номер 4, страница 58 - гдз по английскому языку 5-11 класс учебник Latham-Koenig, Oxenden

Six point one.

Nowadays, we're surrounded by some powerful ideas about the sort of things that will make us happy. The first of these is that we tend to think that really to deliver satisfaction, the pleasures we should aim for need to be rare. We've become suspicious of the ordinary, which we assume is mediocre, dull, and uninspiring. And likewise, we assume that things that are unique, hard to find, exotic, or unfamiliar are naturally going to give us more pleasure.

Then we want things to be expensive. If something is expensive, we value it more, whereas if something is cheap or free, it's a little harder to appreciate.

The pineapple, for instance, dropped off a lot of people's wish list of fruit when its price fell from exorbitant. They used to cost the equivalent of hundreds of pounds to unremarkable. Caviar continues to sound somehow more interesting than eggs.

Then we want things to be famous. In a fascinating experiment, a well-known violinist once donned scruffy clothes and busked at a street corner and was largely ignored. Though people would flock to the world's greatest concert halls to hear just the same man play just the same pieces.

Lastly, we want things to be large scale. We're mostly focused on big schemes that we hope will deliver big kinds of enjoyment: marriage, career, travel, getting a new house. These approaches aren't entirely wrong, but they unintentionally create an unhelpful bias against the cheap, the easily available, the ordinary, the familiar, and the small scale.

As a result, if someone says they've been on a trip to a Caribbean island by private jet, we automatically assume they had a better time than someone who went to the local park by bike. We imagine that visiting the Uffizi Gallery in Florence is always going to be nicer than reading a paperback novel in the back garden.

A restaurant dinner at which lobster thermidor is served, sounds a good deal more impressive than a supper of a cheese sandwich at home.

The highlight of a weekend seems more likely to be a hang-gliding lesson rather than a few minutes spent looking at the cloudy sky.

It feels odd to suggest that a modest vase of lily of the valley, the cheapest flower at many florists, might give us more satisfaction than a Van Gogh original.

And yet the paradoxical and cheering aspect of pleasure is how unpredictable it can prove to be. Fancy holidays are not always one hundred percent pleasurable. Our enjoyment of them is remarkably vulnerable to emotional trouble and casual bad moods.

A fight that began with a small disagreement can end up destroying every benefit of a five-star holiday resort. Real pleasures often seem insignificant. Eating a fig, having a bath, whispering in bed in the dark, talking to a grandparent, or scanning through old photos of when you were a child.

And yet these small-scale pleasures can be anything but small. If we actually take the opportunity to enjoy them fully, these sort of activities may be among the most moving and satisfying we can have. Fundamentally, this isn't really about how much small pleasures have to offer us. It's about how many good things there are in life that we unfairly neglect. We can't wait for everything that's lovely and charming to be approved by others before we allow ourselves to be delighted. We need to follow our own instincts about what is really important to us.