不只是你:手机通话听不清楚惹人恼(有声)

【英文文本】

Well, did you see the thing about why people on cell phones are so annoying?

I know, right? Because you only hear...

Oohp, I gotta go. Sorry. I know that was irritating. Because a recent study in the journal Psychological Science  shows that overhearing only one half of a cell phone conversation is much more distracting than listening to two people chat.

When we follow a full conversation, we tend to fill in the blanks…anticipating what each of the speakers might say. But when we’re limited to just one side of a two-sided dialogue—or “halfalogue”—our brains have to work harder to guess what’s coming next. That unpredictability grabs our attention, which makes these partial exchanges hard to tune¹ out.

Psychologists had volunteers perform tasks that required concentration. And while the subjects worked, they were treated to either a dialogue or halfalogue the scientists had previously² recorded. The results: hearing just the “tete” in a cell phone tete-a-tete leads to poor performance in other tasks.

And that suggests that [phone rings]

Can you excuse me? Hello? Yah, I’m just recording it now
 

1 tune   

n.调子；和谐，协调；v.调音，调节，调整

参考例句：

• He'd written a tune,and played it to us on the piano.他写了一段曲子，并在钢琴上弹给我们听。
• The boy beat out a tune on a tin can.那男孩在易拉罐上敲出一首曲子。

2 previously   

adv.以前，先前（地）

参考例句：

• The bicycle tyre blew out at a previously damaged point.自行车胎在以前损坏过的地方又爆开了。
• Let me digress for a moment and explain what had happened previously.让我岔开一会儿，解释原先发生了什么。