上海新航道培訓學校小編給考生們帶來了雅思閱讀真題原文+譯文練習-什么是幸福，希望備考雅思考試的同學們一定要認真的看題、做題，多做練習，才能掌握相應的答題經驗及技巧，預祝各位考生都取得理想的成績。

  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.

  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.

  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.

  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."

  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.

  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.

  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.

  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.

  雅思閱讀-What happiness is?譯文：

  經濟學家認為，如果人們會把自己描述成幸福的，那么他們就是幸福的.然而 心理學家卻要區分不同幸福感之間的差別。幸福最中等的水平是一種開心或是快樂的感覺。但是有時幸福是對生活的一種評判，認為生活是令人滿意的，而這似乎是不涉及感情范疇的。受人敬仰的心理學家Martin Seligman率先致力于關于幸福的研究。不幸的是，我們并不是天生就會感到幸福;而所幸的是，我們可以做一些關于幸福的事情。關于幸福的研究最早要追溯 到130年前在Leipzig的實驗室，那時心理學對“善良”和“滿足”還知之甚少， 大部分的心理學家都在研究“軟弱”和“痛苦”。圖書館里的書涉及的理論都是關于我們為什么會悲傷，擔憂和生氣這類的情緒。研究生活乎順時發生的事情在當時看來是不靠譜的。積極正面的體驗，比如說快樂，善良，利他主義和英雄主義在當時常常是被人們忽略的。在每100篇關于焦慮和壓抑的心理學論文中，只有一篇會涉及積極的心理狀態。

  少數的實驗心理學家引領了有關幸福研究的潮流?？的螤柎髮W的Alice Isen教授和她的同事致力于研究正面的情感如何讓人們思維更敏捷以及更有創造力。為了展示正面的情感是怎樣迅速地提升一個人的智力，Isen教授通過一個巧妙的診斷將參加實驗的醫生分為3組：一組收到了糖果，一組朗讀人本主義的宜言，一組則作為控制對照組，(實驗結果表明，)收到糖果的醫生的思維更具創造性同時工作也更高效，受到Isen教授和其他人的啟發，Seligman也投身關于幸描的研究，他等集到了幾百萬美金的研究經費，用以資助全世界150名科學家組成的50個研究小組。4家“積極心理學”中心成立，用令人愉悅的顏色裝飾，配有沙發和保姆。心理學家聚集在墨西哥的沙灘上享受著潛水的樂趣，品嘗墨西哥菜肴fajitas，他們還分成小組討論有關“夸跡”和“敬畏"的話題。還有一千名臨床醫學家接受這項新科學項目的培訓。

  但是一些批評家要求心理學家回答一些重大的問題，比如說，什么是定義不同幸福水平的標準以及如何將這些特點分類?這些關于幸福的概念難道不是糢糊不清而且無法被這實的嗎?當四處還有饑荒，洪水和經濟蕭條的時候，將這些研究基金用于積極心態的研究合適嗎?Seligman知道他的工作會被別人輕看，還可能會被人冠以諸如“積極思考的力量”此類的陳詞濫調。因此，為了讓這樣新的科學研究不要浮于自我滿足的狀態，就要確保這項研完和“枳極心理學”相聯系，又以“枳極生物學”作為基礎。

  這就需要我們回到人類的進化史，人類是從更新世時代(180萬到1萬年前)開始進化的，那是一個充滿艱難和動蕩的時代。在冰河世紀，我們的祖先先是忍受冰川形成的寒冷，然后是冰川消融時的泛濫的洪水。人們還得和那些令人毛骨悚然的生物比如說猛犸象和體型如大象般巨大的地懶以及長著銳利犬牙的貓共同生存。但是到了更新世的末期，所有的這些動物都滅絕了，人類卻進化出了腦容量更大的大腦，并且通過自己的智力學會生火和制造較復雜的工具，還學會了說話并且形成了一些社會禮儀。在逆境中生存將人類變得更加有恒心和毅力。Seligman教授說道：“因為我們的大腦是在一個充滿冰川，洪水和饑荒的年代進化來的，我們的大腦經歷了太多患難—災難性，所以我們的大腦的運作模式就是 “發現哪里出了問題”。但問題是，這在更新世那樣的時代是起作用的，在那時這對人類是有益的，但是在現代社會就不起作用了。

  盡管大多數人評價自己很幸福，但是大量證據顯示消極的想法還是在人類心中根深蒂固。實驗顯示，較成功而言，失敗更容易被我們牢牢記住。我們總是在思想一些不順利的事情，而不是那些順利的好的事情。在6種基本的情緒中，有4種是消極的，它們是：生氣，害怕，厭惡和悲傷，而只有一種是積極的，它就是喜悅。(第6種情緒是驚奇，屬于中性。)心理學家同時也是《幸福》這本書的作者Daniel Nettle和皇家學院的一位學者認為，消極的情緒總是告訴我們“一些不好的事情已經發生了”，從而會讓我們采取不一樣的行動。

  究竟是什么樣的大腦結構讓我們會傾向于有消極的想法呢?“快樂”這樣的情緒有生物學基礎嗎?愛荷華大學的神經學家研究了當人們看到令人愉悅的圖片和讓人不舒服的圖片時的情況。當人們看到風景或是海豚玩耍時，大腦的額葉會變得活躍。但是當他們看到一些讓人不舒服的圖片比如說一只小鳥被埋在土里時，或是一個戰死的戰士面部還有部分缺失時，大腦最原始的部分會做出反應。這種識別消極情緒的能力是從古時候大腦進化早期形成的危險識別系統來的。大腦前額葉皮質是產生幸福感的部位，是用來進行一些高級的思考，是人類晚些時期進化來的。

  據Daniel Nettle所言，研究的困難在于大腦對于“喜歡”和“欲望”(wanting and liking)的機制是分開的，“欲望”涉及兩個最初大腦發育的部位，也就是扁桃體和神經大腦區，它們通過化學多巴酚傳遞信息來形成大腦的獎勵機制。它們常常是讓人們很期待吃完東西的快感或是對藥品上癮。小白鼠會不停地擊打柵欄來獲取對大腦“欲望”情緒的電刺激，而忽略異性同伴，但是獲得大腦刺激的小白鼠雖然吃得更多，但是并沒有跡象表明它在吃到自己渴想的食物后有一種滿足感。對人而言，像尼古丁這樣的物質會讓人想要攝取更多但是卻帶來很少的快感。

  從本質上來看，生物課可以告訴我們消極的情緒是人類生存的基本情緒，所以難怪它很難根除。與此同時，讓人覺得很詭異的是，我們的大腦總是想要的很多，但是卻很難真正得到持續的幸福感。

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