【英语时差8,16】烛光里的电视晚餐

 Imagine a friend of yours has invited you over for dinner to share a gourmet¹ meal and an expensive bottle of wine. You really enjoy the meal and the wine and ask your friend where she got the stuff. She confesses that the "gourmet meal" was really a TV dinner nicely arranged on your plate, and that the pricey wine bottle had been emptied before you came over and re-filled with cheap wine. Some dinner! But much of the enjoyment² we receive from consuming gourmet foods, pricey wines, and other fancy products comes from the perception that these products are rare and expensive. A study out of Caltech had participants rate the quality of five wines each labeled only by their price per bottle, which ranged from five to ninety dollars. While participants drank and rated the wines, their brain activity was monitored and recorded using functional³ magnetic resonance⁴ imaging, or fMRI. During this experiment the sneaky researchers gave participants the same wine twice: first labeled as coming from a ninety-dollar bottle, and then again from a ten-dollar bottle. Interestingly people consistently rated the ninety-dollar wine higher than the ten-dollar, even though they were really the same wine! Moreover when drinking the supposedly pricey wine the fMRI scans recorded more activity in a spot in the brain believed to be associated with the experience of pleasure, called the medial orbitofrontal cortex, than when participants drank the supposedly cheap stuff. So it looks like the next time your friend invites you over for a nice dinner and a bottle of wine you're better off not asking any questions at all, because in this case ignorance is bliss⁵.

 

1 gourmet   

n.食物品尝家；adj.出于美食家之手的

参考例句：

• What does a gourmet writer do? 美食评论家做什么？
• A gourmet like him always eats in expensive restaurants.像他这样的美食家总是到豪华的餐馆用餐。

2 enjoyment   

n.乐趣；享有；享用

参考例句：

• Your company adds to the enjoyment of our visit. 有您的陪同，我们这次访问更加愉快了。
• After each joke the old man cackled his enjoyment.每逢讲完一个笑话，这老人就呵呵笑着表示他的高兴。

3 functional   

adj.为实用而设计的，具备功能的，起作用的

参考例句：

• The telephone was out of order,but is functional now.电话刚才坏了，但现在可以用了。
• The furniture is not fancy,just functional.这些家具不是摆着好看的，只是为了实用。

4 resonance   

n.洪亮；共鸣；共振

参考例句：

• Playing the piano sets up resonance in those glass ornaments.一弹钢琴那些玻璃饰物就会产生共振。
• The areas under the two resonance envelopes are unequal.两个共振峰下面的面积是不相等的。

5 bliss   

n.狂喜，福佑，天赐的福

参考例句：

• It's sheer bliss to be able to spend the day in bed.整天都可以躺在床上真是幸福。
• He's in bliss that he's won the Nobel Prize.他非常高兴，因为获得了诺贝尔奖金。