Wordbuilder The Heinemann ELT English. Vocabulary development and practice for higher-leveled students with answer key

Modern Japanese homes are not places where one can commune intimately with one's friends. Lycurgus would have approved. One of his most effective laws was one that forced all Spartan men to eat at the same communal table, never at home. «For the rich,» Plutarch wrote, «being obliged to go to the same table with the poor, could not make use of or enjoy their abundance, nor so much as please their vanity by looking at or displaying it. So that the common proverb, that Plutus, the god of riches, is blind, was nowhere in all the world literally verified but in Sparta. There, indeed, he was not only blind, but like a picture, without either life or morion.» The restricting of the population to cramped, expensive, and now characterless prefabricated housing made of low-grade industrial materials suited Japan's policy of benefiting old-line manufacturing industries at all costs. However, new industries like interior design can prosper only when people are comfortable and educated enough to develop a higher level of taste ...»