听力:运气在我们生活中扮演着怎样的角色?

导语：生活中，我们常常会发出这样的感慨：他运气怎么这么好！或者有时候，也会抱怨：我运气也太差了吧！运气在我们生活中到底扮演着什么角色呢?运气是可以由自己决定的吗？让我们听一听他怎么说。

文本制作与校对：皇矣

音频来源于同名TED演讲

Hello, everybody. I'm honored to be here to talk to you, and what I'm going to talk about today is luck and justice and the relation between them.

大家好。我非常荣幸能跟大家进行这次谈话。我今天要谈论的主题是幸运和公正，还有两者之间的联系。

Some years ago, a former student of mine called me to talk about his daughter. It turns out his daughter was a high school senior, was seriously interested in applying to Swarthmore, where I taught, and he wanted to get my sense of whether she would get in. 

若干年前，我曾经的一个学生给我打来电话，聊起了他的女儿。他的女儿是一名高三学生，她对于申请我所任教的斯沃斯莫尔学院很感兴趣，所以他想要从我这里了解他的女儿是否能进入这所学院。

Swarthmore is an extremely hard school to get into. So I said, "Well, tell me about her." And he told me about her, what her grades were like, her board scores, her extracurricular activities. And she just sounded like a superstar, wonderful, wonderful kid. So I said, "She sounds fabulous. She sounds like just the kind of student that Swarthmore would love to have."

因为斯沃斯莫尔学院是一所非常难进的学校。所以我说:“好啊，那简单介绍一下她的情况吧。”于是他跟我说了他女儿的一些情况，比如她的成绩如何，标化考试成绩如何，还有她的课外活动。她听起来就像一个超级明星，一个非常、非常优秀的孩子。所以我说：“听起来她很好，她就像是斯沃斯莫尔学院非常想要的那一类学生。”

extracurricular [ˌekstrəkə'rɪkjələr] adj.       课外的; 工作之余的;

And so he said, "Well, does that mean that she'll get in?" And I said, "No. There just aren't enough spots in the Swarthmore class for everybody who's good. 

接下来他说：“那就意味着她可以进入这所学院吗？“我说：“不是。即使申请的人都很优秀，斯沃斯莫尔学院也没有足够的名额给他们。

There aren't enough spots at Harvard or Yale or Princeton or Stanford. There aren't enough spots at Google or Amazon or Apple. There aren't enough spots at the TED Conference. There are an awful lot of good people, and some of them are not going to make it." So he said, "Well, what are we supposed to do?" And I said, "That's a very good question."

就像哈佛大学、耶鲁大学、普林斯顿大学或是斯坦福大学录取的名额有限，在谷歌或亚马逊或苹果公司的工作岗位有限，TED会议的参会名额也很有限。这个世界上有太多太多优秀的人了，所以一些人肯定无法得偿所愿。”于是他问：“那我们该怎么办呢？”我答道：“这是个很好的问题。”

What are we supposed to do? And I know what colleges and universities have done. In the interest of fairness, what they've done is they've kept ratcheting up the standards because it doesn't seem fair to admit less qualified people and reject better qualified people, so you just keep raising the standards higher and higher until they're high enough that you can admit only the number of students that you can fit.

我们该怎么办呢？我很清楚很多大学和学院为此所做出的努力。为了公平，大学一直在提高录取要求，因为录取不够资质的人而拒绝更优秀的人是不公平的。所以对申请者的标准会越来越高，直到这个标准足够高，只有一定数量的学生才符合标准。

ratchet[ˈrætʃɪt] n. (防止倒转的)棘轮，棘齿;vt.    安装棘轮于; 松脱; 把…造成棘齿形; 于…作棘齿; 在…上刻锯齿;

And this violates a lot of people's sense of what justice and fairness is. People in American society have different opinions about what it means to say that some sort of process is just, but I think there's one thing that pretty much everyone agrees on, that in a just system, a fair system, people get what they deserve.

但这却违反了大多数人对于正义和公平的理解。对于某种过程是公正的意义，美国人民有不同的理解，但我认为有一个观念是差不多人人都会同意的，那就是在一个正义和公平的体制下，人们会得到他们应得的。

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