晨讀英語美文100篇六級Ambition

[ti:] [ar:] [al:] [by:] [00:02.32]Passage 88. Ambition [00:07.57]It may seem an exaggeration to say that ambition is the drive of society, [00:18.62]holding many of its different elements together, but it is not an exaggeration by much. [00:24.64]Remove ambition and the essential elements of society seem to fly apart. [00:29.57]Ambition is intimately connected with family, [00:33.06]for men and women not only work partly for their families; [00:36.45]husbands and wives are often ambitious for each other, [00:39.85]but harbor some of their most ardent ambitions for their children. [00:44.01]Yet to have a family nowadays—with birth control readily available, [00:48.93]and inflation a good economic argument against having children—is nearly an expression of ambition in itself. [00:55.38]Finally,though ambition was once the domain chiefly of monarchs and aristocrats, [01:00.85]it has, in more recent times,increasingly become the domain of the middle classes. [01:06.11]Ambition and futurity—a sense of building for tomorrow—are inextricable. [01:11.25]Working, saving, planning—these, the daily aspects of ambition [01:15.84]—have always been the distinguishing marks of a rising middle class. [01:20.02]The attack against ambition is not incidentally an attack on the middle class and what it stands for. [01:25.81]Like it or not, the middle class has done much of society’s work in America; [01:30.41]and it, the middle class, has from the beginning run on ambition. [01:34.68]It is not difficult to imagine a world short of ambition. [01:39.71]It would probably be a kinder world:without demands, without abrasions,without disappointments. [01:46.35]People would have time for reflection. [01:48.43]Such work as they did would not be for themselves but for the collectivity. [01:53.79]Competition would never enter in. [01:56.86]Conflict would be eliminated, tension become a thing of the past. [02:01.45]The stress of creation would be at an end. [02:04.30]Art would no longer be troubling, but purely entertaining in its functions. [02:10.10]The family would become superfluous as a social unit, [02:13.70]with all its former power for bringing about neurosis drained away. [02:18.52]Life span would be expanded, for fewer people would die of heart attack or stroke caused by overwork. [02:25.74]Anxiety would be extinct. [02:27.82]Time would stretch on and on, with ambition long departed from the human heart. [02:32.74]Ah, how unbearably boring life would be!

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