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Imagine a world in which there was suddenly no emotion—a world in which human beings could feel no love or happiness, no terror or hate. Try to imagine the consequences of such a transformation. People might not be able to stay alive: knowing neither joy nor pleasure, anxiety nor fear, they would be as likely to repeat acts that hurt them as acts that were beneficial. They could not learn: they could not benefit from experience because this emotional world would lack rewards and punishments. Society would soon disappear: people would be as likely to harm one another as to provide help and support. Human relationships would not exist: in a world without friends or enemies, there could be no marriage, affection among companions, or bonds among members of groups. Society’s economic underpinnings (支柱) would be destroyed: since earning $10 million would be no more pleasant than earning $10, there would be no incentive to work. In fact, there would be no incentives of any kind. For as we will see, incentives imply a capacity to enjoy them. In such a world, the chances that the human species would survive are next to zero, because emotions are the basic instrument of our survival and adaptation. Emotions structure the world for us in implant (嵌入、插入 ) ways. As individuals, we categorize objects on the basis of our emotions. True, we consider the length, shape, size, or texture, but an object’s physical aspects are less important than what it has done or can do to us—hurt us, surprise us, anger us or make us joyful. We also use categorizations colored by emotions in our families, communities, and overall society. Out of our emotional experiences with objects and events comes a social feeling of agreement that certain things and actions are "good" and others are "bad", and we apply these categories to every aspect of our social life—from what foods we eat and what clothes we wear to how we keep promises and which people our group will accept. In fact, society exploits our emotional reactions and attitudes, such as loyalty, morality, pride, shame, guilt, fear and greed, in order to maintain itself. It gives high rewards to individuals who perform important tasks such as surgery, makes heroes out of individuals for unusual or dangerous achievements such as flying fighter planes in a war, and uses the legal and penal (刑法的) system to make people afraid to engage in antisocial acts. The reason why people might not be able to stay alive in a world without emotion is that______.

A. they would not be happy with a life without love
B. they would not be able to tell the texture of objects
C. they would do things that hurt each other’s feelings
D. they would not know what was beneficial and what was harmful to them

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We sometimes think humans are uniquely vulnerable to anxiety, but stress seems to affect the immune defenses of lower animals too. In one experiment, for example, behavioral immunologist ( 免疫学家) Mark Laudenslager, at the University of Denver, gave mild electric shocks to 24 rats. Half the animals could switch off the current by turning a wheel in their enclosure, while the other half could not. The rats in the two groups were paired so that each time one rat turned the wheel it protected both itself and its helpless partner from the shock. Laudenslager found that the immune response was depressed below normal in the helpless rats but not in those that could turn off the electricity. What he has demonstrated, he believes, is that lack of control over an event, not the experience itself, is what wakens the immune system. Other researchers agree. Jay Weiss, a psychologist at Duke University School of Medicine, has shown that animals who are allowed to control unpleasant stimuli don’t develop sleep disturbances or changes in brain chemistry typical of stressed rats. But if the animals are conditioned to confront with situations they have no control over, they later behave passively even when faced with experiences they can control. Such findings reinforce psychologists’ suspicions that the experience or perception of helplessness is one of the most harmful factors in depression. One of the most startling examples of how the mind can alter the immune response was discovered by chance. In 1975 psychologist Robert Ader at the University of Rochester School of Medicine conditioned (使形成条件反射) mice to avoid saccharin (糖精) by simultaneously feeding them the sweetener and injecting them with a drug that while suppressing their immune systems caused stomach upsets. Associating the saccharin with the stomach pains, the mice quickly learned to avoid the sweetener. In order to extinguish this dislike for the sweetener, Ader reexposed the animals to saccharin, this time without the drug, and was astonished to find that those mice that had received the highest amounts of sweetener during their earlier conditioning died. He could only speculate that he had so successfully conditioned the rats that saccharin alone now served to weaken their immune systems enough to kill them. The word "vulnerable"(in Par

A. 1) means______.A. fragileB. ambiguousC. soberD. dedicated

There is no question that the old style of air pollution could kill people. In one week following the infamous "peasouper" fog in December 1952,4,700 people died in London. Most of these people were elderly and already had heart or lung diseases. A series of these killer fogs eventually led to the British Parliament passing the Clean Air Act which restricted the burning of coal. Fortunately the effect of smog on the lungs is not so dramatic. Scientists have now conducted a number of laboratory experiments in which volunteers are exposed to ozone inside a steel chamber for a few hours. Even at quite low concentrations there is a reversible fall in lung function, an increase in the irritability of the lungs and evidence of airway inflammation. Although irritable and inflamed lungs are particularly seen in people with asthma (哮喘) and other lung diseases, these effects of ozone also occur in healthy subjects. Similar changes are also seen after exposure to nitrogen dioxide, although there is some disagreement about the concentration at which they occur. Other studies have found that people living in areas with high levels of pollution have more symptoms and worse lung function than those living in areas with clean air. Groups of children attending school camps show falls in lung function even at quite low concentrations of ozone. There is also a relationship between ozone levels and hospital admissions for asthma, both in North America and Australia. It is suspected that long-term exposure to smog may result in chronic bronchitis (支气管炎) and emphysema (肺气肿), but this has yet to be proven. Recently an association has been found between the levels of particles in the air and death rates in North American cities. The reason for this association is not understood and as yet there is no evidence this occurs in Australia. However, we do know that hazy days are associated with more asthma attacks in children. In the last sentence of the third paragraph, the word "suspected" can be best replaced by______.

A. doubtful
B. supposed
C. suspicious
D. said

Many things make people think artists are weird—the odd hours, the nonconformity, the clove cigarettes. However, the weirdest may be this: artists’ only jobs are to explore emotions, and yet they choose to focus on the ones that feel lousy. This wasn’t always so. The earliest forms of art, like painting and music, are those best suited for expressing joy. But somewhere in the 19th(上标) century, more artists began seeing happiness as insipid, phony or, worst of all, boring. In the 20th(上标) century, classical music became more atonal, visual art more unsettling. Sure, there have been exceptions, but it would not be a stretch to say that for the past century or so, serious art has been at war with happiness. In 1824, Beethoven completed his "Ode to Joy". In 1962, novelist Anthoy Burgess used it in A Clockwork Orange as the favorite music of his ultra-violent antihero. You could argue that art became more skeptical of happiness because modern times have seen such misery. But the reason may actually be just the opposite: there is too much damn happiness in the world today. In the West, before mass communication and literacy, the most powerful mass medium was the church, which reminded worshippers that their souls were in peril and that they would someday be meat for worms. Today the messages that the average Westerner is bombarded with are not religious but commercial, and relentlessly happy. Since these messages have an agenda—to prey our wallets from our pockets—they make the very idea of happiness seem bogus(假的). "Celebrate!" commanded the ads for the arthritis drug Celebrex, before we found out it could increase the risk of heart attack. What we forget—what our economy depends on us forgetting—is that happiness is more than pleasure without pain. The things that bring the greatest joy carry the greatest potential for loss and disappointment. Today, surrounded by promises of easy happiness, we need someone to tell us that it is OK not to be happy, that sadness makes happiness deeper. As the wine-connoisseur movie Sideways tells us, it is the kiss of decay and mortality that makes grape juice into Pinot Norway need art to tell us, as religion once did, that you will die, that everything ends, and that happiness comes not in denying this but in living with it. It’s a message even more bitter than a clove cigarette, yet, somehow, is a breath of fresh air. The word "Celebrex" in the advertisement______.

A. misleads people into buying dangerous drugs
B. reminds people of a cheerful feeling
C. boasts of the effectiveness of a drug
D. comes from a religious term

认真阅读“给定资料”,简要回答下面两题。 根据“给定资料”,概括我国现阶段干群关系的基本情况。 要求:内容全面,观点明确,思路清楚,语言准确,不超过300字。

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