【易伯华独家】最新雅思阅读全真模拟试题：幸福的科学解释

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易伯华雅思名师讲堂今天和大家分享一篇阅读仿真模拟题“Can Scientists tell us: What happiness

is?”(幸福的科学解释)，这是一篇论说文，全文共8段。烤鸭们可以先自己试着做一做，做完之后可以对下答案，再看看易伯华名师的悉心讲解。一起来学习吧!

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.

Question 14-20

The reading passage has seven paragraphs A-H.

Which paragraph contains the following information?

Write the correct letter A-H, in boxes 14-20 on your answer sheet.

14 An experiment involving dividing several groups one of which received

positive icon

15 Review of a poorly researched psychology area

16 Contrast being made about the brain’s action as response to positive or

negative stimulus

17 The skeptical attitude toward the research seemed to be a waste of

fund

18 a substance that produces much wanting instead of much liking

19 a conclusion that lasting happiness are hardly obtained because of the

nature of brains

20 One description that listed the human emotional categories

Question 21-25

Complete the following summary of the paragraphs of Reading Passage, using no

more than four words from the Reading Passage for each answer.

Write your answers in boxes 21-25 on your answer sheet.

A few pioneers in experimental psychology study what happens when lives go

well. Professor Alice divided doctors, making a tricky experiment, into three

groups: beside the one control group, the other two either are asked to read

humanistic statements about drugs, or received …21... The latter displayed the

most creative thinking and worked more efficiently. Since critics are

questioning the significance of the …22…for both levels of happiness and

classification for the virtues. Professor Seligman countered in an evolutional

theory: survival in a time of adversity forged our brains into the way of

thinking for what's wrong because we have a…23…

There is bountiful of evidence to show that negative thinking is deeply built

in the human psyche. Later, at Iowa University, neuroscientists studied the

active parts in brains to contrast when people are shown pleasant and unpleasant

pictures. When positive images like…24…are shown, part of the frontal lobe of

the brain becomes active. But when they are shown unpleasant image, the response

comes from …25…of the brain.

Question 26

Write your answers in boxes 26 on your answer sheet.

Choose the correct letter. A, B, C or D.

According to Daniel Nettle in the last two paragraphs, what is true as the

scientists can tell us about happiness

A Brain systems always mix liking and wanting together.

B Negative emotions can be easily rid of if we think positively.

C Happiness is like nicotine we are craving for but get little pleasure.

D The inner mechanism of human brains does not assist us to achieve durable

happiness.