SSS 2008-11-24
时间：2018-12-24 作者：英语课 分类：Scientific American(十一)月
This is Scientific American's 60-Second Science. I'm Karen Hopkin. This will just take a minute.
It’s called the "broken windows" theory and it says that in a neighborhood where buildings have broken windows, people are more likely to engage in bad behavior. Maybe because they figure no one will care. Or there’s little chance they’ll get caught. The idea has been embraced by people in law enforcement—crack down on petty crime and you’ll also put a halt to more serious offenses 1. New York City, for example, used the logic 2 to justify 3 a “zero tolerance” approach to things like the squeegeeing of car windows. But the theory has been hard to prove. Crime did go down in New York, but was it directly related to the squeegee decline?
Now Dutch scientists say that there may be something to the whole “broken windows” thing, after all. For example, they found that cyclists who parked their bikes near a wall covered in graffiti were twice as likely to litter than people who parked near the same wall after it was painted clean. The results were published online by the journal Science on November 20th. I guess we should be thankful that the cyclists’ bad behavior stopped at littering. And they didn’t decide to, say, swipe a better set of wheels for the ride home.
Thanks for the minute for Scientific American's 60-Second Science. I'm Karen Hopkin.
- It's wrong of you to take the child to task for such trifling offenses. 因这类小毛病责备那孩子是你的不对。 来自《简明英汉词典》
- Thus, Congress cannot remove an executive official except for impeachable offenses. 因此，除非有可弹劾的行为，否则国会不能罢免行政官员。 来自英汉非文学 - 行政法