🎓原文：How bad are video games for your grades｜带音频👀来源：经济学人 20241026期
✍️词汇：橙色熟词生义｜绿色生词｜红色短语💡Tips：沉浸式阅读｜全文1200词｜预计10分钟左右
你那位爱玩video game的朋友现在怎么样了？一直以来我们潜意识里会认为过度玩游戏会影响学习成绩，会影响大学生毕业后的薪水。爱玩游戏的人朋友更多吗？外向的人会花更多的时间玩游戏吗？爱玩游戏的人和室友关系更好吗？最近威斯康辛大学、暨南大学和中山大学的一项联合研究会给到大家一个答案，到底游戏对学习、生活、社交甚至薪水的影响有多大……
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Para 1
ARRIVING ON
THE magical continent of Teyvat,
you and your twin are attacked and separated by an unwelcoming god. When you
regain consciousness, you set off in search of your lost sibling,
exploring seven beguiling worlds (one of which resembles a Chinese national park). Along the way you team
up with other heroes, blessed with elemental powers. One can cross lakes by
freezing the water beneath his feet. Another can float on air currents of his
own creation. Together, your travelling party must fight monsters, solve
puzzles and plunder treasure chests.
sibling：[ˈsɪblɪŋ]
n. 兄弟，姐妹
beguiling： [bɪˈɡaɪlɪŋ]
adj. 迷人的，欺骗的
plunder：[ˈplʌndɚ]
v/n. 掠夺，抢劫
Treasure chest：宝箱
Chest这里翻译为“箱子”，而不是胸部
Released in
September 2020 by a Chinese developer, the online game “Genshin Impact”
became a big hit.
A year after its release, it was attracting more than 13m monthly users in
China and more than 50m worldwide. The success of this home-grown creation and
others like it was not, however, a source of great pride for China’s
government. It worries that gaming addiction poses a threat to teenagers. In
2021 a state-run newspaper complained that online games were contributing to myopia,
bad grades and alienation. They are often described as “spiritual opium”,
it said.
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A
big hit：红极一时，大受欢迎
myopia：[maɪˈoʊpiə]
n. 近视，短视
Hyperopia：远视
Spiritual opium：[ˈoʊpiəm]
n. 鸦片，麻醉剂
In 2019 China’s government limited
children under 18 to an hour and a half of online game-time a day during the
school week. In 2021 it went further, permitting only three hours a week. The
limits were part of a crackdown on consumer-tech firms that horrified entrepreneurs and investors. Still, parents around the world will be keen to
know whether they did any good.
horrify： [ˈhɔrɪfaɪ]
v. 使震惊，惊吓
Para 4
Those curious
will find some clues in a remarkable new study by PanleJia Barwick and Chao Fu of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, as well as SiyuChen of Jinan University and Teng Li of Sun Yat-Sen University. It sheds light on the
impact of gaming (and other mobile-phone habits) on the grades, well-being and
job-market success of Chinese students. To tease out such effects, the researchers
make use of the government’s imposition of time limits and the arrival of GenshinImpact. They show that mobile-phone apps are contagious: students will use their phone
more if roommates do. The study also demonstrates some digital harm: grades
suffer along with a graduate’s initial job offers.
Sun Yat-Sen University：暨南大学Sun Yat-Sen University：中山大学
Shed
light on：解释，阐明，弄明白
Tease out：巧妙获得，套出
contagious：[kənˈteɪdʒəs]
adj. 传染性的
What sets
the study apart is the data. The authors have access to the university records of thousands of
undergraduates who enrolled at a mid-tier university in an unnamed southern
province from 2018 to 2020. More
remarkable,
they also have access to mobile-phone records—calls made, apps used, locations
visited—for millions of subscribers. Because customers provide their
national-identity number when they register for a phone, the researchers can
match the university records of 6,430 students to their phone data. By looking
at their calls, they can map
out their
friendship networks, even before they arrived at university. And by consulting
course schedules and class locations, they are also able to chart where
students were meant to be each hour of the week.
More remarkable：更引人注目的，非凡的
Map out：绘制，规划设计
The data
provide a detailed portrait of undergraduate life. Students spend 93 hours a month on mobile-phone apps,
including 12 hours on games. But these averages mask wide variation. A third of the
students use their phones at least 210 hours a month—equivalent to 7 hours a
day—and a third spend 30 hours a month on games. After the arrival of GenshinImpact, the average student arrived at their study hall 18 minutes later and
returned to the dorm 25 minutes earlier, according to the data from their
phones. Those treasure chests were not going to open themselves.
Gaming can
be a way to retreat from the people around you. Yet the scholars show that app
use is social. Extroverted students use games more than their less outgoing
peers. Students who report more game-time also report better relationships with
roommates. Phone habits spread. A student’s use of apps is correlated with their roommates’ use, and this correlation seems to reflect causation.
How else to explain why a student’s use of apps in college correlates with even
their roommates’ pre-college use?
Correlate：[ˈkɔːrələt]
causation：[kɔˈzeʃən]
原因，诱因
One difficulty
in capturing the effects of phone habits is reverse causality:
students doing badly at school may seek escapist comfort. In addition, an
independent source of stress, such as homesickness or loneliness, might
simultaneously hurt a student’s grades and glue them to their phone, without the phone itself
harming their grades. The researchers therefore exploit two factors that
affected phone use but not grades. One was the appearance of GenshinImpact. The other was the government’s curbs on gaming. These limits affected
only a few of the students directly: 92% of them were already 18 when the rules
began. But the regulation did affect their underage friends. And since gaming
is contagious, a reduction in their friends’ usage curtailed their own.
n. 因果关系
glue：v/n. 粘合，粘牢，胶水
curtail：[kɜːrˈteɪl]
v.限制，缩短
Sacrifice to
the digital godsThe findings are best conveyed by
imagining two nearly identical students, one of whom spends twice as much time
gaming as the other. The gamer’s grades, on a scale from 0 to 100, would be 0.8
points lower. Because averages are clustered in Chinese universities, that
would reduce their class ranking by 10 percentile points. Now imagine two
identical students with contrasting roommates: one set spend twice as much time
on gaming apps as the other set. That would lower a student’s grade average by
0.4 points, partly because it would encourage the student to spend a bit more
time gaming as well, reducing their rank by 5 percentile points.
cluster：[ˈklʌstər]
v. 群聚;聚集
n. 群，团
percentile：[pərˈsentaɪl]
n. 百分位数
Para 10
What if gaming
limits were extended to undergraduates? The authors estimate it would cut a
student’s monthly game time from 12 hours to under eight, partly because
friends and roommates would also play less. The restraint would raise their grades and
lift their wages after graduation by 0.9% or 48 yuan ($6.80) a month. Games
like GenshinImpact, which are free to play, exact a real cost. For some spiritual
opium-eaters, intent on discovering other kinds of treasure, even lost wages
may seem a small sacrifice.
restraint：[rɪˈstreɪnt]
n.抑制，克制，控制
Constraint：限制，约束
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