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Most people have a list of wishes—things that they think will bring them happiness. Happiness lists are easy to come up with. However, the mechanism behind them is somewhat complicated, since it involves what psychologist Daniel Gilbert calls the greatest achievement of the human brain—the ability to imagine. To imagine what will bring joy to our future selves requires mental time travel, which is a unique human skill resulting from two million years of evolution. We use this skill every day, predicting our future emotions and then making decisions, whether big or small, according to our forecasts of how they'll make our future selves feel.
Yet, our imagination often fails us. When we're lucky enough to get what we wished for, we discover that it doesn’t come with everlasting happiness. And when the things we feared come to pass, we realize that they don't crush us after all. In dozens of studies, Gilbert has shown that we can mispredict emotional consequences of positive events, such as receiving gifts or winning football games, as much as negative events, like breaking up or losing an election. This impact bias(影响偏差) —overestimation of the intensity and duration of our emotional reactions to future events—is significant, because the prediction of the duration of our future emotions is what often shapes our decisions, including those concerning our happiness.
Just as our immune systems work tirelessly to keep our bodies in good health, our psychological immune systems routinely employ an entire set of cognitive(认知) mechanisms in order to deal with life's habitual attack of less-than-pleasant circumstances. Actually, our psychological immune system has an impressive feature of its own: the ability to produce happiness. Thus, when life disappoints us, we “ignore, transform, and rearrange” information through a variety of creative strategies until the rough edges of negative effects have been dutifully dulled. When we fail to recognize this ability of our psychological immune systems to produce happiness, we're likely to make errors in our affective forecasting.
Happiness, Gilbert points out, is a fast moving target. As passionate as we’re about finding it, we routinely misforecast what will make us happy, and how long our joy will last. In reality, he adds that the best way to make an affective forecast is not to use your imagination, but your eyes. Namely, instead of trying to predict how happy you'll be in a particular future, look closely at those who are already in the future that you’re merely contemplating(冥想) and ask how happy they are. If something makes others happy, it'll likely make you happy as well.
Forecasting Happiness | |
The mechanism behind happiness lists | *It’s a bit complicated because of the involvement of the human ability to 1.. *Mental time travel is a unique human skill we use on a(n) 2. basis to make predictions about our future emotions and then 3. all our decisions on them. |
The 4. with predicting happiness | *We can make wrong predictions about emotional consequences of positive or negative events, which can 5. us from making right decisions. |
The functions of the psychological immune system | *Our psychological immune system routinely help 6. unpleasant circumstances in life. *Our wrong affective forecasting results from our 7. to recognize the power of our psychological immune system. |
An effective 8. to predict happiness | *Use your eyes 9. of your imagination while making affective forecasts. 10. others who are in the future that you’re contemplating and ask how happy they are. |
As long as people have been telling stories, crones(丑陋的老太婆) have been scaring the wits out of children. “Nags(怨妇), witches, evil stepmothers, cannibals(食人妇). It’s quite dreadful,” says Maria Tatar, who teaches a course on folklore and mythology at Harvard. "But old women are also powerful—they're often the ones who can work magic.” In the Disney film Snow White, there’s a scene in which the beautiful, charming, wicked queen turns into an old hag and poisons Snow White so she'll sleep forever. The old lady in Hansel and Gretel wants to roast children in her oven and the witch in The Little Mermaid cuts out Ariel’s tongue.
Tatar says old women villains(恶人) are especially scary because, historically, the most powerful person in a child’s life was the mother. “Children do have a way of splitting the mother figure into...the evil mother—who’s always making rules and regulations, policing your behavior, getting angry at you—and then the kind mother—the one who is giving and protects you, makes sure that you survive.”
Veronique Tadjo, a writer who grew up in the Ivory Coast, thinks there’s a fear of female power in general. She says a common figure in African folk tales is the old witch who destroys people’s souls. Still, they're not all bitter and evil hags. Elderly women in folk tales often use their knowledge and experience of the world to guide the troubled protagonist(主人公). Tadjo points to the Kenyan story Marwe In The Underworld about a girl who commits suicide by drowning herself and enters the Land of the Dead where she meets an old woman. “That old woman teaches her quite a lot of things,” Tadjo says. “And also, when Marwe starts longing for the world of the living, she helps her go back to the surface with a lot of riches. And we understand that Marwe has been rewarded for her goodness.” In other words: Do your chores and you’ll be rewarded. The point of these ancient tales, no matter what continent they come from, may have been to scare children into behaving.
Perhaps the scariest old woman character—the ugly Baba Yaga—comes from Russia. She’s bony with a hooked nose and long, iron teeth. Her hut(小屋) stands on chicken legs and she kidnaps children and eats them. Safe to say Baba Yaga has been making Eastern European children sleepless for centuries. In one interpretation, a mean stepmother sends the young girl Vasilisa to Baba Yaga's hut in the woods to get a candle. The girl is sure she’s being sent to her death. Baba Yaga forces her to cook and clean, and Vasilisa does everything she's told. In the end, the old crone gives her what she needs and sends her home. “You see this kind of double face of the hag,”Maria Tatar says. “On the one hand: aggressive, threatening. And on the other hand: sometimes to make sure that there is a happily ever after.”
There's that power again. In Japanese folklore, the Yama Uba(山姥) is an equally ambiguous old woman. She’s a mountain witch who, like Baba Yaga, lures people into her hut and eats them. But she'll also help a lost traveler. Noriko Reider is a professor at Miami University of Ohio who's done extensive research on Yama Uba stories. “She brings fortune and happiness,” Reider says. “She can also bring death and destruction for those who are not very good.”
According to Cuban-American writer Alma Flor Ada, in Hispanic(拉美地区的) culture old women are multi-talented. Ada is co-author of Tales Our Grandmas Told, which includes a story about Caliph’s son who becomes seriously ill. After “all of the best physicians in the land” fail to cure him, Caliph sends his messengers searching for help. Then one morning, an old woman arrives with this advice: To get well, the prince must wear the overcoat of a man who is truly happy. And of course it works.
1.What does the underlined phrase in Para 1 “scaring the wits out of children” mean？
A. making children frightened B. making children stupid
C. making children interested D. making children confused
2.Among all the characters mentioned, ________ is terribly treated by an old woman.
A. Caliph B. Marwe C. Ariel D. Vasilisa
3.The images of ________ show double faces of a hag by doing both good and evil things.
A. Snow White and The Little Mermaid B. Hansel and Gretel
C. Veronique Tadjo and Noriko Reider D. Baba Yaga and Yama Uba
4.About the cultural images of an old woman, ________ has a different view from others.
A. Maria Tatar B. Veronique Tadjo C. Noriko Reider D. Alma Flor Ada
5.All the following words can be used to describe Baba Yaga EXCEPT ________.
A. aggressive B. sensitive C. dreadful D. merciful
6.According to the passage, why are old women often the face of evil in fairy tales and folklore?
A. Because they are always nags, witches, evil stepmothers and cannibals.
B. Because they are scary by recalling the general fear of female power.
C. Because they are intended to scare children into behaving well.
D. Because they are multi-talented with the ability to work magic.
The human face is a remarkable piece of work. The astonishing variety of facial features helps people recognize each other and is vital to the formation of complex societies. So is the face’s ability to send emotional signals, whether through an unconscious red face or the artifice of a false smile. People spend much of their waking lives reading faces, for signs of attraction, hatred, trust and fraud. They also spend plenty of time trying to hide true feelings or intentions.
Technology is rapidly catching up with the human ability to read faces. In America facial recognition is used by churches to track worshippers’ attendance; in Britain, by retailers to spot past shoplifters. In China, it confirms the identities of ride-hailing drivers, permits tourists to enter attractions and lets people pay for things with a smile. Apple’s new iPhone is expected to use it to unlock the home screen.
Set against human skills, such applications might seem incremental(增值的). Some breakthroughs, such as flight or the Internet, obviously transform human abilities; facial recognition seems merely to encode(编码) them. Although faces are unique to individuals, they are also public, so technology does not, at first sight, interfere with something that is private. And yet the ability to record, store and analyze images of faces cheaply, quickly and on a vast scale promises one day to bring about fundamental changes to opinions of privacy, fairness and trust.
Start with privacy. One big difference between faces and other biometric data, such as fingerprints, is that they work at a distance. Anyone with a phone can take a picture for facial-recognition programs to use. Facebook's bank of facial images cannot be used by others, but the Silicon Valley giant could obtain pictures of visitors to a car showroom, say, and later use facial recognition to serve them ads for cars. Law-enforcement agencies now have a powerful weapon in their ability to track criminals, but at enormous potential cost to citizens’ privacy.
The face is not just a name-tag. It displays a lot of other information—and machines can read that, too. Again, that promises benefits. Some firms are analyzing faces to provide automated diagnoses of rare genetic conditions, far earlier than would otherwise be possible. Systems that measure emotion may give autistic(孤独症的) people a grasp of social signals they find difficult.
1.Which of the following statement about facial recognition is true according to the passage?
A. It is widely applied by Chinese in many fields.
B. It is applied to track worshippers by American churches.
C. It has been applied by Apple to unlock home screen.
D. It is applied to catch thieves by police.
2.What does the third paragraph mainly talk about?
A. Flight and the Internet surely transform human abilities.
B. Facial recognition will cause fundamental changes to minds.
C. Facial expressions are not only unique but also public.
D. Facial recognition has just the same effects as other breakthroughs.
3.From the last two paragraphs, we can infer that __________.
A. the face is superior to other biometric data
B. people can keep a balance between face and privacy
C. the face has shown many benefits especially in medicine
D. fingerprints is a powerful weapon in tracking criminals
4.What is the best title of the passage?
A. Human facial expressions B. Reading faces
C. Scientific breakthroughs D. Nowhere to hide
Kerala, India, has placed a tax on hamburgers, pizza and other fast food. The 14.5 percent tax will be added to foods at restaurants such as McDonald’s, Pizza Hut and Burger King.
The tax is being called a “fat tax” because it adds cost to foods considered high in fat and calories. It is the first fast food tax enacted in India, where obesity levels are rising in the growing middle class.
Kerala’s Finance Minister Thomas Isaac suggested the tax after learning of similar measures in other countries. He hopes it will get people to choose to eat healthy food, which he said is “going out of fashion.”
Dr. Anoop Misra at New Delhi’s Fortis Hospital strongly supports the “fat tax” as a way to reduce the number of diabetes cases in young people.
A government finance official in central Gujarat says that the state is considering a similar 14.5 percent tax. “This idea can also be adopted in the state, as we also have high consumption of junk and unhealthy food,” the official said.
Critics of the tax say it probably will not stop people from buying fast food. IT engineer Gaurav Singh wants the government to focus on education and awareness instead of taxing fast food.
“The one food that is eaten widely in Kerala is the ‘paratha’, which is basically high in fat, high in refined(精制的) flour, and it is cheap. It can't be taxed because it is highly unorganized.”
Some doctors and health experts say the tax should also include other snack foods and sugary drinks sold across the country.
One fast food customer In New Dehli, Vijay Deoli believes the government should deal with more important issues. “First you have to clear up the air, the water, etc. This is a small thing.”
Others say the government should do more to bring attention to fast food and obesity rather than changing people's choices.
Many health experts agree that bringing attention to the issue is important. But Dr. Misra thinks education alone does not work.
He compared the tax to a law passed several years ago that got people to wear seat belts to avoid paying a fine. “Laws can change people’s habits.”
1.Why did Thomas Isaac introduce the “fat tax”?
A. To follow the latest trend in other countries.
B. To prevent young people from getting diabetes.
C. To encourage people to change their eating habits.
D. To control the development of fast food restaurants.
2.What’s Vijay Deoli’s attitude towards the “fat tax”?
A. Worried B. Opposed C. Surprised D. Suspicious
3.The example of wearing seat belts in the last paragraph is used to show the effect of ________.
A. education B. regulations C. people’s choices D. people’s awareness
SCOTTISH DANCING IT'S FUN IT'S GOOD EXERCISE ＊We have classes for dancers of all abilities. ＊Previous experience is not essential. ＊All you need to bring is a pair of soft shoes and enthusiasm. ＊Classes are held in a number of places and at different times. ＊We guarantee you a warm welcome. |
THE RENAISSANCE SINGER New singers are invited to join our choir, formed in 1993, to perform a wide variety of music in Cambridge. We meet every Wednesday evening from 7. 30—9. 30pm, and this term we are rehearsing for a special concert with audience participation on Saturday 1st December. An ability to sight-read and previous experience in choral singing is desirable, although not essential. |
DRAWING WITH COLOUR An intensive workshop for beginners. Saturday 13th and Sunday 14th October This unusual workshop offers instruction in effective ways to draw in colour. Activities will include study of light and shade and ways to express mood and emotion in colour. The small class(12 students) assures maximum attention for each student. Professional quality materials are included in the fee of￡95. |
WORLD CULTURE DAY Brazilian Street Percussion(打击乐) 2.30—4.30 Samba percussion workshop. Lift your spirits with the taste of carnival! It doesn’t matter whether you’re experienced musician or a complete beginner, you’ll be creating complex amazing rhythms in no time. African Storytelling 3.45—4.45 The magical African story-telling tradition of narration, poetry and proverbs(mainly from Ghana and Nigeria). An event for all the family. |
1.Which activity promises rapid progress?
A. SCOTTISH DANCING B. THE RENAISSANCE SINGER
C. DRAWING WITH COLOUR D. WORLD CULTURE DAY
2.If you go to the activity DRAWING WITH COLOUR, ________.
A. individual guidance will be provided B. you will get materials free of charge
C. some relevant skills will be required D. it will help put you in a good mood
根据黑布林文本阅读，从每题所给的A、B、C、D四个选项中选出最佳选项。
1.What is the relationship between Dr Jekyll and Mr Utterson?
A. Distant relatives B. Client and lawyer C. Doctor and patient D. Master and servant
2.Dr Lanyon stopped all contact with Dr Jekyll because___________.
A. he disapproved of Jekyll’s will
B. he was jealous of the success of Jekyll’s experiments
C. he was shocked when he realized that Hyde was a part of Jekyll
D. he had an argument with Jekyll about scientific beliefs
3.Judging from the look and voice, Hyde is considered all of the following EXCEPT _______.
A. mysterious B. mischievous C. unfriendly D. unpleasant
4.What kind of story is The Strange Case of Doctor Jekyll and Mr Hyde?
A. Romance B. Adventure C. War D. Mystery
5.Which of the following is NOT the theme to the story?
A. The reflection of personal behavior B. The importance of reputation
C. The duality of human nature D. The battle of good against evil
