托福阅读素材

时间：2021-01-12 10:08:49 托福考试我要投稿

2018托福阅读素材精选

　　托福是由美国教育测验服务社举办的英语能力考试，全名为“检定非英语为母语者的英语能力考试”，一起来看看托福阅读素材，仅供大家参考！谢谢！

2018托福阅读素材精选

　　托福阅读素材1

　　The hidden power of smiling

　　0:11

　　When I was a child, I always wanted to be a superhero. I wanted to save the world and make everyone happy. But I knew that I'd need superpowers to make my dreams come true. So I used to embark on these imaginary journeys to find intergalactic objects from planet Krypton, which was a lot of fun, but didn't yield much result. When I grew up and realized that science fiction was not a good source for superpowers, I decided instead to embark on a journey of real science, to find a more useful truth.

　　0:41

　　I started my journey in California, with a UC Berkeley 30-year longitudinal study that examined the photos of students in an old yearbook, and tried to measure their success and well-being throughout their life. By measuring the students' smiles, researchers were able to predict how fulfilling and long-lasting a subject's marriage would be,

　　1:03

　　(Laughter)

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　　how well she would score on standardized tests of well-being, and how inspiring she would be to others. In another yearbook, I stumbled upon Barry Obama's picture. When I first saw his picture, I thought that his superpowers came from his super collar.

　　1:20

　　(Laughter)

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　　But now I know it was all in his smile.

　　1:24

　　Another aha! moment came from a 2010 Wayne State University research project that looked into pre-1950s baseball cards of Major League players. The researchers found that the span of a player's smilecould actually predict the span of his life. Players who didn't smile in their pictures lived an average of only 72.9 years, where players with beaming smiles lived an average of almost 80 years.

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　　(Laughter)

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　　The good news is that we're actually born smiling. Using 3D ultrasound technology, we can now see that developing babies appear to smile, even in the womb. When they're born, babies continue to smile -- initially, mostly in their sleep. And even blind babies smile to the sound of the human voice. Smiling is one of the most basic, biologically uniform expressions of all humans.

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　　In studies conducted in Papua New Guinea, Paul Ekman, the world's most renowned researcher on facial expressions, found that even members of the Fore tribe, who were completely disconnected from Western culture, and also known for their unusual cannibalism rituals,

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　　(Laughter)

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　　attributed smiles to descriptions of situations the same way you and I would. So from Papua New Guinea to Hollywood all the way to modern art in Beijing, we smile often, and use smiles to express joy and satisfaction.

　　2:56

　　How many people here in this room smile more than 20 times per day? Raise your hand if you do. Oh, wow. Outside of this room, more than a third of us smile more than 20 times per day, whereas less than 14 percent of us smile less than five. In fact, those with the most amazing superpowers are actually children, who smile as many as 400 times per day.

　　3:22

　　Have you ever wondered why being around children, who smile so frequently, makes you smile very often? A recent study at Uppsala University in Sweden found that it's very difficult to frown when looking at someone who smiles. You ask why? Because smiling is evolutionarily contagious, and it suppresses the control we usually have on our facial muscles. Mimicking a smile and experiencing it physicallyhelps us understand whether our smile is fake or real, so we can understand the emotional state of the smiler.

　　3:58

　　In a recent mimicking study at the University of Clermont-Ferrand in France, subjects were asked to determine whether a smile was real or fake while holding a pencil in their mouth to repress smiling muscles. Without the pencil, subjects were excellent judges, but with the pencil in their mouth -- when they could not mimic the smile they saw -- their judgment was impaired.

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　　(Laughter)

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　　In addition to theorizing on evolution in "The Origin of Species," Charles Darwin also wrote the facial feedback response theory. His theory states that the act of smiling itself actually makes us feel better,rather than smiling being merely a result of feeling good. In his study, Darwin actually cited a French neurologist, Guillaume Duchenne, who sent electric jolts to facial muscles to induce and stimulate smiles. Please, don't try this at home.

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　　(Laughter)

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　　In a related German study, researchers used fMRI imaging to measure brain activity before and after injecting Botox to suppress smiling muscles. The finding supported Darwin's theory, by showing that facial feedback modifies the neural processing of emotional content in the brain, in a way that helps us feel better when we smile. Smiling stimulates our brain reward mechanism in a way that even chocolate -- a well-regarded pleasure inducer -- cannot match.

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　　British researchers found that one smile can generate the same level of brain stimulation as up to 2,000 bars of chocolate.

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　　(Laughter)

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　　Wait -- The same study found that smiling is as stimulating as receiving up to 16,000 pounds sterling in cash.

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　　(Laughter)

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　　That's like 25 grand a smile. It's not bad. And think about it this way: 25,000 times 400 -- quite a few kids out there feel like Mark Zuckerberg every day.

　　6:00

　　(Laughter)

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　　And unlike lots of chocolate, lots of smiling can actually make you healthier. Smiling can help reduce the level of stress-enhancing hormones like cortisol, adrenaline and dopamine, increase the level of mood-enhancing hormones like endorphins, and reduce overall blood pressure.

　　6:19

　　And if that's not enough, smiling can actually make you look good in the eyes of others. A recent study at Penn State University found that when you smile, you don't only appear to be more likable and courteous, but you actually appear to be more competent.

　　6:36

　　So whenever you want to look great and competent, reduce your stress or improve your marriage, or feel as if you just had a whole stack of high-quality chocolate without incurring the caloric cost, or as if you found 25 grand in a pocket of an old jacket you hadn't worn for ages, or whenever you want to tap into a superpower that will help you and everyone around you live a longer, healthier, happier life, smile.

　　7:05

　　(Applause)

　　托福阅读素材2

　　A great way to get to know someone better is to say something that makes them laugh.

　　想要更好地了解别人，一个好办法就是说些能让他们发笑的事。

　　Sharing a few good giggles and chuckles makes people more willing to tell others something personal about themselves, without even necessarily being aware that they are doing so, suggests new research.

　　新研究显示，分享一些好笑的事会让人更乐意告诉别人自己的私事，甚至当他们这样做的'时候，也根本不会意识到这一点。

　　Alan Gray of University College London discovered the tidbit in a new study recently published in the journal Human Nature.

　　英国伦敦大学学院(University College London)的艾伦格雷(Alan Gray)在研究中发现了这一有趣的现象。最近，他的这项研究成果发表在了《人类天性》(Human Nature)杂志上。

　　According to Gray, the act of verbally opening up to someone is a crucial building block that helps to form new relationships and intensify social bonds.

　　格雷认为，用言语向他人敞开心扉的行为是帮助人们建立新关系，增强人与人之间社会联系的重要基本要素。

　　Such self-disclosure can be of a highly sensitive nature — like sharing one’s religious convictions or personal fears — or a superficial tidbit such as one’s favorite type of food.

　　自我表露的过程具有高度敏感性——好比分享宗教信仰或者害怕之物——或者只是一个流于表面的趣闻，比如最爱的食物类型。

　　To investigate the role and influence of laughter in this disclosure process, Gray and his colleagues gathered 112 students from Oxford University in England, into groups of four.

　　为了调查笑声在自我表露过程中扮演的角色和产生的影响，格雷和他的同事从英国牛津大学(Oxford University)召集了112个学生，并把他们分为四组。

　　The students did not know one another. The groups watched a 10-minute video together, without chatting to one another.

　　学生们彼此都不认识。每组会坐在一起看一个10分钟的视频，期间并无交谈。

　　The videos differed in the amount of laughter they invoked, and the amount of positive feelings or emotions they elicited.

　　视频的区别在于，引人发笑的频率和传达积极情绪或情感的效力各有不同。

　　One featured a stand-up comedy routine by Michael McIntyre, another a straightforward golf instruction video, and the third a pleasant nature excerpt from the “Jungles” episode of the BBC’s Planet Earth series.

　　一个视频是迈克尔麦金太尔(Michael McIntyre)的单人喜剧秀，一个是简短的高尔夫教学片，第三个是从《BBC行星地球系列》(BBC’s Planet Earth series)“丛林”(Jungles)一集里节选的一个令人愉悦的自然片段。

　　The levels of laughter and the participants’ emotional state after watching the video was the

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