人教版M6 Unit 2 What is happiness to you(测)-高考英语一轮复习(解析).doc

M6 Unit 2 What is happiness to you(测)-2022年高考英语一轮复****讲练测
(新高考•江苏)
一、阅读理解
阅读下列短文，从每题所给的A、B、C和D四个选项中，选出最佳选项。
A
(2021·浙江高三月考)Our brain doesn’t know how to be happy, or even content. It simply lacks the genetic instructions to carry out that task. It knows how to do a million other less important things, from writing a letter to maintaining our balance; from appreciating the music of Bach to smelling a rose, but if you ask the brain to be happy, it simply doesn’t know how to respond.
This is because the genetic code is only concerned with survival and reproduction, which happiness does not necessarily have anything to do with, and therefore belongs in a different realm. Nature doesn't want us to always feel content and satisfied, let alone happy, as this would lower our guard against possible threats to our survival.
Happiness, as the Brazilian poet Vinicius de Moraes put it, is “like a feather flying in the air. It flies light, but not for very long.” It is so elusive that it has also been compared to a butterfly, which “when pursued, is always just beyond your grasp, but which, if you will sit down quietly, may alight upon you,” according to 19th-century American novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne. In any case, what is clear is that happiness is, at best, fleeting (飞逝的) and inconstant.
In this blog, we will look at the myth of happiness from many perspectives and, in the process, we will touch on topics such as happy personalities, the unhappy workings of the brain, evolution, dreams, and even fairy tales. I explore all these issues in detail in my book, which shares its title with this blog. Happiness is a crucial concept. We spend all of our lives pursuing it, so it deserves a very careful analysis.
We are determined by our biological design to experience mixed and messy emotions. But the silver lining is the knowledge that having difficult emotions doesn’t represent a personal failure. The inevitable unhappiness that we all suffer from time to time is not a sho