2014考研英语二真题完型填空文章出处
原文出处：美国大西洋月刊
原文标题：Is Obesity Really a Disease?（肥胖症真的是一种病吗？）
刊登时间：Jun 24 2013
原文节选：
Thinner isn't always better. A number of epidemiological studies have concluded that normal-weight people are in fact at higher risk of some diseases, including cardiovascular disease, compared to those whose who are overweight. And there are health conditions for which being overweight is actually protective. For example, heavier women are less likely to develop osteoporosis than thin women. Likewise, among the elderly, being somewhat overweight is often an indicator of good health..
Of even greater concern is the fact that obesity turns out to be very difficult to delineate. It is often defined in terms of body mass index, or BMI. BMI equals body mass divided by the square of height. An adult with a BMI of 18 to 25 is often considered to be normal weight. Between 25 and 30 is overweight. And over 30 is considered obese. Obesity, in turn, can be divided into moderately obese (30 to 35), severely obese (35 to 40), and very severely obese (over 40).
A hearty appetite generally indicates health and may even suggest that a person knows how to enjoy life.While such numerical standards seem straightforward, they are not. Obesity is probably less a matter of weight than body fat . Some people with a high BMI are in fact extremely fit, while others with a low BMI may be in poor shape. For example, many collegiate and professional football players qualify as obese, though their percentage body fat is low. By BMI, Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson is obese. Conversely, someone with a small frame may have high body fat but a normal BMI.
Today we have a tendency to stigmatize obesity. The overweight are sometimes pictured in the media with their faces covered. Stereotypes associated with obesity include laziness, lack of will power, and lower prospects for success. Teachers, employers, and health professionals have been shown to harbor biases against the obese. Even very young children tend to look down on the overweight, and teasing about body build has long been a problem in schools.
2014考研英语二真题阅读理解文章出处
Text 1
原文出处：经济学人（The Economist）
原文标题：《金钱和幸福》（Money and happiness）
刊登时间：Jun 22nd 2013
原文节选：
WHAT would you do with $590m? This is now a question for Gloria MacKenzie, an 84-year-old widow who recently emerged from her small, tin-roofed house inFloridato collect the biggest undivided lottery jackpot in history. The blogosphere is full of advice for this lucky Powerball pensioner. But if she hopes her new-found lucre will yield lasting feelings of fulfilment, she could do worse than read “Happy Money” by Elizabeth Dunn and Michael Norton.
These two academics—she teaches psychology at theUniversityofBritish Columbia; he lectures on marketing atHarvardBusinessSchool—use an array of behavioural research to show that the most rewarding ways to spend money can be counterintuitive. Fantasies of great wealth often involve visions of fancy cars and palatial homes on remote bluffs. Yet satisfaction with these material purchases wears off fairly quickly. What was once exciting and new becomes old-hat; remorse creeps in. It is far better to spend money on experiences, say Ms Dunn and Mr Norton, like interesting trips, unique meals or even going to the cinema. These purchases often become more valuable with time—as stories or memories—particularly if they involve feeling more connected to others.
This slim volume is packed with tips to help wage slaves as well as lottery winners get the most “happiness bang for your buck”. It seems most people would be better off if they could shorten their commutes to work, spend more time with friends and family and less of it watching television (something the average American spends a whopping two months a year doing, and is hardly jollier for it). Buying gifts or giving to charity is often more pleasurable than purchasing things for oneself, and luxuries are most enjoyable when they are consumed sparingly. This is apparently the reason McDonald’s restricts the availability of its popular McRib—a marketing gimmick that has turned the pork sandwich into an object of obsession.
Readers of “Happy Money” are clearly a privileged lot, anxious about fulfilment, not hunger. Money may not quite buy happiness, but people in wealthier countries are generally happier than those in poor ones. Yet the link between feeling good and spending money on others can be seen among rich and poor people around the world, and scarcity enhances the pleasure of most things for most people. Not everyone will agree with the authors’ policy ideas, which range from mandating more holiday time to reducing tax incentives for American homebuyers. But most people will come away from this book believing it was money well spent.
Text 2
原文出处：星报在线（The Star Online）
原文标题：《怎样改善自己的相貌》（How-we-really-rate-our-looks）
刊登时间：June 29, 2013
原文节选：
Some advertising would have us believe that we’re more beautiful than we think we are. In fact, the reverse may be true.
WE HAVE a deep-seated need to feel good about ourselves and we naturally employ a number of self-enhancing (to use the psychological terminology) strategies to achieve this.
Social psychologists have amassed oceans of research into what they call the “above-average effect”, or “illusory superiority”, and shown that, for example, 70% of us rate ourselves as above average in leadership, 93% in driving (across the ages and genders) and 85% at getting on well with others – all obviously statistical impossibilities.
We rose-tint our memories and put ourselves into self-affirming situations. We become defensive when criticised, and apply negative stereotypes to others to boost our own self-esteem. We strut around thinking we’re hot stuff.
Psychologist and behavioural scientist Nicholas Epley oversaw a key study into self-enhancement and attractiveness. Rather than have people simply rate their beauty compared with others, he asked them to identify an original photograph of themselves from a line-up, including versions that had been morphed to appear more and less attractive. Visual recognition, reads the study, is “an automatic psychological process, occurring rapidly and intuitively with little or no apparent conscious deliberation”. If the subjects quickly chose a falsely-flattering image – which most did – they genuinely believed it was really how they looked.
Epley found no significant gender difference in responses. Nor was there any evidence that those who self-enhanced the most (that is, the participants who thought the most positively-doctored pictures were real) were doing so to make up for profound insecurities. In fact, those who thought that the images higher up the attractiveness scale were real, directly corresponded with those who showed other markers for having higher self-esteem.
“I don’t think the findings that we have are any evidence of personal delusion,” says Epley. “It’s a reflection simply of people generally thinking well of themselves.” If you are depressed, you won’t be self-enhancing.
Knowing the results of Epley’s study, it makes sense that many people hate photographs of themselves so viscerally – on one level, they don’t even recognise the person in the picture as themselves. Facebook, therefore, is a self-enhancer’s paradise, where people can share only the flukiest of flattering photos, the cream of their wit, style, beauty, intellect and lifestyles. It’s not that people’s profiles are dishonest, says Catalina Toma of Wisconsin-Madison University, “but they portray an idealised version of themselves”. (People are much more likely to out-and-out lie on dating websites, to an audience of strangers.)
Text 3
原文出处：劳伦斯日报（Lawrence Journal-World）
原文标题：《科学发现情绪会影响眼泪的化学成分》
刊登时间：March 1984
原文节选：

Text 4
原文出处：英国卫报（The guardian）
原文标题：综合开支审查可能会扭转房市危机（Comprehensive spending review could turn the housing crisis around）
刊登时间：June 2013
原文节选：
The government has been slow to wake up to the fact that housing is potentially one of the important drivers of economic recovery.
As Danny Alexander, chief secretary to the Treasury, recently made clear in a speech to the Manchester Chamber of Commerce, when the government talks about infrastructure contributing to the economy the focus is usually on roads, railways, broadband and energy. Housing is seldom mentioned.
Why is that? To some extent the housing sector must shoulder the blame. We have not been good at communicating the real value that housing can contribute to economic growth. Then there is the scale of the typical housing project. It is hard to jostle for attention among multibillion-pound infrastructure projects, so it is inevitable that the attention is focused elsewhere. But perhaps the most significant reason is that the issue has always been so politically charged. This government does not want to see a return to large-scale provision of council housing, so it is naturally wary of measures that will lead us down that route.
Nevertheless, the affordable housing situation is desperate. Waiting lists increase all the time and we are simply not building enough new homes.
The comprehensive spending review offers an opportunity for the government to help rectify this. It needs to put historical prejudices to one side and take some steps to address our urgent housing need.
There are some indications that it is preparing to do just that. The communities minister, Don Foster, has hinted that George Osborne may introduce more flexibility to the current cap on the amount that local authorities can borrow against their housing stock debt. The cap, introduced in 2012 as part of the Housing Revenue Account reform, has been a major issue for the sector. Evidence shows that 60,000 extra new homes could be built over the next five years if the cap were lifted, increasing GDP by 0.6%.
Ministers should also look at creating greater certainty in the rental environment, which would have a significant impact on the ability of registered providers to fund new developments from revenues.
Finally, they should look at the way in which public sector land is released. Currently up-front payments are required, putting a financial burden on the housing provider. A more positive stimulus would be to encourage a system where the land is made available and maintained as a long-term equity stake in the project.
But it is not just down to the government. While these measures would be welcome in the short term, we must face up to the fact that the existing £4.5bn programme of grants to fund new affordable housing, set to expire in 2015, is unlikely to be extended beyond then. The Labour party has recently announced that it will retain a large part of the coalition's spending plans if it returns to power. The housing sector needs to accept that we are very unlikely to ever return to the era of large-scale public grants. We need to adjust to this changing climate.
2014考研英语二真题翻译文章出处
原文出处：时代杂志
原文标题：A Primer for Pessimists
刊登时间：March, 2009
原文节选：
Most people would define optimism as being eternally hopeful, endlessly happy, with a glass that’s perpetually half full. But that’s exactly the kind of false cheerfulness that positive psychologists wouldn’t recommend. “Healthy optimism means being in touch with reality,” says Tal Ben-Shahar, a Harvard professor who taught the university’s most popular course, Positive Psychology, from 2002 to 2008. “It certainly doesn’t mean thinking everything is great and wonderful.”
Ben-Shahar, who is the author of Happier and The Pursuit of Perfect, describes realistic optimists an “optimalists”—not those who believe everything happens for the best, but those who make the best of things that happen.
In his own life, Ben-Shahar uses three optimalist exercises, which he calls PRP. When he feels down—say, after giving a bad lecture—he grants himself permission (P) to be human. He reminds himself that not every lecture can be a Nobel winner; some will be less effective than others. Next is reconstruction (R). He analyzes the weak lecture, learning lessons for the future about what works and what doesn’t. Finally, there’s perspective (P), which involves acknowledging that in the grand scheme of life, one lecture really doesn’t matter.
Studies suggest thatpeople who are able to focus on the positive aspects of a negative event—basically, cope with failure—can protect themselves from the physical toll of stress and anxiety. In a recent study at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), scientists asked a group of women to give a speech in front of a stone-faced audience of strangers. On the first day, all the participants said they felt threatened, and they showed fear hormones. On subsequent days, however, those women who had reported rebounding from a major life crisis in the past no longer felt the same subjective threat over speaking in public. They had learned that this negative event, too, would pass and they would survive. “It’s a back door to the same positive state because people are able to tolerate and accept the negative,” says Elissa Epel, one of the psychologists involved in the study.

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