托福阅读素材之微笑的力量

由 androidx86.net 分享时间：2023-02-15 16:13:05 加入收藏我要投稿点赞

为了帮助大家高效备考托福，今天小编给大家带来了托福阅读素材之微笑的力量，希望能够帮助到大家，下面小编就和大家分享，来欣赏一下吧。

托福阅读素材之微笑的力量

托福阅读材料:The hidden power of smiling

0:11

When I was a child, I always wanted to be a superhero. I wanted to save the world and make everyone happy. But I knew that I'd need superpowers to make my dreams come true. So I used to embark on these imaginary journeys to find intergalactic objects from planet Krypton, which was a lot of fun, but didn't yield much result. When I grew up and realized that science fiction was not a good source for superpowers, I decided instead to embark on a journey of real science, to find a more useful truth.

0:41

I started my journey in California, with a UC Berkeley 30-year longitudinal study that examined the photos of students in an old yearbook, and tried to measure their success and well-being throughout their life. By measuring the students' smiles, researchers were able to predict how fulfilling and long-lasting a subject's marriage would be,

1:03

(Laughter)

1:04

how well she would score on standardized tests of well-being, and how inspiring she would be to others. In another yearbook, I stumbled upon Barry Obama's picture. When I first saw his picture, I thought that his superpowers came from his super collar.

1:20

(Laughter)

1:21

But now I know it was all in his smile.

1:24

Another aha! moment came from a 2010 Wayne State University research project that looked into pre-1950s baseball cards of Major League players. The researchers found that the span of a player's smilecould actually predict the span of his life. Players who didn't smile in their pictures lived an average of only 72.9 years, where players with beaming smiles lived an average of almost 80 years.

1:52

(Laughter)

1:54

The good news is that we're actually born smiling. Using 3D ultrasound technology, we can now see that developing babies appear to smile, even in the womb. When they're born, babies continue to smile -- initially, mostly in their sleep. And even blind babies smile to the sound of the human voice. Smiling is one of the most basic, biologically uniform expressions of all humans.

2:20

In studies conducted in Papua New Guinea, Paul Ekman, the world's most renowned researcher on facial expressions, found that even members of the Fore tribe, who were completely disconnected from Western culture, and also known for their unusual cannibalism rituals,

2:36

(Laughter)

2:37

attributed smiles to descriptions of situations the same way you and I would. So from Papua New Guinea to Hollywood all the way to modern art in Beijing, we smile often, and use smiles to express joy and satisfaction.

2:56

How many people here in this room smile more than 20 times per day? Raise your hand if you do. Oh, wow. Outside of this room, more than a third of us smile more than 20 times per day, whereas less than 14 percent of us smile less than five. In fact, those with the most amazing superpowers are actually children, who smile as many as 400 times per day.

3:22

Have you ever wondered why being around children, who smile so frequently, makes you smile very often? A recent study at Uppsala University in Sweden found that it's very difficult to frown when looking at someone who smiles. You ask why? Because smiling is evolutionarily contagious, and it suppresses the control we usually have on our facial muscles. Mimicking a smile and experiencing it physicallyhelps us understand whether our smile is fake or real, so we can understand the emotional state of the smiler.

3:58

In a recent mimicking study at the University of Clermont-Ferrand in France, subjects were asked to determine whether a smile was real or fake while holding a pencil in their mouth to repress smiling muscles. Without the pencil, subjects were excellent judges, but with the pencil in their mouth -- when they could not mimic the smile they saw -- their judgment was impaired.

4:21

(Laughter)

4:23

In addition to theorizing on evolution in "The Origin of Species," Charles Darwin also wrote the facial feedback response theory. His theory states that the act of smiling itself actually makes us feel better,rather than smiling being merely a result of feeling good. In his study, Darwin actually cited a French neurologist, Guillaume Duchenne, who sent electric jolts to facial muscles to induce and stimulate smiles. Please, don't try this at home.

4:52

(Laughter)

4:54

In a related German study, researchers used fMRI imaging to measure brain activity before and after injecting Botox to suppress smiling muscles. The finding supported Darwin's theory, by showing that facial feedback modifies the neural processing of emotional content in the brain, in a way that helps us feel better when we smile. Smiling stimulates our brain reward mechanism in a way that even chocolate -- a well-regarded pleasure inducer -- cannot match.

5:27

British researchers found that one smile can generate the same level of brain stimulation as up to 2,000 bars of chocolate.

5:36

(Laughter)

5:38

Wait -- The same study found that smiling is as stimulating as receiving up to 16,000 pounds sterling in cash.

5:47

(Laughter)

5:48

That's like 25 grand a smile. It's not bad. And think about it this way: 25,000 times 400 -- quite a few kids out there feel like Mark Zuckerberg every day.

6:00

(Laughter)

6:01

And unlike lots of chocolate, lots of smiling can actually make you healthier. Smiling can help reduce the level of stress-enhancing hormones like cortisol, adrenaline and dopamine, increase the level of mood-enhancing hormones like endorphins, and reduce overall blood pressure.

6:19

And if that's not enough, smiling can actually make you look good in the eyes of others. A recent study at Penn State University found that when you smile, you don't only appear to be more likable and courteous, but you actually appear to be more competent.

6:36

So whenever you want to look great and competent, reduce your stress or improve your marriage, or feel as if you just had a whole stack of high-quality chocolate without incurring the caloric cost, or as if you found 25 grand in a pocket of an old jacket you hadn't worn for ages, or whenever you want to tap into a superpower that will help you and everyone around you live a longer, healthier, happier life, smile.

7:05

托福阅读真题原题+题目

Matching the influx of foreign immigrants into the larger cities of the United States during the late nineteenth century was a domestic migration, from town and farm to city, within the United States. The country had been overwhelmingly rural at the beginning of the century, with less than 5 percent of Americans living in large towns or cities. The proportion of urban population began to grow remarkably after 1840, increasing from 11 percent that year to 28 percent by 1880 and to 46 percent by 1900. A country with only 6 cities boasting a population of more than 8,000 in 1800 had become one with 545 such cities in 1900. Of these, 26 had a population of more than 100,000 including 3 that held more than a million people. Much of the migration producing an urban society came from smaller towns within the United States, but the combination of new immigrants and old American settlers on America's urban frontier in the late nineteenth century proved extraordinary.

The growth of cities and the process of industrialization fed on each other. The agricultural revolution stimulated many in the countryside to seek a new life in the city and made it possible for fewer farmers to feed the large concentrations of people needed to provide a workforce for growing numbers of factories. Cities also provided ready and convenient markets for the products of industry, and huge contracts in transportation and construction — as well as the expanded market in consumer goods — allowed continued growth of the urban sector of the overall economy of the Untied States.

Technological developments further stimulated the process of urbanization. One example is the Bessemer converter (an industrial process for manufacturing steel), which provided steel girders for the construction of skyscrapers. The refining of crude oil into kerosene, and later the development of electric lighting as well as of the telephone, brought additional comforts to urban areas that were unavailable to rural Americans and helped attract many of them from the farms into the cities. In every era the lure of the city included a major psychological element for country people: the bustle and social interaction of urban life seemed particularly intriguing to those raised in rural isolation.

1. What aspects of the United States in the nineteenth century does the passage mainly discuss?

(A) Technological developments

(B) The impact of foreign immigrants on cities

(D) The relationship between industrialization and urbani

2. The word influx in line 1 is closest in meaning to

(A) working

(B) processing

(D) attraction

3. The paragraph preceding the passage most probably discuss

(A) foreign immigration

(B) rural life

(D) famous cities of the twentieth century