[A] By contrast, somewhat more than 25 percent of the earth’s population can be found in the industrialized societies. They lead modern lives. They are products of the first half of the twentieth century, molded by mechanization and mass education, brought up with lingering memories of their own country’s agricultural past. They are, in effect, the people of the present.
[B] The remaining 2 or 3 percent of the world’s population, however, are no longer people of either the past or the present. For within the main centers of technological and cultural change, in Santa Monica, California and Cambridge, Massachusetts, in New York and London, and Tokyo, are millions of men and women who can already be said to be living the way of life of the future. Trend-makers often without being aware of it, live today as millions will live tomorrow. And while they account for only a few percent of the global population today, they are already from an international nation of the future in our midst. They are the advanced agents of man, the earliest citizens of the worldwide super-industrial society now in the throes of birth.
[C] It is, in fact, not too much to say that the pace of life draws a line through humanity, dividing us into camps, triggering bitter misunderstanding between parent and child, between Madison Avenue and Main Street, between men and women, between American and European, between East and West.
[D] What makes them different from the rest of mankind Certainly, they are richer, better educated, more mobile than the majority of the human race. They also live longer. But what specifically marks the people of the future is the fact that they are already caught up in a new, stepped-up pace of life. They "live faster" than the people around them.
[E] The inhabitants of the earth are divided not only by race, nation, religion or ideology, but also, in a sense, by their positions in time. Examining the present population of the globe, we find a tiny group who still live, hunting and food-foraging, as men did millennia ago. Others, the vast majority of mankind, depend not on bear-hunting or berry-picking, but on agriculture. They live, in many respects, as their ancestors did centuries ago. These two groups taken together compose perhaps 70 percent of all living human beings. They are the people of the past.
[F] Some people are deeply attracted to this highly accelerated pace of life--going far out of their way to bring it about and feeling anxious, tense or uncomfortable when the pace slows. They want desperately to be "where the action is." James A. Wilson has found, for example, that the attraction for a fast pace of life is one of the hidden motivating forces behind the much-publicized "brain-drain"--the mass migration of European scientists and engineers who migrated to the U. S. and Canada. He concluded that it was no higher salaries or better research facilities alone, but also the quicker tempo that lure them. The migrants, he writes, "are not put off by what they indicated as the ’faster pace~ of North America; if anything, they appear to prefer this pace to others."
[G] The pace of life is frequently commented on by ordinary people. Yet, oddly enough, it has received almost no attention from either psychologists or sociologists. This is a gaping inadequacy in the behavioral sciences, for the pace of life profoundly influences behavior, evoking p and contrasting reactions from different people. (578 words)
Notes: gaping是gape的现在分词；gape vi. 裂开。not too much 一点也不多，一点也不过分。Madison Avenue麦迪逊街(纽约一条街道的名字。美国主要广告公司、公共关系事务所集中于此。常用以表示此等公司之作风、做法等。)。Main Street 实利主义社会。food-foraging 觅食的。millennium 千年。trend-maker (=trend-setter) 领导新潮的人。in the throes of 为……而苦干、搏斗。be caught up in陷入。going far out of their way to bring it about 远远没有阻碍它的诞生。brain-drain (高科技)人才流动(从欧洲到美洲)。
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