每日一篇:《经济学人》读译参考 Day48

英语是一门需要慢慢积累的学科，想要学好它，速成是不可取的。跟着聚英考研信息网小编每天学一点英语，一起为考研筑起坚实的地基。

经济学人:合理的怀疑:只见部分,不辩总体(1)

Finance and Economics

财经

Free exchange: Reasonable doubt

自由交流：合理的怀疑

 

The importance of context also arose in Mr Thaler's work on “mental accounting”.In thinking about money, people tend to compartmentalise, grouping certain types of spending or income together.In some cases this might amount to a strategy for managing imperfect self-control (as in the credit-card debt example).

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More broadly, it reflects the human tendency to tackle cognitive problems in pieces, rather than as a whole.When petrol prices fall, for example, drivers sometimes switch from regular-grade petrol to premium (rather than use savings out of the “petrol” category somewhere else).Because of this mental pigeonholing, taxi drivers who aim to earn a certain amount each day may stop work early on busy days and later on slow ones, though the opposite approach would maximise earnings per hour.

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Mr Thaler, with his colleague Hersh Shefrin, understood choices as battles between two competing cognitive forces: a “doer” part of the brain focused on short-term rewards, and a “planner” focused on the long term.Willpower can help suppress the doer's urges, but exercising restraint is costly.

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This internal struggle is continuous, so individual preferences are not constant over time (whether you have another beer may depend on the state of the brain at a given moment).It also means that presenting people with a “choice architecture” which favours the planner over the doer can have big effects on behaviour.That insight became the basis for “nudging”.

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注释

1.thinking about 考虑

例句:Studying stretched my mind and got me thinking about things.

学习拓展了我的思路，启发我去思考问题。

2.depend on 取决于

例句:The risk and severity of sunburn depend on the body's natural skin colour

晒伤的风险和严重程度取决于人体的自然肤色。

3.individual preferences 个人喜好

例句:From the micro perspective, individual preferences are various and changeable.

从微观角度讲，个体偏好是异质的而且是可以改变的。

4.have big effects on 对...有重大影响

例句:Seal formation at the soil surface has been found to have big effects on soil erosion and infiltration rate.

土壤结皮对地表入渗速度和土壤侵蚀有很大的影响。

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每日一篇:《经济学人》读译参考 Day47

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