2019年雅思阅读全真模拟题：幸福的科学解释

2019

年雅思阅读全真模拟题：幸福的科学解释

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

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

plan to stop the new

science floating

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

：

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

of action.

F