 来自互联网

4 byline   

n.署名；v.署名

参考例句：

• His byline was absent as well.他的署名也不见了。
• We wish to thank the author of this article which carries no byline.我们要感谢这篇文章的那位没有署名的作者。

5 anonymously   

ad.用匿名的方式

参考例句：

• The manuscripts were submitted anonymously. 原稿是匿名送交的。
• Methods A self-administered questionnaire was used to survey 536 teachers anonymously. 方法采用自编“中小学教师职业压力问卷”对536名中小学教师进行无记名调查。

6 marital   

adj.婚姻的，夫妻的

参考例句：

• Her son had no marital problems.她的儿子没有婚姻问题。
• I regret getting involved with my daughter's marital problems;all its done is to bring trouble about my ears.我后悔干涉我女儿的婚姻问题, 现在我所做的一切将给我带来无穷的烦恼。

7 gender   

n.（生理上的）性，（名词、代词等的）性

参考例句：

• French differs from English in having gender for all nouns.法语不同于英语，所有的名词都有性。
• Women are sometimes denied opportunities solely because of their gender.妇女有时仅仅因为性别而无法获得种种机会。

8 complicate   

vt.使复杂化，使混乱，使难懂

参考例句：

• There is no need to complicate matters.没有必要使问题复杂化。
• These events will greatly complicate the situation.这些事件将使局势变得极其复杂。

9 adventurous   

adj.爱冒险的；惊心动魄的，惊险的，刺激的　

参考例句：

• I was filled with envy at their adventurous lifestyle.我很羨慕他们敢于冒险的生活方式。
• He was predestined to lead an adventurous life.他注定要过冒险的生活。

10 orientation   

n.方向，目标；熟悉，适应，情况介绍

参考例句：

• Children need some orientation when they go to school.小孩子上学时需要适应。
• The traveller found his orientation with the aid of a good map.旅行者借助一幅好地图得知自己的方向。

11 elicited   

引出，探出( elicit的过去式和过去分词 )

参考例句：

• Threats to reinstate the tax elicited jeer from the Opposition. 恢复此项征税的威胁引起了反对党的嘲笑。
• The comedian's joke elicited applause and laughter from the audience. 那位滑稽演员的笑话博得观众的掌声和笑声。

12 distressing   

a.使人痛苦的

参考例句：

• All who saw the distressing scene revolted against it. 所有看到这种悲惨景象的人都对此感到难过。
• It is distressing to see food being wasted like this. 这样浪费粮食令人痛心。

13 flirty   

adj.爱调戏的，轻浮的

参考例句：

• Add a flirty blouse and cardigan for a super chic weekend look. 再穿一件风情万种的衬衫，搭配开襟羊毛衫，就是超级有型的周末装了。 来自互联网

14 genders   

n.性某些语言的（阳性、阴性和中性，不同的性有不同的词尾等）( gender的名词复数 )；性别；某些语言的（名词、代词和形容词）性的区分

参考例句：

• There are three genders in German: masculine, feminine and neuter. 德语中有叁性：阳性、阴性和中性。 来自辞典例句
• Japan was fourth among the genders of foreign students. 日本在二十个留美学生输送地中列第四位。 来自互联网