雅思阅读练习题《幸福的科学解释》
雅思的.阅读理解对考生来说是个不小的挑战,因此,考生要是想要获得比较理想的成绩的话,还是需要多加练习的,下面为大家送上一篇雅思阅读练习题,供大家练习。
Can Scientists tell us: What happiness is?
A
Economists accept that if people describe themselves as happy, then they are happy. However, psychologists differentiate between levels of happiness. The most immediate type involves a feeling; pleasure or joy. But sometimes happiness is a judgment that life is satisfying, and does not imply an emotional state. Esteemed psychologist Martin Seligman has spearheaded an effort to study the science of happiness. The bad news is that we're not wired to be happy. The good news is that we can do something about it. Since its origins in a Leipzig laboratory 130 years ago, psychology has had little to say about goodness and contentment. Mostly psychologists have concerned themselves with weakness and misery. There are libraries full of theories about why we get sad, worried, and angry. It hasn't been respectable science to study what happens when lives go well. Positive experiences, such as joy, kindness, altruism and heroism, have mainly been ignored. For every 100 psychology papers dealing with anxiety or depression, only one concerns a positive trait.
B
A few pioneers in experimental psychology bucked the trend. Professor Alice Isen of Cornell University and colleagues have demonstrated how positive emotions make people think faster and more creatively. Showing how easy it is to give people an intellectual boost, Isen divided doctors making a tricky diagnosis into three groups: one received candy, one read humanistic statements about medicine, one was a control group. The doctors who had candy displayed the most creative thinking and worked more efficiently. Inspired by Isen and others, Seligman got stuck in. He raised millions of dollars of research money and funded 50 research groups involving 150 scientists across the world. Four positive psychology centres opened, decorated in cheerful colours and furnished with sofas and baby-sitters. There were get-togethers on Mexican beaches where psychologists would snorkel and eat fajitas, then form "pods" to discuss subjects such as wonder and awe. A thousand therapists were coached in the new science.
C
But critics are demanding answers to big questions. What is the point of defining levels of happiness and classifying the virtues? Aren't these concepts vague and impossible to pin down? Can you justify spending funds to research positive states when there are problems such as famine, flood and epidemic depression to be solved? Seligman knows his work can be belittled alongside trite notions such as "the power of positive thinking". His plan to stop the new science floating "on the waves of self- improvement fashions" is to make sure it is anchored to positive philosophy above, and to positive biology below.
D
And this takes us back to our evolutionary past. Homo sapiens evolved during the Pleistocene era (1.8 m to 10,000 years ago), a time of hardship and turmoil. It was the Ice Age, and our ancestors endured long freezes as glaciers formed, then ferocious floods as the ice masses melted. We shared the planet with terrifying creatures such as mammoths, elephant-sized ground sloths and sabre-toothed cats. But by the end of the Pleistocene, all these animals were extinct. Humans, on the other hand, had evolved large brains and used their intelligence to make fire and sophisticated tools, to develop talk and social rituals. Survival in a time of adversity forged our brains into a persistent mould. Professor Seligman says: "Because our brain evolved during a time of ice, flood and famine, we have a catastrophic brain. The way the brain works is looking for what's wrong. The problem is, that worked in the Pleistocene era. It favoured you, but it doesn't work in the modem world."
E
Although most people rate themselves as happy, there is a wealth of evidence to show that negative thinking is deeply ingrained in the human psyche. Experiments show that we remember failures more vividly than successes. We dwell on what went badly, not what went well. Of the six universal emotions, four anger, fear, disgust and sadness are negative and only one, joy, is positive. The sixth, surprise, is psychologist Daniel Nettle, author of Happiness, and one of the Royal Institution lecturers, the negative emotions each tell us "something bad has happened" and suggest a different course of action.
F
What is it about the structure of the brain that underlies our bias towards negative thinking? And is there a biology of joy? At Iowa University, neuroscientists studied what happens when people are shown pleasant and unpleasant pictures. When subjects see landscapes or dolphins playing, part of the frontal lobe of the brain becomes active. But when they are shown unpleasant images a bird covered in oil, or a dead soldier with part of his face missing the response comes from more primitive parts of the brain. The ability to feel negative emotions derives from an ancient danger-recognition system formed early in the brain's evolution. The pre-frontal cortex, which registers happiness, is the part used for higher thinking, an area that evolved later in human history.
G
Our difficulty, according to Daniel Nettle, is that the brain systems for liking and wanting are separate. Wanting involves two ancient regions the amygdala and the nucleus accumbens that communicate using the chemical dopamine to form the brain's reward system. They are involved in anticipating the pleasure of eating and in addiction to drugs. A rat will press a bar repeatedly, ignoring sexually available partners, to receive electrical stimulation of the "wanting" parts of the brain. But having received brain stimulation, the rat eats more but shows no sign of enjoying the food it craved. In humans, a drug like nicotine produces much craving but little pleasure.
H
In essence, what the biology lesson tells us is that negative emotions are fundamental to the human condition, and ifs no wonder they are difficult to eradicate. At the same time, by a trick of nature, our brains are designed to crave but never really achieve lasting happiness.
-
关于保护动物的雅思写作素材
动物保护的核心内容是禁止虐待、残害、猎杀和捕食任何动物。下面是小编整理的`跟保护动物有关的雅思写作素材,希望能帮到大家!如何保护濒临灭绝的动物Itissuggestedthatpeoplehavebeenawareoftheissue--lackofpreservationforendangeredspieces,animalsandplant...
-
2017年生态类话题雅思写作范文
雅思写作经常考查一些社会广泛关注的热点问题,比较注重写作与现实社会的'联系。因此,考生在准备雅思作文的时候,可以多关注社会热点。下面,为大家献上两篇2017年生态类话题雅思写作范文。2017年生态类话题雅思写作范文一Somepeoplethinkthathumanneedsforfarmland...
-
雅思考口语考官是什么样的
鉴于同学们想了解更多雅思(IELTS)英语考试的学习方法介绍,今天小编给大家整理了一些实用简单的雅思(IELTS)英语学习资料,觉得有用的话快收藏吧。为什么考雅思?现在去美国是越来越难了,想去英联邦国家当然要考雅思。11月16日晚,一位来参加雅思之夜咨询会的女孩子如...
-
雅思考试经验分享
雅思考试经验分享雅思考试(IELTS),外文名InternationalEnglishLanguageTestingSystem,由剑桥大学考试委员会外语考试部、英国文化协会及IDP教育集团共同管理,是一种针英语能力,为打算到使用英语的国家学习、工作或定居的人们设置的英语水平考试。下面是小编收集的同...