問題詳情

Section C:閱讀測驗（每題3分，共15分）Living on Tokyo TimeIt’s &ir to say that Japanese people are unbelievably busy. Working 10 houre a day, and often coming in on days o年 they riarely take a vacation of more than three or four days. A straight week is a hedonistic luxury.Watching people live like this, with almost no time for themselves, makes an American like me wonder why more of them don’t .throw themselves under subway trains. But I seem to have &r more anxiety about free time than my Japanese friends do—even though, compared to them, I have much more of it. Why doesn’t this cradle-to-grave, manic scheduling bother them?A lot of Westerners make the glib assumption that Japanese people are simply submissive, unoriginal, or masochistic enough to put up with such a punishing system. I don’t think that’s it. In Japan, time is measured in the same hours and minutes and days as anywhere else, but it is experienced as a fundamentally diffident phenomenon. In the West, we save time, spend time, invest time, even kill time—all of which implies that it belongs to us in the first place. We might find ourselves obliged to trade huge chunks of time for a steady salary, but most of us resent this as something stolen from us, and we take it for granted that our spare hours are none of our teachers9 or bosses' business.The Japanese grow up with a sense of time as a communal resource, 】ike the company motor pool. If you get permission, you can borrow a little for your own use, but the mainpriority is to serve the institution—in this case, society as a whole. Club activities, overtime, drinks with the boss, and invitations to the boring weddings of people you hardly know are not seen as intruding on your free time~they are the duties that you can do nothing about but that turn the wheel of society. ‘Tree’’ time is something that only comes into existence when those obligations have all been fulfilled. This is nicely borne out by an expression my boss uses whenever he leaves work a little early: “I’m going to receive a little free time.”Though I can’t pretend I like living on a Japanese schedule, I try hard not to make judgments. Things are more complicated than they appear. The Japanese sacrifice their private time to society, but in return they get national health insurance, a wonderful train system, sushi, the two thousand temples of Kyoto, and traditional culture so rich that every backwater village seems to have its own unique festivals, seasonal dishes, legends, and even dialect. All of which are invaluable social goods that I would not trade for a lifetime of free hours.Adapted from Lynnika Butler’s article of the same title
1 • What does the author mean with the phrase “Tokyo time” in her article title?
(A)It refers to the Japanese time zone, as 11:00 p.m. in Taipei is 12:00 a.m. in Tokyo.
(B)It refers to the Tokyo worko-s* unique way of scheduling, which cannot be seen elsewhere in Japan.
(C)It refers to the Japanese way of treating time, which is different from the Western way.D. It refers to the unreasonably short vacation a Japanese worker can enjoy.

參考答案

答案：B
難度：適中0.444444
統計：A(0),B(4),C(3),D(0),E(0)

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