1 . Social distancing is not a new concept in the natural world, where infectious diseases are commonplace. Through specialized senses animals can detect certain diseases and change their behavior to avoid getting ill.
In 1966, while studying chimps (猩猩) in a Tanzanian national park, zoologist Jane Goodall observed a chimp named McGregor who had caught a highly infectious virus. His fellow chimps attacked him and threw him out of the troop. In one instance, McGregor approached chimps in a tree. He reached out a hand in greeting, but the others moved away without a backward glance.
“For a full two minutes, old McGregor sat motionless, staring after them,” Goodall notes in her 1971 book In the Shadow of Man. “It’s really not that different to how some societies react today to such a tragedy.”
Not all animals are so aggressive toward their ailing neighbors. Sometimes it’s as simple as avoiding those who may infect you.
When Kiesecker, a lead scientist in America, studied American bullfrog in the late 1990s, he found that bullfrogs could not only detect a deadly smell of infection in other bullfrogs, but healthy members actively avoided those that were sick. Bullfrogs rely on chemicals signals to determine who is sick or not.
Caribbean lobsters also shun diseased members of their community, well before they become infectious. It takes about eight weeks for lobsters infected with the deadly virus Panulirus argus mininuceovirus to become dangerous to others. Normally social animals, lobsters begin keeping away from the diseased as early as four weeks after infection – once the lobsters can smell certain chemicals released by sick individuals.
Overall, it’s important to note that, unlike us, animals don’t realize if they stay home, they might actually reduce the infection rate,” Kiesecker explains. “As humans, we have that ability. It’s a big difference.”
1. What can we learn about the chimps from Goodall’s observation?| A．They kept a distance from one another. |
| B．They became aggressive when infected. |
| C．The infected avoided contact with others. |
| D．The infected were forced to leave the group. |
| A．Avoid. | B．Cure. | C．Get rid of. | D．Get along with. |
| A．Humans are more sensitive to virus. |
| B．Humans are less likely to get infected. |
| C．Humans treat infectious diseases in a wiser way. |
| D．Humans can detect chemical signals more quickly. |
| A．Help Me Out |
| B．Leave Me Alone |
| C．Stay Away From Us |
| D．Stay Home Stay Healthy |
2 . How can we possibly cope with the large amount of information about virus spread,stock market nosedives,canceled plans and uncertainty about the future?Some people are buried in the fear,anxiety and sadness,checking news sites and social media constantly.Others try to suppress it all and ignore the outside world(I'm guessing that Instagram has never seen so much traffic).
There's a third option,though.Rather than fully involving in the negative or ignoring it, we can do our best to experience joy alongside everything else that is sad in the world.In fact, research that I and others have conducted suggests that allowing the two different emotions to coexist may actually benefit us in the long run.
Dr.Jeff Larsen and his colleagues coined something known as the"coactivation model of mixed emotions",and the basic idea is that we may be able to deal with,and learn from negative emotions like sadness if we experience them concurrently with positive emotions like joy at the same time.Here,positive emotions provide a psychological buffer(缓冲），making it easier for people to deal with the things they don't want to face.
The comedian Mitch Hedberg proposed an analogy that captures this essence quite well, noting that“it would be cool if you could eat a carrot with an onion ring and they would travel down to your stomach.Then they would get there,and the carrot would say,'It's cool,he's with me .’ Applied to our emotional lives,we could do a better job in digesting,processing gaining insight into the negative events in our lives if we could do so alongside the positive.
Several years ago,my partner Jon Adler and I set out to test this exact idea.Specifically, we looked at sample of adult volunteers who signed up or weekly mental health therapy sessions.Between each week,they reported the feelings they were having and also took a few questionnaires that were meant to assess their overall health.This design allowed us to examine how different emotional experiences would impact mental health in a longitudinal fashion,over the course of 12 weeks.
1. What does the author recommend people to do with a flood of bad news?| A．Take no notice of it at all. |
| B．Make better plans to fight against it. |
| C．Take in all of the negative emotions. |
| D．Involve in the negative and enjoy happiness as well. |
| A．Mixed emotions remain to be proved. |
| B．The negative emotion is easy to deal with. |
| C．The positive emotion makes it easier for people to succeed. |
| D．Mixed emotions allow people to handle the negative better. |
| A．Exhibition. | B．Promotion. | C．Similarity. | D．Requirement. |
| A．To measure the volunteers health on the whole. |
| B．To record what the volunteers are experiencing. |
| C．To treat the mental diseases of the adults. |
| D．To overturn the theory coactivation model of mixed emotions. |
