【每日阅读训练第四期——速度越障7系列】【7-7】文史哲

cleotina

速度

速度一
We present the short story "Doctor Heidegger's Experiment" by Nathaniel Hawthorne. Here is Barbara Klein with the story.

BARBARA KLEIN: That very unusual man, old Doctor Heidegger, once invited four friends to meet him in his office. There were three white-bearded gentlemen, Mister Medbourne, Colonel Killigrew, and Mister Gascoigne. And, there was a thin old lady whose husband had died, so she was called the Widow Wycherly.

They were all sad old creatures who had been unfortunate in life. As a young man, Mister Medbourne had lost all his money in a badly planned business deal. Colonel Killigrew had wasted his best years and health enjoying the pleasures of women and drink. Mister Gascoigne was a ruined politician with an evil past.

As for the Widow Wycherly, tradition tells us that she was once a great beauty. But shocking stories about her past had led the people of the town to reject her. So, she lived very much alone.

It is worth stating that each of these three men were early lovers of the Widow Wycherly. And they had once been on the point of killing each other over her.

"My dear old friends," said Doctor Heidegger, "I would like your help in one of my little experiments." He motioned for them to sit down.
【215】


速度二
Doctor Heidegger's office was a very strange place. The dark room was filled with books, cobwebs, and dust. An old mirror hanging between two bookcases was said to show the ghosts of all the doctor's dead patients.

On another wall hung a painting of the young woman Doctor Heidegger was to have married long ago. But she died the night before their wedding after drinking one of the doctor's medicines. The most mysterious object in the room was a large book covered in black leather. It was said to be a book of magic.

On the summer afternoon of our story, a black table stood in the middle of the room. On it was a beautiful cut-glass vase. Four glasses were also on the table.

Doctor Heidegger was known for his unusual experiments. But his four guests did not expect anything very interesting.

The doctor picked up his black leather book of magic. From its pages he removed a dried-up old rose.

"This rose," said the doctor, "was given to me fifty-five years ago by Sylvia Ward, whose painting hangs on this wall. I was to wear it at our wedding. Would you think it possible that this ancient rose could ever bloom again?"

"Nonsense!" said the Widow Wycherly with a toss of her head. "You might as well ask if an old woman's lined face could ever bloom again."

"See!" answered Doctor Heidegger.

He reached for the vase and threw the dried rose into the water it contained. Soon, a change began to appear. The crushed and dried petals moved and slowly turned from brown to red. And there was the rose of half a century looking as fresh as when Sylvia Ward had first given it to her lover.

"That is a very pretty trick," said the doctor's friends. "What is the secret?"

"Did you ever hear of the Fountain of Youth?" asked Doctor Heidegger. "The Spanish explorer Ponce De Leon went in search of it centuries ago. But he was not looking in the right place. If I am rightly informed, the famous Fountain of Youth is in southern Florida. A friend of mine has sent me the water you see in the vase."
【367】


速度三
The doctor filled the four glasses with water from the Fountain of Youth. The liquid produced little bubbles that rose up to the silvery surface. The old guests agreed to drink the water, although they did not believe in its power.

"Before you drink, my friends," the doctor said, "you should draw up a few general rules as guidance before you pass a second time through the dangers of youth. You have had a lifetime of experience to direct you. Think what a shame it would be if the wisdom of your experiences did not act as a guide and teacher."

The doctor's four friends answered him with a laugh. The idea that they would ever repeat the mistakes of their youth was very funny.

"Drink, then," said the doctor. "I am happy that I have so well chosen the subjects of my experiment."

They raised the glasses to their lips. If the liquid really was magical, it could not have been given to four human beings who needed it more. They seemed as though they had never known youth or pleasure. They looked like they had always been the weak, unhappy creatures who were bent over the doctor's table.

They drank the water.

There was an almost immediate improvement among the guests. A cheerful glow like sunshine brightened their faces. They looked at one another imagining that some magic power had really started to smooth the lines on their faces.

"Quick! Give us more of this wondrous water!" they cried. "We are younger, but we are still too old!"

"atience!" said Doctor Heidegger who watched the experiment with scientific coolness. "You have been a long time growing old. Surely you could wait half an hour to grow young!"
【289】


速度四
Again he filled their glasses. The four guests drank the liquid in one swallow. As the liquid passed down their throats it seemed to change their whole systems. Their eyes grew clear and bright. Their hair turned from silver to darker shades.

"My dear widow, you are lovely!" cried Colonel Killigrew, who watched as the signs of age disappeared from her face.

The widow ran to the mirror.

The three men started to behave in such a way that proved the magic of the Fountain of Youth's water.

Mister Gascoigne's mind turned to political topics. He talked about nationalism and the rights of the people. He also told secrets softly to himself.

All this time Colonel Killigrew had been shouting out happy drinking songs while his eyes turned towards the curvy body of the Widow Wycherly.

Mister Medbourne was adding dollars and cents to pay for a proposed project. It would supply the East Indies with ice by linking a team of whales to the polar icebergs.

As for the Widow Wycherly, she stood in front of the mirror greeting her image as a friend she loved better than anything in the world.
"My dear old doctor," she cried, "please give me another glass!"

The doctor had already filled the glasses again. It was now near sunset and the room was darker than ever. But a moon-like light shined from within the vase. The doctor sat in his chair watching. As the four guests drank their third glass of water, they were silenced by the expression on the doctor's mysterious face.

The next moment, the exciting rush of young life shot through their blood. They were now at the happy height of youth. The endless cares, sadness, and diseases of age were remembered only as a troubled dream from which they had awoken.
【303】


速度五
"We are young!" they cried.

The guests were a group of happy youngsters almost crazy with energy. They laughed at the old-fashioned clothing they wore. They shouted happily and jumped around the room.

The Widow Wycherly - if such a young lady could be called a widow - ran to the doctor's chair and asked him to dance.

"lease excuse me," answered the doctor quietly. "My dancing days were over long ago. But these three young men would be happy to have such a lovely partner."

The men began to argue violently about who would dance with her. They gathered around the widow, each grabbing for her.

Yet, by a strange trick owing to the darkness of the room, the tall mirror is said to have reflected the forms of three old, gray men competing for a faded, old woman.

As the three fought for the woman's favor, they reached violently for each other's throats. In their struggle, they turned over the table. The vase broke into a thousand pieces. The Water of Youth flowed in a bright stream across the floor.

The guests stood still. A strange coldness was slowly stealing over them all. They looked at Doctor Heidegger who was holding his treasured rose. The flower was fading and drying up once more.

The guests looked at each other and saw their looks changing back. "Are we grown old again so soon?" they cried.

In truth they had. The Water of Youth had powers that were only temporary.

"Yes, friends, you are old again," the doctor said. "And the Water of Youth lies wasted on the ground. But even if it flowed in a river at my door, I still would not drink it. This is the lesson you have taught me!"

But the doctor's four friends had learned no such lesson. They decided at that moment to travel to Florida and drink morning, noon, and night from the Fountain of Youth.

【324】


越障
Asia’s next revolution


Countries across the continent are building welfare states—with a chance to learn from the West’s mistakes
Sep 8th 2012 | from the print edition

ASIA’S economies have long wowed the world with their dynamism. Thanks to years of spectacular growth, more people have been pulled from abject poverty in modern Asia than at any other time in history. But as they become more affluent, the region’s citizens want more from their governments. Across the continent pressure is growing for public pensions, national health insurance, unemployment benefits and other hallmarks of social protection. As a result, the world’s most vibrant economies are shifting gear, away from simply building wealth towards building a welfare state.

The speed and scale of this shift are mind-boggling (see article). Last October Indonesia’s government promised to provide all its citizens with health insurance by 2014. It is building the biggest “single-payer” national health scheme—where one government outfit collects the contributions and foots the bills—in the world. In just two years China has extended pension coverage to an additional 240m rural folk, far more than the total number of people covered by Social Security, America’s public-pension system. A few years ago about 80% of people in rural China had no health insurance. Now virtually everyone does. In India some 40m households benefit from a government scheme to provide up to 100 days’ work a year at the minimum wage, and the state has extended health insurance to some 110m poor people, more than double the number of uninsured in America.

If you take Germany’s introduction of pensions in the 1880s as the beginning and Britain’s launch of its National Health Service in 1948 as the apogee, the creation of Europe’s welfare states took more than half a century. Some Asian countries will build theirs in a decade. If they get things wrong, especially through unaffordable promises, they could wreck the world’s most dynamic economies. But if they create affordable safety nets, they will not just improve life for their own citizens but also become role models themselves. At a time when governments in the rich world are failing to redesign states to cope with ageing populations and gaping budget deficits, this could be another area where Asia leapfrogs the West.

Beyond Bismarck and Beveridge


History offers many lessons for the Asians on what to avoid. Europe’s welfare states began as basic safety nets. But over time they turned into cushions. That was partly because, after wars and the Depression, European societies made redistribution their priority, but also because the recipients of welfare spending became powerful interest groups. The eventual result, all too often, was economic sclerosis with an ever-bigger state. America has kept its safety net less generous, but has made mistakes in creating its entitlements system—including making unaffordable pension and health-care promises, and tying people’s health insurance to their employment.


The record in other parts of the emerging world, especially Latin America, is even worse. Governments have tended to collect insufficient tax revenue to cover their spending promises. Social protection often aggravated inequalities, because pensions and health care flowed to affluent urban workers but not the really poor. Brazil famously has a first-world rate of government spending but third-world public services.


Asia’s governments are acutely conscious of all this. They have little desire to replace traditions of hard work and thrift with a flabby welfare dependency. The region’s giants can seek inspiration not from Greece but from tiny Singapore, where government spending is only a fifth of GDP but schools and hospitals are among the best in the world. So far, the safety nets in big Asian countries have generally been minimalist: basic health insurance and pensions which replace a small fraction of workers’ former income. Even now, the region’s social spending relative to the size of its economies is only about 30% of the rich-country average and lower than any part of the emerging world except sub-Saharan Africa.



That leaves a fair amount of room for expansion. But Asia also faces a number of peculiarly tricky problems. One is demography. Although a few countries, notably India, are relatively youthful, the region includes some of the world’s most rapidly ageing populations. Today China has five workers for every old person. By 2035 the ratio will have fallen to two. In America, by contrast, the baby-boom generation meant that the Social Security system had five contributors per beneficiary in 1960, a quarter of a century after its introduction. It still has three workers for every retired person.



Another problem is size, which makes welfare especially hard. The three giants—China, India and Indonesia—are vast places with huge regional income disparities within their borders. Building a welfare state in any one of them is a bit like creating a single welfare state across the European Union. Lastly, many Asian workers (in India it is about 90%) are in the “informal” economy, making it harder to verify their incomes or reach them with transfers.


Cuddly tigers, not flabby cats


How should these challenges be overcome? There is no single solution that applies from India to South Korea. Different countries will, and should, experiment with different welfare models. But there are three broad principles that all Asian governments could usefully keep in mind.


The first is to pay even more attention to the affordability over time of any promises. The size of most Asian pensions may be modest, but people collect them at an early age. In China, for example, women retire at 55; in Thailand many employees are obliged to stop work at 60 and can withdraw their pension funds at 55. That is patently unsustainable. Across Asia, retirement ages need to rise, and should be indexed to life expectancy.


Second, Asian governments need to target their social spending more carefully. Crudely put, social provision should be about protecting the poor more than subsidising the rich. In fast-ageing societies, especially, handouts to the old must not squeeze out investment in the young. Too many Asian governments still waste oodles of public money on regressive universal subsidies. Indonesia, for instance, last year spent nine times as much on fuel subsidies as it did on health care, and the lion’s share of those subsidies flows to the country’s most affluent. As they promise a broader welfare state, Asia’s politicians have the political opportunity, and the economic responsibility, to get rid of this kind of wasteful spending.


Third, Asia’s reformers should concentrate on being both flexible and innovative. Don’t stifle labour markets with rigid severance rules or over-generous minimum wages. Make sure pensions are portable, between jobs and regions. Don’t equate a publicly funded safety net with government provision of services (a single public payer may be the cheapest way to provide basic health care, but that does not have to mean every nurse needs to be a government employee). And use technology to avoid the inefficiencies that hobble the rich world’s public sector. From making electronic health records ubiquitous to organising transfer payments through mobile phones, Asian countries can create new and efficient delivery systems with modern technology.



In the end, the success of Asia’s great leap towards welfare provision will be determined by politics as much as economics. The continent’s citizens will have to show a willingness to plan ahead, work longer and eschew handouts based on piling up debt for future generations: virtues that have so far eluded their rich-world counterparts. Achieving that political maturity will require the biggest leap of all.
【1251】




译者注：

1. 福利制度是国家或政府在立法或政策范围内为所有对象普遍提供在一定的生活水平上尽可能提高生活质量的资金和服务的社会保障制度。

2. 俾斯麦（Otto Eduard Leopold von Bismarck，1815年4月1日－1898年7月30日）是十九世纪德国最卓越的政治家，担任普鲁士首相期间通过一系列铁血战争统一德国，并成为德意志帝国第一任宰相（又译“总理”）。俾斯麦以保守专制主义者的身份，镇压了19世纪80年代的社会民主运动，但他通过立法建立了世界上最早的工人养老金、健康和医疗保险制度，及社会保险。

3. 威廉?贝弗里奇 （William Beveridge, 1879年3月5日－1963年）是福利国家的理论建构者之一，他于1942年发表《社会保险报告书》（Report on Social Insurance），也称《威廉?贝弗里奇报告》，提出建立“社会权利”新制度，包括失业及无生活能力之公民权、退休金、教育及健康保障等理念。他是自由主义者，主张市场经济。他于1944年发表《自由社会的全面就业》一书，主张有国家及市场导向的私人企业来联合运作，对当代社会福利政策及健保制度深具影响。

fightfor700

谢谢 cleotina，上面的小故事不错，越障的文章很新，学到不少知识。

跟着小分队练了几天，发现与其一味追求速度而完全忽视了理解实在是得不偿失，考试时一定会导致读第二遍。所以打算接下来一段时间内练习的时候以读懂为主，兼顾速度。


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viese

Countries in Asia are trying to establish walfare system. But the pace of them is too quick. They want to use decade to estabish it, but the western countries use half of century to do so. The developing countries should pay attention to three points. First, do not make promise that unaffordable. Second, do not pay too much. Third, be flexible and innovative
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hi1177

插个楼，虽然我不跟队，但是每天也会读。越障很有趣，忍不住冒个泡。谢谢楼主。

bank11

在很久之前读过跟今天的速度很像的文章~很有意思~谢谢LZ~~

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1. Asia is pushing forward welfare and pensions for its people.
2. There are several mistakes that the European and Latin America made when they started to provide pension fund and welfare for their people. But Asia has tired to avoid such mistakes. Like over welfare and not offering welfare for the really poors.
3. Some problems that make Asia's movtion hard to put forward. The size of counties, the ageing of populations.
4. Some suggestions/principals for Asia.
   -take affordability into  consideration, enhance retirement age for workers
   -target at the poors
   -make plans with innovation

kathy0911

感谢楼主！现在的困扰是速度跟理解力的问题，有时候看的快却理解越差。。。哎


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yqhpsyche

又没有坚持住天天做....懒死了啊....

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obstacle 之前读过，略过..

miffyhui

59”
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6’35” the economic development make the insurance emerged inAsian countries.
In Indonesia, the government promised to provide thecitizens with health insurance. In china, the public insurance has covered therural area in the recent years, more than the American insurance system. InIndia…
Europe’s insurance system became cushion. And the recipientof the welfare spending became the interest group.
Problems: 1. Demography; 2. Size
3 principles: 1.pay more attention to the affordability; 2. Targettheir social spending. 3….  
文章很清晰，不过看完漏了太多了，前面看得细后面忘得多

我心匪席

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In Asia, people have been pulled out from poverty, and want more from government, such as social safety, pension and health insurance.
The speed and scale of the shift are mind-boggling in Asian country. Take Indonesia, China for example and compare to American.
The creation of welfare states in Europe (Germany and Britain) took more than half a century. While in Asia, it took only a decade.
What Asia can learn from the lessons on European countries? The welfare spending become too huge in GDP and economic was sclerosis.
Latin American is even worse in keeping spending promises through insufficient tax revenues.
Asia has been aware about the problem. It learns from Singapore.
But it also faces problems:
1) Its demography, aging coutries.2) Its size, huge landscape.
How to overcome problems:
1) The size of most Asian pensions may be modest, but people collect them at an early age.
2) Asian governments need to target their social spending more carefully.
3) Asia’s reformers should concentrate on being both flexible and innovative.
4) the success of Asia’s great leap towards welfare provision will be determined by politics as much as economics.

感谢楼主分享~返老还童水很有趣~

记得前段时间吵得沸沸扬扬的养老金入市以及延长企业职工退休年龄，不知道决策者是否考虑过平均寿命（life expectancy）。

spencerX

谢谢lz的分享。今天的越障思路很清晰！

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