考研英语黄皮书|【考研英语】同源文详解254期：数字支付的时代，现金仍有意义
北京联盟_本文原题：【考研英语】同源文详解254期：数字支付的时代 ， 现金仍有意义
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原文期刊：The Guardian《卫报》
原文标题：
Don' t give up cash yet: there' s a value to seeing what you spend
本文来源2020.02.22 The Guardian《卫报》Don' t give up cash yet: there' s a value to seeing what you spend（不要抛弃现金：看到多少钱被花掉也很重要） 。 主题：尽管无障碍支付技术带来众多方便 ， 但也限制了我们的选择 。 使用现金支付、接受些许不舒适 ， 不仅符合人的天性 ， 还能让我们支付时更谨慎 。
脉络:
引入话题：使用现金支付颇有益处（第一段）——分析“使用现金支付时花钱少”的原因（第二段）——分析无障碍支付技术的影响（第三、四段）——作者提出建议（第五、六段）
Part 1
原文
I The other day, New York’s city council voted to make it illegal for businesses to refuse payment in cash. The move was mainly intended to benefit people without bank accounts or credit cards. But the rest of us have reason to be grateful, too—because study after study shows we spend more when we pay with a card. Certain wires get crossed in our brains, it seems, and we confuse how easy it is to pay for something with how easily we can afford it.
II Part of the explanation is that credit cards postpone the unpleasantness of actually paying until the bill arrives. But research on debit cards and digital wallets points to the more intriguing phenomenon of psychological distance: cash just feels more immediately real, and losing it feels more painful. Of course, coins and notes are “virtual”, too, in the sense that they only have any value thanks to a web of laws and agreements. But they retain a crucial component of concreteness, demonstrated most clearly by the fact that if you set fire to a ￡20 note, you really are ￡20 worse off. It’s much harder to feel so possessive about digital information. And contactless payment? That barely seems more real than simply thinking about making a purchase.
III Worryingly, no research has so far suggested that this unreality effect is diminishing as we grow accustomed to a cashless world. Instead, frictionless payment is embedding itself as a prime case of what has been called “the tyranny of convenience”, whereby technology makes it easier to get what we desire (the fancy new headphones we’ve been coveting, say) but harder to be the kind of person we would rather be (who can manage without fancy headphones). In the useful phrase of the philosopher Harry Frankfurt, it undermines our capacity to “want what we want to want”.
IV A slightly more down-to-earth way of putting it is just that we’re each a bundle of different, often contradictory desires—and it’s no surprise, nor necessarily even cause for condemnation, that businesses focus on stimulating the ones they can milk for profit.
V This does mean that, as technology continues to smooth our daily lives, we shall increasingly need to develop a taste for friction, for discovering that very particular, bracing sort of pleasure that comes from embracing minor discomforts—like making yourself dig through your bag for some actual cash—rather than always seeking to eliminate them.
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