What sort of glass you drink from predicts how fast you drink
喝酒有多快?看杯子就知道
WOULD you like that in a straight or a jug, sir? was once a common response
to British pubgoers' request for a pint.
在過去，泡吧的英國佬如果要來杯一品脫的啤酒，通常都要回答這樣一個問題，“先生，你要哪一種杯子乘啤酒，凈飲杯還是扎啤杯?
Like the Lilliputians inGulliver's Travels, who argued whether a boiled egg
should be opened at the pointed or the rounded end, beer drinkers were adamant
that only from their preferred shape of glass did their tipple taste best.
正如《格列佛游記》中小人國里的人對于吃雞蛋應該先從哪端打破而爭論不休一樣，喝啤酒的人同樣固執(zhí)的認為，只有用他們喜歡的杯型喝酒，味道才帶勁。
Straight-sided glasses—sometimes with a bulge a little below the lip—have
largely won the day.
凈飲杯在今天廣受歡迎，這種杯子的杯口有時會凸出稍低的一小塊來。
Jugs—squat cylinders of dimpled glass equipped with handles—are now
rare.
而扎啤杯，圓柱形的杯身短淺，且外圍被修飾成一個個小酒窩，還帶有把手，但這種杯子在今天已經(jīng)很少見了。
But that is probably because straight glasses are easier for bar staff to
collect and stack, rather than because straight-glass lovers have persuaded
their fellow-drinkers of the virtue of their view.
這可能是因為，對于酒保來說，凈飲杯更容易堆積和擺放，而不是因為凈飲杯愛好者證明了他們觀點的正確，以讓酒友們信以為真。
The shape of a beer glass does, nevertheless, matter.
盡管如此，啤酒杯的外形的確很重要。
For a group of researchers at the University of Bristol have shown that it
can regulate how quickly someone drinks.
布里斯托爾大學的一組研究者已經(jīng)證實，酒杯的形狀能夠決定人喝酒的快慢。
Angela Attwood and her colleagues asked 160 undergraduates—80 women and 80
men—to do one of four things: drink beer out of a straight glass; drink beer out
of a flute; or drink lemonade from one of these two sorts of glass.
安吉拉阿特伍德和她的同事們曾要求160名大學生—男女各80人，從四件事中選擇一件來做，它們分別是：用凈飲杯喝啤酒，用笛型杯喝啤酒;或者選用這兩種杯子之一盛檸檬汁喝。
To complicate matters further, some of the glasses were full whereas others
were half-full.
為了讓事情變得更加復雜，其中的一些杯子是滿的，而另一些只盛有一半飲品。
Though, as is common practice in studies of this sort, participants were
misled about its true nature, and were shown films and asked to do a language
test afterwards, to support this misdirection, what Dr Attwood and her team were
really interested in was how quickly the various drinks would be drunk.
雖然和做這類研究所慣用的手法一樣，實驗過程掩蓋了本質(zhì)，對參與者進行了誤導，之后他們被帶去看電影，做語言測試;而進行這種誤導是因為，阿特伍德教授和她的團隊真正感興趣的是不同杯子里的飲品被喝光的速度。
The answer was that a full straight glass of beer was polished off in 11
minutes, on average.
實驗得出的答案是：滿滿一杯用凈飲杯乘的啤酒，平均11分鐘就被喝完了。
A full flute, by contrast, was down the hatch in seven, which was also the
amount of time it took to drink a full glass of lemonade, regardless of the type
of vessel.
相比之下，用笛型杯盛滿的一杯酒，7分鐘就見底了。而不管用哪種杯子，同樣7分鐘，一滿杯子的檸檬汁就會能被喝光。
If a glass started half-full, however, neither its shape nor its contents
mattered.
然而，如果一個杯子開始只倒?jié)M了一半，不管杯型如何，裝的是什么飲品，
It was drunk in an average of five minutes.
喝完它平均只要5分鐘。
Dr Attwood's hypothesis is that a beer drinker, wishing to pace himself
through an evening, is monitoring the volume remaining in the glass, probably
with reference to the halfway mark.
阿特伍德博士提出的假設是：一位喝啤酒的人，想要一晚上自始自終控制自己喝多少酒的話，就會時刻關注杯子里剩余的酒量，可能他就是以杯子的中間點作為基準的。
A curved-sided glass, though, makes exercising such judgment hard—as she
demonstrated by calling her volunteers back a week later and asking them to
estimate from pictures how full various glasses were.
然而一個杯身傾斜的杯子，就讓這種判斷變得困難起來—正如阿特伍德所證明的那樣，讓參與她實驗的志愿者在一個星期后回來，并且讓他們僅憑圖片來估計各種杯子倒?jié)M是個什么情況。
Most volunteers thought the halfway mark in the flute was lower than its
true value, and if a volunteer had drunk from such a glass originally, the
degree of misestimation correlated with how fast he had drunk.
大多數(shù)志愿者認為在笛型杯中，杯子所顯示的中點要比它真實的中點要低，而如果一位志愿者一開始就用這種杯子喝酒，他對酒量的誤判和他喝酒的速度將會一一對應。
If a glass is half-full to start with, however, this reference point is
lost from the beginning.
但是如果一開始杯子只倒?jié)M了一半的話，這一參照點從最初就失去了意義。
The upshot, as Dr Attwood reports in the Public Library of Science, is that
straight glasses have it.
正如艾特伍德在《公共科學圖書館》雜志中所做的報告一樣，結果顯示凈飲杯可以證明這種假設。
Though beer flutes are not common in British pubs, her observation that the
shape of a glass can affect how fast it is drunk from bears investigation.
雖然用笛型杯喝啤酒在英國的酒吧里并不常見，而從她的觀察報告中可以看出，一個杯子的形狀能夠影響喝啤酒的速度。
Both health campaigners and breweries would be interested in the results,
though they would probably draw opposite conclusions about what is the
best-shaped glass in which to serve a bevvy.
健康活動者和各啤酒廠都會對研究的結果感興趣，不過關于用什么形狀的杯子乘酒，兩者可能會得出截然相反的結論。
