1. It is difficult to escape the influence of television. If you fit the statistical averages, by the age of 20 you will have been exposed to at least 20 000 hours of television. You can add 10, 000 hours for each decade you have lived after the age of 20. The only things Americans do more than watch television are work and sleep.
   1)要摆脱电视的影响是困难的。如果统计的平均数适用于你的话，那么到20岁的时候你就至少看过20000个小时的电视了，在那以后每生活10年即增加10000小时。美国人比看电视花时间更多的事只有工作和睡眠。

    2. Calculate for a moment what could be done with even a part of those hours. Five thousand hours, I am told, are what a typical college undergraduate spends working on a bachelor's degree. In 10000 hours you could have learned enough to become an astronomer or engineer. You could have learned several languages fluently. If it appealed to you, you could be reading Homer in the original Greek or Dostoyevsky in Russian. If it didn't, you could have walked around the world and written a book about it.
   2)稍稍计算一下即使用这些时间的一部分可能做些什么事。听说一个大学生一般用5000小时即可获得学士学位。在10000个小时内你能学成一个天文学家或工程师，流利掌握几门外语。要是你感兴趣，你可能在读希腊原文的荷马史诗或甩俄文读陀思妥耶夫斯基的作品；如果你对此不感兴趣，那你可能已徒步周游世界并写出了游记。

    3. The trouble with television is that it discourages concentration. Almost anything interesting and rewarding in life requires some constructive, consistently applied effort. The dullest, the least gifted of us can achieve things that seem miraculous to those who never concentrate on anything. But television encourages us to apply no effort. It sells us instant gratification. It diverts us only to divert, to make the time pass without pain.
    3)电视的毛病在于它鼓励人们不去集中注意力。生活中几乎一切有趣的、能给人以满足的事都需要一定的建设性的、持之以恒的努力。我们中间最迟钝、最没有天才的人也能做出使从来不在任何事情上专心致志的人感到像是奇迹一样的事来。但电视鼓励我们不做出任何努力，它向我们兜售马上即得的满足，它给我们以娱乐，只是为了转移我们对现实的注意，使我们能毫无痛苦地消磨掉时间。