2024年大学英语六级考试阅读理解.doc

12月大学英语六级考试真题（第1套）
Section B
Directions: In this section, you are going to read a passage with ten statements attached to it. Each statement contains information given in one of the paragraphs. Identify the paragraph from which the information is derived. You may choose a paragraph more than once. Each paragraph is marked with a letter.
Meaning Is Healthier Than Happiness
[A]For at least the last decade, the happiness craze has been building. In the last three months alone, over 1,000 books on happiness were released on Amazon, including Happy Money, Happy-People-Pills For All, and, for those just starting out, Happiness for Beginners.
[B]One of the consistent claims of books like these is that happiness is associated with all sorts of good life outcomes, including - most promisingly - good health. Many studies have noted the connection between a happy mind and a healthy body - the happier you are, the better health outcomes we seem to have. In a meta-analysis (overview) of 150 studies on this topic, researchers put it like this: “Inductions of well-being lead to healthy functioning, and inductions of ill-being lead to compromised health.”
[C]But a new study, just published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) challenges the rosy picture. Happiness may not be as good for the body as researchers thought. It might even be bad.
[D]Of course, it's important to first define happiness. A few months ago, I wrote a piece called “There's More to Life Than Being Happy” about a psychology study that dug into what happiness really means to people. It specifically explored the difference between a meaningful life and a happy life.
[E]It seems strange that there would be a difference at all. But the researchers, who looked at a large sample of people over a month-long period, found that happiness is associated with selfish “taking” behavior and that having a sense of meaning in life is associated with selfless “giving” behavior.
[F]"Happiness without meaning characterizes a relatively shallow, self-absorbed or even selfish life, in which things go well, needs and desire are easily satisfied, and difficult or taxing entanglements are avoided," the authors of the study wrote. "If anything, pure happiness is linked to not helping others in need.” While being happy is about feeling good, meaning is derived from contributing to others or to society in a bigger way. As Roy Baumeister, one of the researchers, told me, "Partly what we do as human beings is to take care of others and contribute to others. This makes life meaningful but it does not necessarily make us happy.”
[G]The new PNAS study also sheds light on the difference between meaning and happiness, but on the biological level. Barbara Fredrickson, a psychological researcher who specializes in positive emotions at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, and Steve Cole, a genetics and psychiatric researcher at UCLA, examined the self-reported levels of happiness and meaning in 80 research subjects.
[H]Happiness was defined, as in the earlier study, by feeling good. The researchers measured happiness by asking subjects questions like “How often did you feel happy?” “How often did you feel interested in life?” and “How often did you feel satisfied?” The more strongly people endorsed these measures of “hedonic well-being,” or pleasure, the higher they scored on happiness.
[I]Meaning was defined as an orientation to something bigger than the self. They measured meaning by asking questions like “How often did you feel that your life has a sense of direction or meaning to it?”, “How often did you feel that you had something to contribute to society?”, and “How often did you feel that you belonged to a community social group?” The more people endorsed these measures of “eudaimonic well-being” - or, simply put, virtue - the more meaning they felt in life.

[J]After noting the sense of meaning and happiness that each subject had, Fredrickson and Cole, with their research colleagues, looked at the ways certain genes expressed themselves in each of the participants. Like neuroscientists who use fMRI scanning to determine how regions in the brain respond to different stimuli, Cole and Fredrickson are interested in how the body, at the genetic level, responds to feelings of happiness and meaning.
[K] Cole's past work has linked various kinds of chronic adversity to a particular gene expression pattern. When people feel lonely, are grieving the loss of a loved one, or are struggling to make ends meet, their bodies go into threat mode. This triggers the activation of a stress-related gene pattern that has two features: an increase in the activity of pron-inflammatory genes and a decrease in the activity of genes involved in anti-viral responses
[L]Cole and Fredrickson found that people who are happy but have little to no sense of meaning in their lives - proverbially, simply here for the party - have the same gene expression patterns as people who are responding to and enduring chronic adversity. That is, the bodies of these happy people are preparing them for bacterial threats by activating the pro-inflammatory response. Chronic inflammation is, of course, associated with major illnesses like heart disease and various cancers.
[M]"Empty positive emotions" - like the kind people experience during manic episodes or artificially induced euphoria from alcohol and drugs - "are about as good for you for as adversity," says Fredrickson.
[N]It's important to understand that for many people, a sense of meaning and happiness in life overlap; many people score jointly high (or jointly low) on the happiness and meaning measures in the study. But for many others, there is a dissonance - they feel that they are low on happiness and high on meaning or that their lives are very high in happiness, but low in meaning. This last group, which has the gene expression pattern associated with adversity, formed a whopping 75 percent of study participants. Only one quarter of the study participants had what the researchers call “eudaimonic predominance” - that is, their sense of meaning outpaced their feelings of happiness.
[O]This is too bad given the more beneficial gene expression pattern associated with meaningfulness. People whose levels of happiness and meaning line up, and people who have a strong sense of meaning but are not necessarily happy, showed a deactivation of the adversity stress response. Their bodies were not preparing them for the bacterial infections that we get when we are alone or in trouble, but for the viral infections we get when surrounded by a lot of other people.
[P]Fredrickson's past research, described in her two books, Positivity and Love 2.0, has mapped the benefits of positive emotions in individuals. She has found that positive emotions broaden a person's perspective and buffers people against adversity. So it was surprising to her that hedonistic well-being, which is associated with positive emotions and pleasure, did so badly in this study compared with eudaimonic well-being.
[Q]“It's not the amount of hedonic happiness that's a problem,” Fredrickson tells me, “It's that it's not matched by eudaimonic well-being. It's great when both are in step. But if you have more hedonic well-being than would be expected, that's when this [gene] pattern that's akin to adversity emerged.”
[R]The terms hedonism and eudemonism bring to mind the great philosophical debate, which has shaped Western civilization for over 2,000 years, about the nature of the good life. Does happiness lie in feeling good, as hedonists think, or in doing and being good, as Aristotle and his intellectual descendants, the virtue ethicists, think? From the evidence of this study, it seems that feeling good is not enough. People need meaning to thrive. In the words of Carl Jung, “The least of things with a meaning is worth more in life than the greatest of things without it.” Jung's wisdom certainly seems to apply to our bodies, if not also to our hearts and our minds.
46 . The author's recent article examined how a meaningful life is different from a happy life.
47 . It should be noted that many people feel their life is both happy and meaningful.
48 . According to one survey, there is a close relationship between hedonic well-being measures and high scores on happiness.
49 . According to one of the authors of a new study, what makes life meaningful may not make people happy.
50 . Experiments were carried out to determine our body's genetic expression of feelings of happiness and meaning.
51 . A new study claims happiness may not contribute to health.
52 . According to researchers, taking makes for happiness while giving adds meaning to life.
53 . Evidence from research shows that it takes meaning for people to thrive.
54 . With regard to gene expression patterns, happy people with little or no sense of meaning in life are found to be similar to those suffering from chronic adversity.
55 . Most books on happiness today assert that happiness is beneficial to health.
Passage One
Questions 56 to 60 are based on the following passage.
    Nothing succeeds in business books like the study of success. The current business-book boom was launched in 1982 by Tom Peters and Robert Waterman with “In Search of Excellence”. It has been kept going ever since by a succession of gurus and would-be gurus who promise to distil the essence of excellence into three(or five or seven) simple rules.
    The Three Rules is a self-conscious contribution to this type; it even includes a bibliography of “success studies”. Messrs Raynor and Mumtaz Ahmed work for a consultancy, Deloitte, that is determined to turn itself into more of a thought-leader and less a corporate repairman. They employ all the tricks of the success genre. They insist that their conclusions are “measurable and actionable”-guide to behavior rather than analysis for its own sake. Success authors usually serve up vivid stories about how exceptional business-people stamped their personalities on a company or rescued it from a life-threatening crisis. Messrs Raynor and Ahmed are happier chewing the numbers: they provide detailed appendices on “calculating the elements of advantage” and “detailed analysis”.
    The authors spent five years studying the behavior of their 344 “exceptional companies”, only to come up at first with nothing. Every hunch(直觉)led to a blind alley and every hypothesis to a dead end. It was only when they shifted their attention from how companies behave to how they think that they began to make sense of their voluminous material.
    Management is all about making difficult tradeoffs in conditions that are always uncertain and ever-changing. But exceptional companies' approach these trade-offs with two simple rules in mind, sometimes consciously, sometimes unconsciously. First: better before cheaper. Companies are more likely to succeed in the long run if they compete on quality or performance than on price. Second: revenue before cost. Companies have more to gain in the long run from driving up revenue than by driving down costs.
    Most success studies suffer from two faults. There is “the halo (光环) effect”, whereby good performance leads commentators to attribute all manner of virtues to anything and everything the company does. These virtues then suddenly become vices when the company fails. Messrs Raynor and Ahmed work hard to avoid these mistakes by studying large bodies of data over several decades. But they end up embracing a different error: stating the obvious. Most businesspeople will not be surprised to learn that it is better to find a profitable niche (缝隙市场) and focus on boosting your revenues than to compete on price and cut your way to success. The difficult question is how to find that profitable niche and protect it. There, The Three Rules is less useful.
56 . What kind of business books are most likely to sell well?
A Books on excellence.
B Guides to management.
C Books on business rules.
D Analyses of market trends.
57 . What does the author imply about books on success so far?
A They help businessmen on way or another.
B They are written by well-recognized experts.
C They more or less fall into the same stereotype.
D They are based on analyses of corporate leaders.
58 . How does The Three Rules different from other success books according to the passage?
A It focuses on the behavior of exceptional businessmen.
B It bases its detailed analysis on large amount of data.
C It offers practicable advice to businessmen.
D It draws conclusion from vivid examples.
59 . What does the passage say contributes to the success of exceptional companies?
A Focus on quality and revenue.
B Management and sales promotion.
C Lower production costs and competitive prices.
D Emphasis on after-sale service and maintenance.
60 . What is the author's comment on The Three Rules?
A It can help to locate profitable niches.
B It has little to offer to businesspeople.
C It is noted for its detailed data analysis.
D It fails to identify the keys to success.
Passage Two
Questions 61 to 65 are based on the following passage.
    Until recently, the University of Kent prided itself on its friendly image. Not any more. Over the past few months it has been working hard. With the help of media consultants, to play down its cosy reputation in favour of something more academic and serious.
    Kent is not alone in considering an image revamp (翻新). Changes to next year's funding    regime are forcing universities to justify charging students up to ￡9,000 in fees.
    Nowadays universities are putting much more of a focus on their brands and what their value propositions are. While in the past universities have often focused on student social life and attractions of the university town in recruitment campaigns, they are now concentrating on more tangible(实在的)attractions, such as employment prospects, engagement with industry, and lecturer contact hours, making clear exactly what students are going to get for their money.
    The problem for universities is that if those benefits fail to materialize, students notice. That worries Rob Behrens, who deals with student complaints. “Universities need to be extremely careful in describing what's going to happen to students he says. “As competition is going to get greater for attracting gifted students, there is a danger that universities will go the extra mile.”
    One university told prospective engineering students they would be able to design a car and race it at Brands Hatch, which never happened, he says. Others have promised use of sophisticated equipment that turned out to be broken or unavailable. “If universities spent as much money on handling complaints and appeals appropriately as they spend on marketing, they would do better at keeping students, and in the National Student Survey returns,” he sa