Question

If you were given a chance to choose your favorite life metaphor(比喻), what would it be? Do you agree with Forrest Gump’s mother that life is “a box of chocolates” because “you never know what you’re going to get”? Or do you prefer the phrase from the 1930’s song that “l(fā)ife is just a bowl of cherries(櫻桃)”? Though simply stated, each conveys a very different view. A “box” implies mystery, because we don’t know what is in a closed box. Meanwhile, a “bowl” of cherries is completely in view.

For many centuries, the metaphor of life that probably burst into most people’s mind was the one suggested by Shakespeare: “All of life is a stage…” On that stage, we take seven roles. More recently, psychologist Erik Erikson took up the idea of life as a stage. Erikson regarded development as a “powerful unfolding” in which we are driven from one stage to the next as our bodies, minds, and social roles develop.

Stage metaphors fit with many of our common-sense ideas about change, but the problem with the stage metaphor is that it isn’t particularly accurate. None of the studies that try to clarify the universality of adult life stages actually studied people as they developed over time. All of them were based on performances of their samples(樣本) at one point in time. People’s actual lives don’t fit into these stage metaphors. They don’t automatically transform when people reach a certain age. Instead, people’s real lives are messy, unpredictable, and full of surprises.

Today, I’d like to focus on an even longer study, an 80-year study which is the subject of a recent book by Howard Friedman and Leslie Martin. Their final chapter summarizes the “many changes of healthy and unhealthy pathways” that their participants took over the course of their lives. As I too discovered in my research, the pathway provides a perfect metaphor of human development. We don’t all go down the same road marked with the same signposts based on age. People travel through diverse routes as they track the years of adulthood. Friedman and Martin use health and long life as their measure; I’ve used sense of achievement. In both cases, we are in perfect agreement in evaluating development not according to age but “the key features of life”.

The paths that Friedman and Martin describe seize the changes that characterize people as they age. Some examples are “The High Road” (reliable, full of plans); “Not Easy Street” (exposed to high stress throughout life), “Catastrophe Lane” (a downwardly twisty life); “Happy Trails to You” (cheerful, sociable), “The Road to Resilience” (able to handle stress with a strong will). Though I haven’t yet been able to follow my participants for 80 years, I too saw some of these pathways among my samples: “The Minding Way” , “The Downward Slope” , “The Straight and Narrow Path” , and “The Successful Trail”.

The pathway metaphor gives you hope for changing the direction of your life if you are unhappy with it so far. You can’t stop the clock from ticking the minutes between one birthday and the next, but you can adjust the road that you’re on by changing yourself, your situation, or both.

1.The author introduces the topic of the passage in the first paragraph by ______.

A. making comparisons B. giving examples

C. describing scenes D. providing explanations

2.According to the passage, the “stage metaphor” ______.

A. leads to misunderstandings

B. is used in memory of Shakespeare

C. doesn’t exactly reflect one’s real life

D. hasn’t enough stages to clarify life changes

3.The author is convinced of the life metaphor Friedman and Martin suggest because she ______.

A. spent less time on her research B. has found their book a bestseller

C. considers their measure more scientific D. got a similar finding to theirs

4.When a person is facing difficulties bravely, which metaphor can best describe him?

A. “Not Easy Street” B. “Happy Trails to You”

C. “Catastrophe Lane” D. “The Road to Resilience”

5.What does the passage focus on?

A. The pathway as a perfect life metaphor.

B. Various views on life metaphors.

C. The stage as a common life metaphor.

D. Different kinds of life metaphors.

Answer 1