1 . 阅读下面短文，根据题目要求回答问题。

Anxiety is not deadly, because being able to feel anxious shows that our fight-or-flight system is operational, which is an indicator of brain and sensory health. Once we accept that being anxious is a normal part of life, we can use it to our benefit.

Anxiety can help build our emotional strength. If we want to build emotional strength, we need to face some degree of mental stress. Of course, unpleasant and abuse tend to cause more harm than good, but the experience of occasional anxiety, stress, and tension substantially increases our emotional courage.

Anxiety can increase your emotional connection. Clinical science has identified that sharing our anxieties with our loved ones is one of the most effective strategies to build connection. When my patients learn to open up and share their anxieties with their partners, they almost always report a greater sense of emotional connection.

Anxiety can help us rebalance. When we feel genuinely anxious because of stress, it’s our body’s way of telling us to rebalance. Nobody is truly limitless. When we pay attention to our internal cues and acknowledge our weaknesses, we emerge more focused and healthier overall and also less stressed and anxious.

Anxiety can be a healthy, helpful emotion that is a constructive aspect of human life. When it comes to occasional experience of anxiety, it can emotionally help boost our courage. It can also build up emotional connect ion when we express our sensitive feelings to others. And in the form of stress, it can serve as an internal indicator to remain balanced and healthy. Now it’s high time we started putting it to good use．

1. Why is anxiety not deadly?

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2. When can anxiety increase our emotional connection?

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3. Please decide which part is false in the following statement, then underline it and explain why?

When we pay attention to our internal cues and acknowledge our weaknesses, we emerge more focused and healthier overall and also more stressed and anxious．

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4. As a student, how do you make use of test anxiety to help you be better prepared for exams? (In about 40 words)

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2 . How We Talk about Fear Matters

Lately, there seems to be plenty to fear in the world. How we talk about what we fear might offer clues to how we perceive that emotion socially and culturally.

Get the root of fear.

    1    . In Anglo Saxon times, “fear” primarily referred to sudden danger. The root of the word dates back to “pēr” from Indo-European about 6,000 years ago. This root suggests that fear developed from a sudden (frightening) experience you passed through.

Figure out the emotional meaning of fear.

Whether emotions are viewed positively or negatively varies from culture to culture.    2     . For instance, in English, the word “anxious” can be used to mean “worried” or “eager”. But the word meaning “anxious” just means “regret” in Dargwa. Therefore, many English speakers may not view anxiety as negatively as Dargwa speakers.

Find out a fearful pattern.

In looking at such patterns across the major language families, researchers found that the word “fear” was often associated with anxiety, envy and grief in Indo-European languages. But in Austronesian languages, “fear” more often was associated with surprise.     3     .

    4    

How we talk about fear changes how we react to it. When we talk about what frightens us, it may be useful to disrupt associated meanings. In addition, how our language categorizes an emotion seems to impact whether we perceive those emotions negatively or positively.

In conclusion, fear is something that can be changed by cultural and linguistic experience.    5     . Perhaps Roosevelt was right when he in famously said “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.”

A．Talk more about fears

B．Change our perception of fear

C．The word fear has a long history in English

D．There seemed a fearful pattern across the major language families

E．This is based on what people have learned to associate with emotion words

F．It opens the door to potential ways to change how we talk about and react to it

G．This makes speakers of the latter languages associate this emotion with a less negative sense

3 . A Way Out of Social Anxiety: Volunteering and Acts of Kindness

As a socially anxious introvert, I can attest(证明)to the benefits of serving others through volunteering in my community.

A volunteer job doesn’t need to require stepping into a busy room full of 100 people at a school or hospital.     1     This kind of work is much more suitable and agreeable for introverts.

    2     When I help elders or people with disabilities who are more isolated and lonelier than I am, I feel my nervousness and self-consciousness disappear. My social awkwardness loses its grip on me when I’m focused on helping someone else rather than myself or my social performance. Unlike showing up at a job interview, business meeting, or speaking engagement, working as a volunteer with people in need takes the spotlight away from being measured or judged.     3    

Social scientists have an apt name for stressful social situations where we need to perform and would likely be judged or evaluated. The “social-evaluative threat” is particularly threatening for people with social anxiety as stress hormones rapidly increase. Any time we are in evaluative situations where we are judged by others, we face this social-evaluative threat and endure a sudden rush of stress hormones that increase anxiety.     4     Yet when we are in situations where we are offering casual acts of kindness or nurturing others we tend to feel less threatened or judged by others. Helping others and sharing simple acts of kindness does not pose such a social-evaluative threat, but instead, calms and soothes us. Neuroscientists have studied the warm glow of doing good that makes us feel good.

“Kindness may help socially anxious people,” says Dr. Lynn Alden, a psychology professor at the University of British Columbia.     5     She found that acts of kindness may help to counter the socially anxious person’s fear of negative evaluation by promoting more positive perceptions and expectations of how other people will respond.

A．Some people are naturally reserved while others are rather outgoing.

B．In social anxiety disorder, fear and anxiety lead to avoidance which can disrupt our life.

C．Indeed, my own act of kindness has always been a sure bet to bring me out of my shell.

D．Instead, my volunteer service consists of quiet one-on-one visits with isolated older adults.

E．When I am giving my free time to help others, I feel truly liberated in my mission to serve.

F．High-performance events such as public speaking or job interviews can be really unbearable.

G．She and her colleagues conducted a study with 115 undergraduate students who had reported high levels of social anxiety.

4 . 阅读下面短文，根据题目要求用英文回答问题。请在答题卡指定区域作答。

“An apple a day keeps the doctor away.” We all know that healthy habits can help us build a strong body, but how can we live a happy life? Over the past two decades, scientists have identified many techniques to raise our happiness, but these methods cannot work magic. “Things like poverty or injury are obviously going to affect your well-being,” says Laurie Santos, at Yale University. “But for many of us, our happiness is much more under our control than we think.” Her free course, The Science of Well-being, explores evidence-based ways to increase happiness.

For a taste of what the course involves, consider our tendency to compare ourselves negatively with the people around us. By recognizing when those thoughts have started to arise, you can consciously shift the reference point to something more neutral(中立的).With this kind of thinking, you may start to feel more content.

The use of gratitude journals, where you regularly count your blessing, work on a similar basis. We have a tendency for “hedonic adaptation”, essentially getting used to the good things in our life over time, and taking them for granted, so they no longer bring us the same interest—we should delay that process.

Other tips like small acts of kindness may surprise you with rewarding experience. However, those approaches to happier life should be used carefully. There is now some evidence that pursuit of happiness can have the opposite effect if it becomes time-consuming. Keeping a gratitude journal appears to be effective if it is used once a week. It seems that the technique may become a burden if it is practiced too regularly.

There seems little doubt that we can learn to be happier, but we should recognize that the path to a better life is with ups and downs. You cannot remove every negative feeling, but with some science-backed strategies, you can shift the balance so as to experience more positive feeling than negative ones.

1. How can we deal with the tendency to compare ourselves negatively with those around us?
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2. What does “hedonic adaptation” mean?
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3. Please decide which part is false in the following statement, then underline it and explain why.
As approaches to happier life small acts of kindness can effectively improve our well-being, we should use them as much as possible.
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4. In addition to the methods mentioned in the passage, what other method(s) can you take to increase happiness? (In about 40 words)
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5 . Have you ever bought a new car and started noticing the exact color and model of car everywhere? Has that type of car just become popular in your city? Were they there before? Or are you just going crazy?

You’re not going crazy. The reason you are now just noticing them is what psychologists call “priming”. Basically, the cars were always there. You just didn’t recognize them consciously. However, when that certain model of car becomes part of your conscious thinking, you start “automatically” recognizing all of the other cars that are the same, because you are already “primed” to do so.

The priming effect takes many forms. In one study, students were asked to walk around a room for 5 minutes at a rate of 30 steps per minute, which was about one-third their normal pace. After this brief experience, the participants were much quicker to recognize words related to old age, such as forgetful, old, and lonely. Reciprocal priming effects tend to produce a coherent reaction: if you are primed to think of old age, you would tend to act old, and acting old would reinforce the thought of old age. This research shows that the way we think influences the way we act, and the way we act influences the way we think.

A similar conclusion was reached by the American psychologist William James a century ago, but he emphasized the effect on feeling. “Actions seem to follow feeling, but really actions and feeling go together; and by regulating the action, which is under the more direct control of the will, we can indirectly regulate the feeling, which is not. Thus the path to cheerfulness, should our cheerfulness be lost, is to sit up cheerfully and to act and speak as if cheerfulness were already there.”

So, that’s it. If you want to be happy, just sit up and act happy. Based on these scientific findings, we can adopt certain priming effects to help make ourselves consistently happier.

One thing we have in common is our ability to think, and thus feel. Pleasant thoughts have been proven to produce the chemicals that make us feel happy, particularly thoughts and feelings of gratitude. When we purposefully go through and think about the things we’re grateful for and deliberately feel as much gratitude as we can, we are flooding our mind with the “happy chemicals”. Furthermore, by consciously thinking, feeling and expressing gratitude, we will not only be happier in the moment, we will be “primed” to recognize the things in our life to appreciate. Each time this happens, the “happy chemicals” will be produced. Do this every day and we will become consistently happier. This makes up for the momentary happiness we gain from eating chocolate or buying new clothes. More than that, combining thoughts of gratitude with happy acts like smiling and laughing will have a supplementary positive effect on our state of mind.

1. Which of the following is an example of the priming effect?

A．Walking much faster after attending a lecture about old age.

B．Donating money to the poor after seeing pictures of cute cats.

C．Learning about various types of cars after purchasing the first car.

D．Completing SO_P as SOUP rather than SOAP after seeing the word EAT.

2. What does the underlined word “reciprocal” in Paragraph 3 probably mean?

A．Related.

B．Two-way.

C．Well-rounded.

D．Opposite.

3. What will the author probably agree with?

A．Eating or shopping leads to consistent feelings of happiness.

B．Our will has greater control over emotions than over actions.

C．Happy chemicals make us think about the things we’re grateful for.

D．Practicing gratitude frequently prepares us for long-term happiness.

4. Which of the following would be the best title for the passage?

A．Prime Yourself to Be Happier

B．Share Happiness to Enhance Wellbeing

C．Why Gratitude Is Important in Psychology

D．How Happy Chemicals Affect People’s Thoughts

6 . Ryuichi Sakamoto, the Japanese composer who died on March 28, 2023, was a talented musician. For many, his combination of noisy notes and joyous ones made him timeless and avant-garde (前卫的). But for me, Sakamoto was first and foremost a creator of complex emotions.

Before I learned to love Sakamoto, my mother loved him. After her days studying textiles (纺织) at a women’s college in our hometown of Nagoya, Japan, she would come home and play the Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence theme over and over. When she sat at her piano bench, she was trying to mold herself into the most attracting woman that she could be. Still, her childhood desire for a bigger life never died. Years later, when she played it again on that same piano, now transported to our Chicago home, her hands would crash down on Sakamoto’s drumming and upset bridge. It seemed that she buried herself in her younger dream and at the same time got lost in the reality of living away from her home and family. Both the joy of a fulfilled dream and the sorrow of its harsh realities mixed in Sakamoto’s score, pervading (弥漫) our living room.

Following in my mother’s footsteps, I too learned to play Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence. I played it in an open music room at college, where I was quite depressed under the gaze of strangers as well as excited about becoming my own adult. I played Sakamoto again in my then-boyfriend’s grandparents’ sitting room, the piece now reflecting my struggle to see how my Japanese and American self could fit into this white family, even though I was in love.

Sakamoto’s genius for telling the contradictions (矛盾) of existence arises again and again. I’m still playing Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence, now at the electric piano in my living room, as I puzzle through becoming a new mother, frightened and thrilled at the same time. Maybe someday my daughter will play Sakamoto’s music, and it will help her understand her life too.

1. The author loves Sakamoto for_________.

A．his Japanese identity

B．his talent as a composer

C．his way to combine notes

D．his creation of mixed emotions

2. How did the author’s mother feel when she played Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence in Chicago?

A．Contented with her current life.

B．Joyful and sorry at the same time

C．Annoyed with the difficult bridge

D．Lonely and upset away from home.

3. What is this passage mainly about?

A．The life and accomplishments of Ryuichi Sakamoto.

B．The challenges of being a Japanese-American woman.

C．Contradicting emotions aroused by Sakamoto’s music.

D．A mother and daughter’s shared love for playing the piano.

7 . If you are of the “no regrets” school of life, you might think that all this regret is a recipe for unhappiness. But that isn’t the case. True, letting yourself be overwhelmed by regret is indeed bad for you. But going to the other extreme may be even worse. To extinguish your regrets doesn’t free you from shame or sorrow; it consigns you to make the same mistakes again and again. To truly get over our guilt requires that we put regret in its proper place.

As uncomfortable as it is, regret is an amazing cognitive feat. It requires that you go back to a past scenario, imagine that you acted differently to change it, and with that new scenario in mind, arrive at a different present — and then, compare that fictional present with the one you are experiencing in reality.     1     You would remember your own pettiness and irritability, and then imagine yourself showing more patience, being kind instead of hurtful at key moments. Then you would fast-forward to today and see how your relationship could be flourishing instead of languishing.

    2     Pink says they come in four basic varieties, and an instance of regret may involve just one or a combination. Wishing you’d been kinder to your partner is an example of a connection regret, in which you lament behavior that harmed an important relationship, such as spoiling a romance or neglecting your bond with relatives before they died.

Many connection regrets overlap with moral regrets, which can come about after you violate your own values. For example, you may pride yourself on being a loving person, and thus regret not living up to this image in the relationship you harmed. Moral regrets can also involve just yourself.     3    

Pink’s other two categories of regrets involve life choices. Foundation regrets are those in which you did something that affected the course of your life in a way you don’t like. A classic example is wishing you had stayed in school.     4    . They are all about inaction and forgone opportunities. This is what you feel when you kick yourself for not taking a chance, as in wishing you had just gone up to that attractive person and introduced yourself.

    5     Regret is implicated in depression and anxiety, and excessive regret can adversely affect your hormones and immune system. In 2013, researchers asked one group of participants in an experiment to describe “your most burdensome regret” right before going to bed; this group took 61 percent longer to get to sleep than a group told to think about a typical day.

But regret doesn’t have to be left unmanaged. The trick is not to remove the bad feeling; it’s to acknowledge it and use it for learning and improvement. Instead of letting the specter of your failed relationship make you miserable, by simply wishing it had tuned out differently you can be honest with yourself about what went wrong and use that knowledge to enjoy better relationships in the future.

A．Not all regrets are the same of course.

B．Meanwhile, boldness regrets are the opposite.

C．Regret may hurt, but obsessing over them is destructive.

D．Your regret can teach you to become smarter and more successful — if you let it.

E．Unanalyzed and unmanaged, any variety of regret can be poison for your well-being.

F．Maybe you regret not living up to your commitment to your health when you ate a whole pizza or skipped the gym.

G．For example, if today your relationship with your partner has soured, your regret might mentally take you back to last year.

8 . Expressive writing or journaling is one way to help you heal from trauma (创伤).    1    . It can help you process what you’ve been through and assist you as you envision a path forward.

Why does a writing intervention work?    2    In fact, narrating the story of an ongoing anxiety “frees up” cognitive resources. When you write down the emotions associated with a traumatic experience, you may be changing the way it is organized in the brain. You are then able to detach from the emotion, making it easier for you to talk about and process the event.

However, for most people, the thought of acknowledging emotions and admitting that there’s something wrong with us is difficult. This is because expressing emotions can bring up feelings of guilt and shame.    3    That is what sets journaling apart. This is between you and your journal — you don’t have to share it with anyone unless, of course, you choose to.

If you’re interested in trying out writing as a tool for healing, start your writing by setting a timer for ten minutes.    4    Think of one object in your home that signifies a moment for you. See it in full color. Feel the weight of it. Use all your senses. Now, write about that object and see how large its meaning can become.

    5    How you heal from trauma can be different from person to person as well. It all depends on what works best for you. Remember, one size does not fit all. Writing may not work for everyone, but you won’t know if you don’t try.

A．Despite that, expressive writing remains an accessible tool.

B．Of course, expressive writing is hardly a panacea (灵丹妙药).

C．Also, seeking help for emotional stress is often seen as a sign of weakness.

D．It may seem abnormal that writing about negative experiences has a positive effect.

E．Once you have a better handle on your problems, you can move forward and get on with life.

F．It is writing from your heart and mind and about the emotion associated with a certain event.

G．Let your mind go to the detailed, specific moments to get to the feelings and truth of your experience.

9 . This was the first communication that had come from her aunt in Jessie’s lifetime.

“I think your aunt has forgiven me at last,” her father said as he passed the letter across the table.

Jessie looked first at the autograph(签名). It seemed strange to see her own name there. There was a likeness between her aunt’s autograph and her own, a hint of the same decisiveness and precision. If Jessie had been educated fifty years earlier, she might have written her name in just that manner.

“You’re very like her in some ways,” her father said, as she still stared at the autograph.

“I should think you must almost have forgotten what Aunt Jessie was like, dear,” she said. “How many years is it since you last saw her?”

“More than forty,” her father said. “We disagreed. We invariably disagreed. Jessie always prided herself on being so modern. She read Darwin and things like that. Altogether beyond me, I admit.”

“And so it seems that she wants to see me.” Jessie straightened her shoulders and lifted her head. She was excited at the thought of meeting this mythical aunt whom she had so often heard about. Sometimes she had wondered if the personality of this remarkable relative had not been a figment(虚构) of her father’s imagination.

But this letter of hers that now lay on the breakfast table was admirable in character. There was something of intolerance expressed in its tone. It was just like what her father had told her.

Mr. Deane came out of his past memories with a sigh.

“Yes, yes; she wants to see you, my dear,” he said. “I’ve heard she has set up a school and helped many youngsters. I think you had better accept this invitation to stay with her. If she took a fancy to you, you could get a better education…”

He sighed again, and Jessie knew that for the hundredth time he was regretting his own past weakness...

1. How was the relationship between Jessie’s father and her aunt?

A．It remained very close over the years.

B．It was broken when they were young.

C．It got tenser due to a misunderstanding.

D．It was uneasy for their financial differences.

2. From the passage, we know Jessie was          .

A．eager to meet her aunt.

B．cautious about her aunt’s invitation

C．angry with her aunt for ignoring her family.

D．puzzled by her aunt’s sudden interest in her

3. What can we learn from the passage?

A．Jessie’s aunt promised to offer her better education.

B．Jessie’s aunt’s personality seemed to change a lot.

C．Jessie and her aunt were different in personality.

D．Jessie’s father felt sorry for what he had done.

10 . The Positive Effects of a Positive Affect

Parents often have high hopes for how their children will turn out in adulthood, such as wanting them to be healthy, to feel satisfied with their career, and to have strong friendships.    1    

Recent research suggests that a teen’s affect—especially positive affect—is one critical factor. What exactly is affect? Affect is the tendency to express positive or negative emotions, which in turn influences how we experience things and determine whether to judge a given situation as positive or negative.    2     Moreover, research suggests that a person’s affect is relatively stable over time, especially by the time one reaches adulthood.

Affect is typically described in terms of being either positive or negative, and it seems that positive affect, in particular, is related to a number of beneficial outcomes in adulthood.

In support of this crucial role that positive affect has in development, a study by researchers at the University of Virginia followed teenagers and young adults from ages 14 to 25, allowing them to understand the predictive power of positive affect across the critical developmental period from adolescence to young adulthood.    3     For example, teens with a higher positive affect reported had a stronger, healthier attachment to their friends.

    4     Positive affect also predicted increased self-worth and job competence, suggesting that, overall, positive affect seems to be a key predictor of young adult success across several important areas of functioning.

But what about the effects of negative affect? The researchers also examined whether negative affect would predict problems in young adulthood.    5     Thus, the important takeaway is that adolescent positive affect may have powerful links to important life outcomes in the domains of personal well-being, career, and social relationships up to a decade later.

A．Affective responses to events typically happen automatically.

B．So how can parents help their children grasp the meaning of positive affect?

C．But what factors help produce these outcomes as teens move from adolescence to adulthood?

D．Interestingly, the results suggested that positive affect may go beyond helping teens build positive relationships.

E．The results uncovered that negative affect might account for many life problems when a teenager became a young adult.

F．Unlike positive affect, having greater negative affect did not have any significant associations with any of the later life outcomes.

G．This study found that positive affect was strongly predictive of life outcomes in young adulthood, such as developing better friendships.