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  3. When you’ve committed to a month of no spending, the scariest sound in the w

When you’ve committed to a month of no spending, the scariest sound in the w

游客2023-11-01  40
问题     When you’ve committed to a month of no spending, the scariest sound in the world goes something like this: glug, glug, glug, followed by my wife saying, "Oh, God. Honey? We need to call a plumber!"
    Our experiment in money-free living had been getting on beautifully. We were happily eating our way through the kitchen, borrowing instead of buying, and feeling the burn from our free seven-day trial gym membership. I was still a no-spending newbie, but already I was one with the Zen of money-free living. Take a deep breath. There’s always a way around opening your wallet.
    The idea to stop spending had been percolating for a while, but it was a trip to Target one afternoon that finally broke me. With our four-year-old, Sebastian, in tow, Ruth and I loaded up on packs of underwear, bath mats, barbecue gear, Spider-Man toys, kitchen gadgets, and a plug-in thingy guaranteed to kill mosquitoes. As we approached the checkout aisle, I thought, we don’t need any of this junk, and we abandoned the cart, saving a good $300.
    That got me thinking about all our pointless expenses: DVDs by mail, lunches out, car washes, "bargain" toys, fancy coffee drinks, and just about everything I’ve ever bought on eBay and Amazon. Especially given the current economic climate, not to mention the state of our landfills, it all suddenly felt like excess. With a promise that we’d stop if it was killing us, I convinced the family to take the giant leap into frugality.
    The rules were that we would buy nothing for 30 days except absolute essentials, like fresh milk and fruit: and even there, after one too many "essential" trips to the market those first few days, I capped expenses at $ 100 for the rest of the month. A handful of key outlays like our mortgage, utilities, and Sebastian’s preschool tuition were excused, but restaurants, parking, clothing, toiletries, Internet access, babysitting, and, yes, gasoline, were now in the no-buy zone.
    I realize many people live like this all the time, by necessity, not by choice, and I anticipate letters saying, "You had to give up your Frappuccino. " But this wasn’t an exercise in "playing poor". Our month of no spending was a financial wake-up call, a chance to recalibrate our relationship with money at a time when everyone I know has money on the brain.
    Do we really need all the things we buy? Does acquiring stuff have actual value in our lives? Can’t we be just as happy—or perhaps even happier—living on much less? Our adventure kicked off with a rousing start. After that first day, I wrote in my journal: Feeling supercharged. We have so much. What could we possibly need to spend money on? [br] It can be inferred from the trip to Target that______.
选项 A、the author paid $ 300 for the cart broken by his child
B、the family bought nothing but essentials for the child
C、the family managed to leave without buying anything
D、the wife had a clear idea of stopping spending long before
答案 C
解析 细节题。由题干关键词Target定位到第三段。该段末句指出As we approached the checkout aisle…we abandoned the cart，saving a good $300．[C]含义与此相符，故为答案。由第三段末句中weabandoned the cart和saving a good $300排除含义不符的[A]和[B]；不购物这一想法是作者的，并非他妻子的，而且这个想法是在Target放弃购物车后才有的，并非是很早以前就有，[D]与原文不符，故排除。
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