文章大意：这是一篇说明文。根据《自然神经科学》的一项研究，这是因为大脑的某些部分对孤独的反应就像对饥饿的反应一样。文章解释了研究开展的经过以及这样的研究可以帮助科学家了解大脑是如何处理孤独的，并可能减少消极后果。
2 . When you have to cancel your Thanksgiving plans due to the spread of the COVID-19, you may find yourself craving companionship as much as that pumpkin pie. That’s because parts of the brain respond to loneliness much like they react to hunger, according to a study in Nature Neuroscience.
Researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology scanned the brains of 40 healthy, social young adults after 10 hours of either fasting (禁食) or social isolation (隔离). They found that after being alone, participants’ neurological responses to social signals were similar to hungry people reacting to food — that is, certain areas of the brain linked to desire were turned on to start working.
For an isolated person, a picture of people laughing together caused the same areas of the brain to light up as when a hungry person looked at a big plate of pasta.
“Just like hunger is an unpleasant sensation that motivates us to seek out food and thirst motivates us to seek out water, loneliness is a biological need that motivates us to reconnect to others,” Holt-Lunstad told Insider.
Researchers were surprised to find that people who were prevented from socializing became much more focused on that need, and less reactive to hunger. As their loneliness increased, they became less responsive to images of food.
These latest findings suggest that the relationship between food and loneliness might be more complicated than we thought, despite the popular opinion of stress-eating to cope with social isolation. More research is needed to understand the complex ways people deal with loneliness.
Studies like this can help scientists understand how the brain processes loneliness, and possibly reduce the negative consequences. However, although loneliness may be similar to hunger, fixing it isn’t as easy as serving someone a hearty dinner because people are unique and they need varying levels of social interactions to meet their needs.
1. The underlined word “craving” in the first paragraph can be replaced by
.
| A．avoiding | B．desiring | C．preferring | D．ignoring |
2. Researchers scanned the brains of the young adults
.
| A．to find their brain responses to both loneliness and hunger |
| B．to provide explanations for their feeling lonely and hungry |
| C．to find how loneliness can have a negative impact on health |
| D．after they have been hungry and socially isolated for 10 hours |
3. What conclusion can be drawn from what Holt-Lunstad said in Paragraph 4?
| A．Hunger is an unpleasant sensation. |
| B．Hunger and thirst motivate us to feed ourselves. |
| C．Socializing is supposed to be basic human need as it is. |
| D．The effects of loneliness on health are comparable to other factors. |
4. What does the last paragraph imply?
| A．Loneliness may be fixed just as hunger is satisfied. |
| B．Situations of loneliness are complicated and hard to cope with. |
| C．Scientists have understood how the brain processes loneliness. |
| D．Loneliness is such a common and serious problem that we all have to suffer. |
