Passage Two

Questions 51 to 55 are based on the following passage.

　　It is the season for some frantic last-minute math across the country,employees of all stripe are counting backward in an attempt to figure out just how much paid time-off they have left it their reserves. More of them, though, will skip those calculations altogether and just power through the holidays into 2017: More than half of American workers don’t use up all of their allotted vacation days each year.

　　Not so long ago, people would have turned up their noses at that kind of dedication to the job. As marketing professors Silvia Bellezza, Neeru Paharia, and Anat Keinan recently explained in Harvard Business Review (HBR), leisure time was once seen as an indicator of high social status, something attainable only for those at the top. Since the middle of the 20th century, though, things have turned the opposite way – these days, punishing hours at your desk, rather than days off, are seen as the mark of someone important.

　　In a series of several experiments, the researchers illustrated just how much we’ve come to admire busyness, or at least the appearance of it. Volunteers read two passages, on about a man who led a life of leisure and another about a man who was over-worked and over –scheduled; when asked to determine which of the two had a higher social status, the majority of the participants said the latter. The same held true for people who used products that implied they were short on time: In one experiment, for example, customers of the grocery-delivery service Peapod were seen as of higher status than people who shopped at grocery stores that were equally expensive; in another, people wearing wireless headphones were considered further up on the social ladder than those wearing regular headphones, even when both were just used to listen to music.