科学技术

　　Beer drinking

　　啤酒的饮用

　　Shape up!

　　形状改变一切！

　　What sort of glass you drink from predicts how fast you drink

　　喝酒有多快？看杯子就知道

　　WOULD you like that in a straight or a jug, sir? was once a common response to British pubgoers' request for a pint.

　　在过去，泡吧的英国佬如果要来杯一品脱的啤酒，通常都要回答这样一个问题，“先生，你要哪一种杯子乘啤酒，净饮杯还是扎啤杯？

　　2_副本.jpgLike the Lilliputians inGulliver's Travels, who argued whether a boiled egg should be opened at the pointed or the rounded end, beer drinkers were adamant that only from their preferred shape of glass did their tipple taste best.

　　正如《格列佛游记》中小人国里的人对于吃鸡蛋应该先从哪端打破而争论不休一样，喝啤酒的人同样固执的认为，只有用他们喜欢的杯型喝酒，味道才带劲。

　　Straight-sided glasses—sometimes with a bulge a little below the lip—have largely won the day.

　　净饮杯在今天广受欢迎，这种杯子的杯口有时会凸出稍低的一小块来。

　　Jugs—squat cylinders of dimpled glass equipped with handles—are now rare.

　　而扎啤杯，圆柱形的杯身短浅，且外围被修饰成一个个小酒窝，还带有把手，但这种杯子在今天已经很少见了。

　　But that is probably because straight glasses are easier for bar staff to collect and stack, rather than because straight-glass lovers have persuaded their fellow-drinkers of the virtue of their view.

　　这可能是因为，对于酒保来说，净饮杯更容易堆积和摆放，而不是因为净饮杯爱好者证明了他们观点的正确，以让酒友们信以为真。

　　The shape of a beer glass does, nevertheless, matter.

　　尽管如此，啤酒杯的外形的确很重要。

　　For a group of researchers at the University of Bristol have shown that it can regulate how quickly someone drinks.

　　布里斯托尔大学的一组研究者已经证实，酒杯的形状能够决定人喝酒的快慢。

　　Angela Attwood and her colleagues asked 160 undergraduates—80 women and 80 men—to do one of four things: drink beer out of a straight glass; drink beer out of a flute; or drink lemonade from one of these two sorts of glass.

　　安吉拉阿特伍德和她的同事们曾要求160名大学生—男女各80人，从四件事中选择一件来做，它们分别是：用净饮杯喝啤酒，用笛型杯喝啤酒；或者选用这两种杯子之一盛柠檬汁喝。

　　To complicate matters further, some of the glasses were full whereas others were half-full.

　　为了让事情变得更加复杂，其中的一些杯子是满的，而另一些只盛有一半饮品。

　　Though, as is common practice in studies of this sort, participants were misled about its true nature, and were shown films and asked to do a language test afterwards, to support this misdirection, what Dr Attwood and her team were really interested in was how quickly the various drinks would be drunk.

　　虽然和做这类研究所惯用的手法一样，实验过程掩盖了本质，对参与者进行了误导，之后他们被带去看电影，做语言测试；而进行这种误导是因为，阿特伍德教授和她的团队真正感兴趣的是不同杯子里的饮品被喝光的速度。

　　The answer was that a full straight glass of beer was polished off in 11 minutes, on average.

　　实验得出的答案是：满满一杯用净饮杯乘的啤酒，平均11分钟就被喝完了。

　　A full flute, by contrast, was down the hatch in seven, which was also the amount of time it took to drink a full glass of lemonade, regardless of the type of vessel.

　　相比之下，用笛型杯盛满的一杯酒，7分钟就见底了。而不管用哪种杯子，同样7分钟，一满杯子的柠檬汁就会能被喝光。

　　If a glass started half-full, however, neither its shape nor its contents mattered.

　　然而，如果一个杯子开始只倒满了一半，不管杯型如何，装的是什么饮品，

　　It was drunk in an average of five minutes.

　　喝完它平均只要5分钟。

　　Dr Attwood's hypothesis is that a beer drinker, wishing to pace himself through an evening, is monitoring the volume remaining in the glass, probably with reference to the halfway mark.

　　阿特伍德博士提出的假设是：一位喝啤酒的人，想要一晚上自始自终控制自己喝多少酒的话，就会时刻关注杯子里剩余的酒量，可能他就是以杯子的中间点作为基准的。

　　A curved-sided glass, though, makes exercising such judgment hard—as she demonstrated by calling her volunteers back a week later and asking them to estimate from pictures how full various glasses were.

　　然而一个杯身倾斜的杯子，就让这种判断变得困难起来—正如阿特伍德所证明的那样，让参与她实验的志愿者在一个星期后回来，并且让他们仅凭图片来估计各种杯子倒满是个什么情况。

　　Most volunteers thought the halfway mark in the flute was lower than its true value, and if a volunteer had drunk from such a glass originally, the degree of misestimation correlated with how fast he had drunk.

　　大多数志愿者认为在笛型杯中，杯子所显示的中点要比它真实的中点要低，而如果一位志愿者一开始就用这种杯子喝酒，他对酒量的误判和他喝酒的速度将会一一对应。

　　If a glass is half-full to start with, however, this reference point is lost from the beginning.

　　但是如果一开始杯子只倒满了一半的话，这一参照点从最初就失去了意义。

　　The upshot, as Dr Attwood reports in the Public Library of Science, is that straight glasses have it.

　　正如艾特伍德在《公共科学图书馆》杂志中所做的报告一样，结果显示净饮杯可以证明这种假设。

　　Though beer flutes are not common in British pubs, her observation that the shape of a glass can affect how fast it is drunk from bears investigation.

　　虽然用笛型杯喝啤酒在英国的酒吧里并不常见，而从她的观察报告中可以看出，一个杯子的形状能够影响喝啤酒的速度。

　　Both health campaigners and breweries would be interested in the results, though they would probably draw opposite conclusions about what is the best-shaped glass in which to serve a bevvy.

　　健康活动者和各啤酒厂都会对研究的结果感兴趣，不过关于用什么形状的杯子乘酒最好，两者可能会得出截然相反的结论。