《经济学人》双语：成功女性的身材更苗条？（Part 1）

原文标题：
The economics of thinness
THE WEIGHT OF THE WORLD
瘦身经济学
世界的重量
 
It is economically rational for ambitious women to try as hard as possible to be thin
从经济上讲，成功女性会尽最大努力保持苗条的身材

[Paragraph 1]
MIREILLE GUILIANOis a slim and successful woman.
米瑞耶·朱利亚诺是一位事业成功且身材苗条的女性。
 
She was born in France and studied in Paris before working as an interpreter for the United Nations.
她生于法国，在巴黎求学，后在联合国担任翻译一职。
 
She then worked in the champagne business and in 1984 joined Veuve Clicquot whose performance was, at the time, rather flat.
再后来，她转战香槟行业，于1984年加入凯歌香槟。凯歌之前的效益不容乐观。
 
She fizzed up the ranks and launched their American subsidiary.
她带领凯歌一路高歌猛进，创办了美国子公司。
 
In 1991 she became its chief executive and ran it with great success.
1991年，她升任该公司首席执行官，事业欣欣向荣。
 
In her apartment overlooking downtown Manhattan, she offers a glass of water before quipping “You know how much I love water.”
她的公寓可以俯瞰曼哈顿市中心，她为我倒了杯水，然后打趣说："你知道我有多喜欢水"。

She is correct; drinking plenty of water is a key rule in “French Women Don’t Get Fat”, her bestselling book on how to lose weight and stay slim “the French way”.
她说得对；她写了一本畅销书《法国女人不会胖》，这本书讲述了如何“法式”减重和保持身材。大量饮水是一个关键原则。

[Paragraph 2]
In the book she describes her discomfort when as a teenager she gained weight while spending a summer in America.
书中，她讲述了十几岁时在美国度夏变胖带来的不开心。
 
Her uneasiness comes to a head when she returns home to France and her father, instead of rushing to hug her, tells her she looks “like a sack of potatoes”.
而她回到法国时，父亲并没有急于拥抱她，而是说她看起来 "像一袋土豆"，这种不开心达到了顶峰。
 
She goes on a new diet plan, remembers her old French habits (lots of water, controlled portions, moving regularly) and tips the scales back in her favour.
她开始了新的减肥计划，再次遵循她以前的法国习惯：大量饮水、控制食量、定期运动。于是，她成功瘦身。
 
[Paragraph 3]
As a successful woman who is willing to talk publicly about her appearance and her weight, Ms Guiliano is rare.
很少有成功女性愿意公开谈论自己外表和体重，但朱利亚诺是个例外。
 
“Of course no one wants to talk about it,” she says.
她说:“当然没有人愿意公开谈论减肥这件事。”
 
“It is much easier to pretend it comes naturally.”
“但是假装天生就瘦却容易得多。”
 
Successive waves of feminism have told smart women they should have emancipated themselves from vanity—as they have from domestic servitude and an existence defined by procreation.
历次女权主义浪潮都教育聪明女性要摆脱自我虚荣心的束缚--就像教育她们要摆脱家庭奴役和生育机器的束缚一样。
 
[Paragraph 4]
But as a woman greatly affected by a comment about her weight she is not rare.
女性很容易受到外人对自己的体重评论影响，她也不例外。
 
Aubrey Gordon, the co-host of the Maintenance Phase, a podcast which unpicks the problems with modern weight loss and wellness, was told by a doctor that she was overweight aged just ten.
奥布里·戈登是播客节目“维持阶段”的联合主持人，这个节目专门分析现代减肥和健康的问题。奥布里·戈登10岁时就被医生告知体重超标。
 
[Paragraph 5]
These experiences are deeply personal but also universal, at least in the rich world.
这虽然都是个人隐私，但却很普遍。至少在富裕国家是如此。
 
They reflect the pressure on women to look like an “ideal”.
它们反映了妇女面临的压力，要求她们看起来像一个 "理想中的人"。
 
That ideal has changed over time.
这个理想随着时间的推移而改变。
 
Renaissance nudes boast ample curves.
文艺复兴时期的裸体画盛行丰满曲线。
 
But in more recent decades it has been defined by thinness.
但最近的几十年，又开始以瘦为美。
 
In the 1980s in New York it was the “social X-ray”, a term coined by Tom Wolfe in his novel “Bonfire of the Vanities” to describe women so slight they existed only in two dimensions.
在20世纪80年代的纽约，“社会X光”这个词是用来形容那些像纸片人一样瘦小的女性，这一词是汤姆·沃尔夫在他的小说《虚荣的篝火》中创造的。
 
This morphed into the “heroin chic” ideal of London in the 1990s.

20世纪90年代这也演变成了伦敦的理想化“海洛因时尚”。

 
[Paragraph 6]
Today the perfect body is the “weasel bod”, says one Los Angelena, who is surrounded by women seeking physical perfection. These women strive to look streamlined and sleek, like a weasel, as though they could slip through water without disturbing it.
洛杉矶的安吉丽娜，身边环绕着很多追求完美身材的女性，她说现如今的完美身材是像“黄鼠狼的身材”一样线条流畅、皮肤光滑，仿佛可以在水中自由滑行，波澜不惊。
 
Pursuit of such a body might permit a little more food than the regimes of the past but it is just as difficult to attain.
追求这样的身体可能允许比以前吃的多一点，但依旧难以实现。
 
[Paragraph 7]
All women eventually recognise the importance placed upon their bodies.
最终，所有女性都会意识到身材管理的重要性。
 
It is as though girls are walking through a forest unaware and are then shown the trees.
这就好像女孩们在不知不觉中穿过一片森林时，只见其树木。
 
They can wonder how the trees got there, how long they have been growing and how deep their roots really go.
她们可以想象这些树是怎么来的，已经生长了多久，根又有多深。
 
But there is little they can do about them and it is almost impossible to imagine the world any other way.
但他们对这些树木几乎无能为力，而且几乎不可能以其他方式想象这个世界。
 
And the fiction that clever and ambitious women, who can measure their worth in the labour market on the basis of their intelligence or education, need pay no attention to their figure, is difficult to maintain upon examination of the evidence on how their weight interacts with their wages or income.
有一种猜想，成功女性，可以不用注重身材管理，因为她们在劳动力市场上的价值可以根据其智力或受教育水平来衡量。在研究了成功女性的体重与工资或收入之间的相互关系的证据后，这种猜想并不成立。
 
The relationship differs in poor countries where rich people are generally heavier than poor ones.
体重与收入的关系在发展中国家略有不同，富人通常比穷人更重视身材管理。
 
[Paragraph 8]
Wealthy people are thinner than poor ones in countries such as America, Britain, Germany and rich Asian countries, such as South Korea.
在美国、英国、德国以及韩国等亚洲发达国家，富人比穷人更瘦。
 
There is typically a gently downward sloping relationship between most measures of weight, like body mass index (BMI), a measure of obesity, or the share of a population that is obese, and income, as measured by wages, the share of people below a poverty line or their income quartile.
大多数衡量体重的指标，如身体质量指数BMI，或肥胖人口的比例，与收入，如工资、贫困线以下的人口比例或其收入四分位数之间，通常有一个缓缓向下的倾斜关系。
 

 
[Paragraph 9]
That poor people are more likely to be overweight has often been explained by arguments that obesity, in the rich world, is a feature of poverty.
有观点认为穷人更有可能体重超标。在发达国家，肥胖是贫穷的一个特征。
 
Poor people may struggle to afford healthy foods.
穷人饮食一般不太健康。
 
They may reach for processed or fast foods because they lack the time to prepare meals at home or have less time to exercise because low-wage jobs often involve working long shifts and can be less flexible than those performed by the “laptop class”.
他们没有时间在家里准备饭菜，也没有那么多时间锻炼，因为他们的工作不仅收入低，轮班工作时间也很长，且不如 "白领阶层 "的工作时间灵活，所有他们的食物更可能是加工食品或快餐。
 
Or because low income is often a function of limited education, perhaps, so goes the thinking, that lack of education extends to a lack of knowledge about how to maintain a healthy weight.
也可能因为收入低往往是受教育程度有限的结果，所以人们会认为，缺乏教育可能会导致缺乏保持健康体重的知识。
 
[Paragraph 10]
The problem with all of these explanations is that the correlation between income and weight at the population level in advanced countries is driven almost entirely by women.
所有这些解释的问题在于，发达国家的人口水平上的收入和体重之间的相关性几乎完全由女性驱动。
 
In America and Italy the relationship between income and weight or obesity is flat for men and downward-sloping for women.
在美国和意大利，男性的收入和体重之间的关系是平缓的，而女性则是向下倾斜的。
 
In South Korea the correlation is positive for men but this is more than offset by the sharply negative correlation in women.

在韩国，男性收入体重是正相关关系，但也被女性的强负相关关系抵消了。

 
In France the relationship slopes gently downwards for men, but the slope is much steeper for women.
在法国，男性收入和体重之间的关系是缓缓向下倾斜的，但女性的倾斜度要大得多。
 
These kinds of patterns seem to hold across most rich countries and appear robust to various ways weight or obesity might be measured.
这些类型的模式似乎在大多数发达国家都适用，而且在各种测量体重或肥胖的方法中似乎都很可靠。
 
（恭喜读完，本篇英语词汇量954/2755左右）
原文出自：2022年12月24日《The Economist》Christmas specials版块。

精读笔记来源于：自由英语之路

本文翻译整理: Maree本文编辑校对: Irene
仅供个人英语学习交流使用。

【补充资料】（来自于网络）
《虚荣的篝火》电影根据汤姆·沃尔夫的小说《虚荣的篝火》改编，是1990年上映的喜剧片，该片讲述了一个华尔街的弄潮儿，惹上了官司，而且官司的开庭地点是布朗士区，从此生活变化得天翻地覆。被搬上银幕时万众瞩目，可是最后却票房与口碑俱惨，有人归罪于选角不当，汤姆·汉克斯演坏蛋不像。起码，那以后汤姆·汉克斯还没再演过坏蛋。要么他自己不敢了，要么没有片商敢了。
 
BMI身体质量指数，是BMI（Body Mass Index ）指数，简称体质指数，是国际上常用的衡量人体胖瘦程度以及是否健康的一个标准。计算公式为：BMI=体重÷身高2。（体重单位：千克；身高单位：米。）BMI由19世纪中期的比利时通才凯特勒最先提出。正常水平：18.5-23.9 kg/m^2。
 
【重点句子】（3 个）

She goes on a new diet plan, remembers her old French habits (lots of water, controlled portions, moving regularly) and tips the scales back in her favour.
她开始了新的减肥计划，再次遵循她以前的法国习惯：大量饮水、控制食量、定期运动。于是，她成功瘦身。
 
Successive waves of feminism have told smart women they should have emancipated themselves from vanity—as they have from domestic servitude and an existence defined by procreation.
历次女权主义浪潮都教育聪明女性要摆脱自我虚荣心的束缚，就像教育她们要摆脱家庭奴役和生育机器的束缚一样。
 
All women eventually recognise the importance placed upon their bodies.
最终，所有女性都会意识到身材管理的重要性。