通过阅读学词汇CET-6（30）
Unit Thirty
Money
Money offers power, an almost unique form of power. Paradoxically money creates a deep sense of powerlessness as well, since technically we are not able to provide money for ourselves; someone or something else must do that for us – our employers or our stocks. All that, money can do: and when such essential, familiar functions are snatched from one’s life, small wonder that people may grow wild, frantic, even murderous.People work for money to buy things that other people make or do, things that they cannot or will not make or do for themselves but that they deem necessary for some definition of self-improvement. So a baker buys a piano because he cannot make one, and yet he judges the possession of a piano to be necessary for his pleasure, stature, worth. The piano maker, in turn, may buy TIME magazine because he deems TIME necessary for his pleasure, stature, worth. Only God knows who gets the better of such deals, but the fact is that the deals are not only economic but social transactions.
Abstractly, then, money is one of the ways, indeed a universally accepted way, we make connections. Cash is cold, so the connections may feel cold, but real blood flows through them. These connections constitute one of central means by which societies cohere; by which they sustain and characterize themselves.
Still, that basic social transaction of buying and selling remains the standard operation of human business. The operation may be standard because buying and selling encompasses, encourages the fundamental, often tormenting, impulse toward human perfectibility; because the simple act of purchase implies a perpetual quest for self-improvement. This is not to say that money is the only way of establishing self-improvement. Spiritual thinkers forswear the power of money because they prefer to have