前程百利小编为大家带来托福阅读材料。生活的意义是你出于对自己的过去、爱好、信仰的理解建立起来的认知，只有你自己可以把它们和你的生活放在一起。
文章的难词已经标示出来，希望大家可以学习到相关知识，并通过不断的阅读练习提高自己的托福阅读能力。
Not long ago, a friend sent me a speech that the great civic leader John Gardner gave to the Stanford Alumni Association 61 years after he graduated from that college. The speech is chock-full(充满)of practical wisdom. I especially liked this passage:
“The things you learn in maturity(成熟) aren’t simple things such as acquiring information and skills. You learn not to engage in self-destructive(自毁的) behavior. You learn not to burn up(毁掉) energy in anxiety. You discover how-to manage your tensions. You learn that self-pity(自怜) and resentment(怨恨) are among the most toxic of drugs. You find that the world loves talent but pays off on character.
“You come to understand that most people are neither for you nor against you; they are thinking about themselves. You learn that no matter how hard you try to please(取悦), some people in this world are not going to love you, a lesson that is at first troubling and then really quite relaxing.”
Gardner goes on in this wise way. And then, at the end, he goes into peroration(结尾) about leading a meaningful life. “Meaning is something you build into your life. You build it out of your own past, out of your affections and loyalties, out of the experience of humankind as it is passed on to you.... You are the only one who can put them together into that unique pattern that will be your life.”
Gardner puts “meaning” at the apogee(最高点) of human existence. His speech reminded me how often we’ve heard that word over the past decades. As my Times colleague April Lawson puts it, “meaning” has become the stand-in(代替的) concept for everything the soul yearns for and seeks. It is one of the few phrases acceptable in modern parlance(说法，语言用法) to describe a fundamentally spiritual need.
Yet what do we mean when we use the word meaning?
The first thing we mean is that life should be about more than material success. The person leading a meaningful life has found some way observing others that leads to a feeling of significance.
Second, a meaningful life is more satisfying than a merely happy life. Happiness is about enjoying the present(当下); meaning is about dedicating oneself to(献给…) the future. Happiness is about receiving; meaningfulness is about giving. Happiness is about upbeat(乐观的) moods and nice experiences. People leading meaningful lives experience a deeper sense of satisfaction.
In this way, meaning is an uplifting(令人振奋的) state of consciousness(意识). It’s what you feel when you’re serving things beyond self.
Yet it has to be said, as commonly used today, the word is flabby and vacuous(无力而空洞的), the product of a culture that has grown inarticulate(含糊不清) about inner life.
Let me put it this way: If we look at the people in history who achieved great things — like Nelson Mandela or Albert Schweitzer or Abraham Lincoln — it wasn’t because they wanted to bathe luxuriously in their own sense of meaningfulness. They had objective and eternally true standards of justice and injustice. They were indignant(义愤的) when those eternal standards were violated. They subscribed to(认同) moral systems — whether secular or religious(世俗的或宗教的) — that recommended specific ways of being, and had specific structures of what is right and wrong, and had specific disciplines about how you might get better over time.
Meaningfulness tries to replace structures, standards and disciplines with self-regarding(关注自身的) emotion. The ultimate authority of meaningful is the warm tingling(激动) we get when we feel significant and meaningful. Meaningfulness tries to replace moral systems with the emotional corona that surrounds acts of charity.
It’s a paltry(微不足道的) substitute. Because meaningfulness is built solely on an emotion, it is content less and irreducible. Because it is built solely on emotion, it's subjective and relativistic. You get meaning one way. I get meaning another way. Who is any of us to judge another’s emotion?
Because it’s based solely on sentiment(情感)), it is useless. There are no criteria to determine what kind of meaningfulness is higher. There’s no practical manual(使用手册) that would help guide each of us awe move from shallower forms of service to deeper ones. There is no hierarchy(等级体系) of values that would help us select, from among all the things we might do, that activity which is highest and best to do.
Because it’s based solely on emotion, it’s fleeting(转瞬即逝的). When the sensations of meaningful go away then the cause that once aroused them gets dropped, too. Ennui(无聊) floods in. Personal crisis follows. There’s no reliable ground.
The philosophy of meaningfulness emerges(出现，浮现) in a culture in which there is no common moral vocabulary or framework. It emerges amid radical pluralism(多元主义), when people don’t want to judge each other. Meaningfulness emerges when the fundamental question is, do we feel good?
Real moral systems are based on a balance of intellectual rigor and aroused moral sentiments. Meaningfulness is pure and self-regarding feeling, the NutraSweet(NutraSweet是一家生产代糖产品的美国公司，在这里是一种暗喻) of the inner life.
以上就是前程百利小编为大家带来的托福阅读材料，平时的阅读练习是托福考试阅读备考的重要一环。希望大家利用好每份材料，尽可能多地从中获取知识。预祝大家托福考试取得好成绩。
