【编者按】精品学习网英语四六级频道为大家收集整理了“大学六级阅读：研究显示快乐的人比一般人长寿35%”供大家参考，希望对大家有所帮助!
本篇阅读材料“研究显示快乐的人比一般人长寿35%”选自《今日美国》(原文标题：Happy? You may live 35% longer, tracking study suggests 2011.10.31)。如果大家觉得比较简单，就当作泛读材料了解了解，认识几个新单词或新表达方式也不错。如果大家觉得这些材料理解上有难度，不妨当做挑战自己的拔高训练，希望大家都有进步^^
Be happy. Live longer.
No, it’s not that simple, but new research says happy lives are longer — by 35%.
The study, published today in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, found that those who reported feeling happiest had a 35% reduced risk of dying compared with those who reported feeling least happy.
Rather than rely on recollections about their feelings of happiness as in earlier studies, this British study of 3,853 participants ages 52-79 rated their feelings at different times on one particular day. Five years later, researchers recorded the number who died and controlled for a variety of factors, including age, gender, health, wealth, education and marital status.
rely on 依靠;依赖
This approach "gets closer to measuring how people actually feel" rather than relying on recollections or general questions about well-being, says epidemiologist Andrew Steptoe, a psychology professor at University College in London, who co-authored the study.
epidemiologist n. 流行病学家
How happy a person is at any point in time, he says, is a product of "some background disposition; some people tend to be happier than others," but also "what they are doing, who they are with, and other features of that point in time. Both are important."
"It’s perfectly true that someone’s happiness over a single day will be affected by what happens to them over that period," Steptoe says. "However, survey experts and psychologists have come to the view that in many ways, this is a better approach to understanding how people actually feel than asking them general questions about how happy they are. Responses to general questions are influenced strongly by personality, by what people think they ’ought’ to say and by recollections that might not be quite accurate," Steptoe says.
What’s not clear, he says, is whether happy feelings are the key to longevity or if it’s something else that causes extended life. "We can’t draw the kind of final conclusion that the happiness is leading directly to better survival," he says.
longevity n. 长寿;寿命
draw a conclusion 下结论
Others who have done research in this area but haven’t read the study say this link between a one-day measure and mortality is important.
"The fact that positive emotions in one day predicted survival is pretty amazing," says Sonja Lyubomirsky, a psychology professor at the University of California, Riverside.
"We do know that happiness is associated with an extended life span," she says. If we can get people to be happier, would that extend the lifespan? We don’t know that yet. Future research can definitely try to show that."
Arthur Stone, a professor of psychiatry and psychology at Stony Brook University in New York, who has used measurements over the course of a day in his research, says the fact that the researchers "got a relationship with mortality means that the relationship must be fairly robust because they only had 3,800 people and they were only measuring the one day."