为大家带来2012 年3月8日的托福写作真题：Many people fail to achieve a balance between work and other parts of life. What causes the situation? How to overcome this problem?该大作文为社会类话题，请看范文详情：
托福写作范文：
Few people claim to be able to maintain the work-life harmony due to the competing pressures at work and demands at home. In this age of modern technology, one of the consequences of the imbalance is stress, a chronic problem common among working men and women alike. It is possible that the root of the problem is an undesirable and yet inevitable conflict between career ambition and personal as well as family life.
由于工作和家庭生活的压力，很少有人声称能够维持工作与生活的和谐。在这个现代科技的时代，失衡的后果之一就是压力，这是职场男女普遍存在的一个长期问题。问题的根源可能是职业抱负和个人生活以及家庭生活之间的不受欢迎和不可避免的冲突。
Some people have begun to think that working gets in the way of living, particularly when they are struggling for professional achievements. A reduction of official working hours does little to relieve the stress that affects one's life because of one's ambition for financial gains and social recognition. To illustrate, typical workaholics continue working at home, or telecommuting, in front of a computer screen. Since one hopes to stand out of the crowd, there is little time left for leisure, pleasure and spiritual development. This being the case, home is no longer a heavenly place for rest as it used to be. Accordingly, one may feel out of the work-life equilibrium in the presence of increasingly keen competition, as if from all directions.
有些人已经开始认为工作妨碍了生活，特别是当他们在为取得专业成就而奋斗时。官方工作时间的减少对减轻生活中的压力并没有什么作用，因为人们追求经济利益和社会认可的野心。为了说明这一点，典型的工作狂们继续在家里工作，或者在电脑屏幕前工作。既然有人希望能从人群中脱颖而出，就没有多少时间留给休闲、娱乐和精神发展了。在这种情况下，家不再像过去那样是一个天堂。因此，在竞争日益激烈的情况下，人们可能会感到工作与生活的平衡，仿佛来自四面八方。
More often than not, there is no clear line between work and family life, home becoming almost an extension of the workplace. Thus, the greater is the stress of trying to become successful, the less likely is the work-life balance, considering there is a price to be paid for taking pride in working, usually at the cost of a variety of family responsibilities and personal enjoyment. Of course, one can manage the work-life harmony skillfully to some extent, but not for long. In fact, this situation is so much like a teeter-totter, one end being work and the other being life. The metaphor refers to a rarely steady state, now moving from balance and now moving back towards it. That is why many people find it difficult to perform a balancing act between work and life.
工作和家庭生活之间并没有明确的界限，家庭几乎成了工作场所的延伸。因此，想要成功的压力越大，工作与生活的平衡就越不容易，考虑到为工作而自豪的代价是有代价的，通常是以家庭责任和个人享受为代价的。当然，一个人可以在一定程度上巧妙地管理工作与生活的和谐，但不会长久。事实上，这种情况就像一个摇摇欲摆的人，一端是工作，另一端是生活。这个比喻指的是一种几乎不稳定的状态，它现在从平衡中移动，现在又回到它的状态。这就是为什么许多人发现在工作和生活中很难做到平衡的原因。
The conflict of work and life may be the cause of the problem, but the solution must depend on one's attitude about money and time. Tackling the problem of the imbalance is nothing easy because the stress of work is invading home. To be realistic, it makes sense that people work because they need money to make ends meet at home, and that time for personal life must sometimes be limited only to uneasy sleep after a hard day.
工作和生活的冲突可能是问题的起因，但解决方法必须依赖于一个人对金钱和时间的态度。解决不平衡的问题并不容易，因为工作的压力正在侵入家庭。现实一点是，人们工作是因为他们需要钱来养家糊口，而这段时间的个人生活有时只能局限在辛苦的一天之后的不舒服的睡眠。
