Can Scientists Tell Us: What Happiness Is? Reading Answers

Dec 20, 2022

Can Scientists Tell Us: What Happiness Is? Reading Answers has 13 questions that need to be answered in 20 minutes. Can Scientists Tell Us: What Happiness Is? Reading Answers discusses the various definitions and meaning of happiness. Can Scientists Tell Us: What Happiness Is? Reading Answers comprises three types of questions- choose the correct heading, complete the summary and choose the correct letter. IELTS reading passage has seven paragraphs, candidates are required to choose the heading for each paragraph. Candidates are required to complete the summary using no more than four words from the IELTS Reading passage for each answer. Candidates are required to choose the correct letter to answer the last question from the given options. Candidates can undertake IELTS Reading practice papers to practise more on different topics.

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Section 1

Read the Passage to Answer the Following Questions

Can Scientists Tell Us: What Happiness Is? Reading Answers

Economists accept that if people describe themselves as happy, then they are happy. However, psychologists differentiate between levels of happiness. The most immediate type involves a feeling; pleasure or joy. But sometimes happiness is a judgment that life is satisfying, and does not imply an emotional state. Esteemed psychologist Martin Seligman has spearheaded an effort to study the science of happiness. The bad news is that we’re not wired to be happy. The good news is that we can do something about it. Since its origins in a Leipzig laboratory 130 years ago, psychology has had little to say about goodness and contentment. Most psychologists have concerned themselves with weakness and misery. There are libraries full of theories about why we get sad, worried, and angry. It hasn’t been respectable science to study what happens when lives go well. Positive experiences, such as joy, kindness, altruism and heroism, have mainly been ignored. For every 100 psychology papers dealing with anxiety or depression, only one concerns a positive trait.
A few pioneers in experimental psychology bucked the trend. Professor Alice Isen of Cornell University and colleagues have demonstrated how positive emotions make people think faster and more creatively. Showing how easy it is to give people an intellectual boost, Isen divided doctors making a tricky diagnosis into three groups: one received candy, one read humanistic statements about medicine, and one was a control group. The doctors who had candy displayed the most creative thinking and worked more efficiently. Inspired by Isen and others, Seligman got stuck in. He raised millions of dollars of research money and funded 50 research groups involving 150 scientists across the world. Four positive psychology centres opened, decorated in cheerful colours and furnished with sofas and baby-sitters. There were get-togethers on Mexican beaches where psychologists would snorkel and eat fajitas, then form “pods” to discuss subjects such as wonder and awe. A thousand therapists were coached in the new science.
But critics are demanding answers to big questions. What is the point of defining levels of haziness and classifying the virtues? Aren’t these concepts vague and impossible to pin down? Can you justify spending funds to research positive states when there are problems such as famine, flood and epidemic depression to be solved? Seligman knows his work can be belittled alongside trite notions such as “the power of positive thinking”. His plan to stop the new science floating “on the waves of self-improvement fashion” is to make sure it is anchored to positive philosophy above, and to positive biology below.
And this takes us back to our evolutionary past. Homo sapiens evolved during the Pleistocene era (1.8 m to 10,000 years ago), a time of hardship and turmoil. It was the Ice Age, and our ancestors endured long freezes as glaciers formed, then ferocious floods as the ice masses melted. We shared the planet with terrifying creatures such as mammoths, elephant-sized ground sloths and sabre-toothed cats. But by the end of the Pleistocene, all these animals were extinct. Humans, on the other hand, had evolved large brains and used their intelligence to make fire and sophisticated tools, to develop talk and social rituals. Survival in a time of adversity forged our brains into a persistent mould. Professor Seligman says: “Because our brain evolved during a time of ice, flood and famine, we have a catastrophic brain. The way the brain works is looking for what’s wrong. The problem is, that worked in the Pleistocene era. It favoured you, but it doesn’t work in the modern world”.
Although most people rate themselves as happy, there is a wealth of evidence to show that negative thinking is deeply ingrained in the human psyche. Experiments show that we remember failures more vividly than success. We dwell on what went badly, not what went well. Of the six universal emotions, four anger, fear, disgust and sadness are negative and only one, joy, is positive. (The sixth, surprise, is neutral). According to psychologist Daniel Nettle, author of Happiness, and one of the Royal Institution lectures, the negative emotion each tells us “something bad has happened” and suggest a different course of action.
What is it about the structure of the brain that underlies our bias towards negative thinking? And is there a biology of joy? At Iowa University, neuroscientists studied what happens when people are shown pleasant and unpleasant pictures. When subjects see landscapes or dolphins playing, part of the frontal lobe of the brain becomes active. But when they are shown unpleasant images, a bird covered in oil, or a dead soldier with part of his face missing, the response comes from more primitive parts of the brain. The ability to feel negative emotions derives from an ancient danger-recognition system formed early in the brain’s evolution. The prefrontal cortex, which registers happiness, is the part used for higher thinking, an area that evolved later in human history.
Our difficulty, according to Daniel Nettle, is that the brain systems for liking and wanting are separate. Wanting involves two ancient regions the amygdala and the nucleus accumbens that communicate using the chemical dopamine to form the brain’s reward system. They are involved in anticipating the pleasure of eating and in addiction to drugs. A rat will press a bar repeatedly， ignoring sexually available partners, to receive electrical stimulation of the “wanting” parts of the brain. But having received brain stimulation, the rat eats more but shows no sign of enjoying the food it craved. In humans, a drug like nicotine produces much craving but little pleasure.
In essence, what the biology lesson tells us is that negative emotions are fundamental to the human condition and it’s no wonder they are difficult to eradicate. At the same time, by a trick of nature, our brains are designed to crave but never really achieve lasting happiness.

Section 2

Solution and Explanation

Questions 1-7:
The reading Passage has seven paragraphs A-H. Which paragraph contains the following information?
Write the correct letter A-H, in boxes 1-7 on your answer sheet.

An experiment involving dividing several groups one of which received positive icon
Review of a poorly researched psychology area
Contrast being made about the brains’ action as response to positive or negative stimulus
The skeptical attitude toward the research seemed to be a waste of fund
A substance that produces much wanting instead of much liking
A conclusion that lasting happiness is hardly obtained because of the nature of brains
One description that listed the human emotional categories.

Question 1:

Answer: B
Supporting Sentence: Showing how easy it is to give people an intellectual boost, Isen divided doctors making a tricky diagnosis into three groups: one received candy, one read humanistic statements about medicine, one was a control group. The doctors who had candy displayed the most creative thinking and worked more efficiently.
Keyword: divided, groups
Keyword Location: Section B, 3rd Line
Explanation: The third line of paragraph B explains that it is simple to improve someone's intelligence. For instance, doctors who consumed sugar performed more effectively and with the highest level of creativity.

Question 2:

Answer: A
Supporting Sentence: Since its origins in a Leipzig laboratory 130 years ago, psychology has had little to say about goodness and contentment. Most psychologists have concerned themselves with weakness and misery. Positive experiences, such as joy, kindness, altruism and heroism, have mainly been ignored. For every 100 psychology papers dealing with anxiety or depression, only one concerns a positive trait.
Keyword: ignored, little to say, only one, positive trait.
Keyword Location: Section A, 10th Line
Explanation: The tenth line of paragraph A describes how the majority of psychologists have focused on weakness and unhappiness. Positive emotions like joy, kindness, charity, and bravery have mostly gone unrecognised.

Question 3:

Answer: F
Supporting Sentence: At Iowa University, neuroscientists studied what happens when people are shown pleasant and unpleasant pictures. When subjects see landscapes or dolphins playing, part of the frontal lobe of the brain becomes active. But when they are shown unpleasant images of a bird covered in oil, or a dead soldier with part of his face missing the response comes from more primitive parts of the brain.
Keyword: what happens, pleasant, unpleasant pictures
Keyword Location: Section F, 3rd Line
Explanation: According to the third line of paragraph F, a portion of the frontal lobe of the brain activates when people observe landscapes or dolphins playing. However, when confronted with unpleasant pictures their reactions are influenced by brain regions that are more primitive.

Question 4:

Answer: C
Supporting Sentence: Can you justify spending funds to research positive states when there are problems such as famine, flood and epidemic depression to be solved?
Keyword: justify spending funds, problems, to be solved
Keyword Location: Section C, 3rd Line
Explanation: The third line of paragraph C asks how funding should be spent to explore positive states. Especially when issues like starvation, floods, and epidemic despair need to be resolved.

Question 5:

Answer: G
Supporting Sentence: In humans, a drug like nicotine produces many cravings but little pleasure.
Keyword: nicotine, produces, many cravings, little pleasure
Keyword Location: Section G, 7th Line
Explanation: The rat eats more as a result of brain stimulation, yet the seventh line of paragraph G states that it doesn't appear to be enjoying the meal it was craving. Similar to how nicotine causes strong cravings but little pleasure in people.

Question 6:

Answer: H
Supporting Sentence: At the same time, by a trick of nature, our brains are designed to crave but never really achieve lasting happiness.
Keyword: brains, designed to crave, never really achieve lasting happiness.
Keyword Location: Section H, 2nd Line
Explanation: The second sentence of paragraph H addresses how our brains are wired to desire happiness, but we can never truly find it.

Question 7:

Answer: E
Supporting Sentence: Of the six universal emotions, four are -: anger, fear, disgust and sadness are negative and only one, joy, is positive. (The sixth, surprise, is neutral).
Keyword: six universal emotions, negative, positive, neutral
Keyword Location: Section E, 4th Line
Explanation: The six basic emotions are mentioned in the fourth line of paragraph E. Out of the six universal emotions, only joy is positive, with the other four being negative (angry, fear, disgust, and sorrow). Surprise, the sixth item, is neutral.

Questions 8-12:
Complete the following summary of the paragraphs of Reading Passage
Using NO MORE THAN FOUR WORDS from the Reading Passage for each answer.
Write your answers in boxes 8-12 on your answer sheet.

A few pioneers in an experimental psychology study what happens when lives go well. Professor Alice divided doctors, making a tricky experiment, into three groups: besides the one control group, the other two either were asked to read humanistic statements about drugs or received 8……………………… The latter displayed the most creative thinking and worked more efficiently. Since critics are questioning the significance of the 9……………………… for both levels of happiness and classification for the virtues. Professor Seligman countered in an evolutionary theory: survival in a time of adversity forged our brains into the way of thinking for what’s wrong because we have a 10………………………….

There is plenty of evidence to show that negative thinking is deeply built-in to the human psyche. Later, at Iowa University, neuroscientists studied the active parts in brains to contrast when people are shown pleasant and unpleasant pictures. When positive images like 11………………………… are shown, part of the frontal lobe of the brain becomes active. But when they are shown unpleasant images, the response comes from 12………………………… of the brain.

Question 8:

Answer: Candy
Supporting Sentence: Isen divided doctors making a tricky diagnosis into three groups: one received candy, one read humanistic statements about medicine, one was a control group
Keyword: divided, three groups, humanistic statements, control group
Keyword Location: Section B, 4th Line
Explanation: The fourth line of paragraph B reads Isen split physicians who were making a challenging diagnosis into three categories. One was a control group, one was given candy, and one read humanistic statements about medicine.

Question 9:

Answer: Definition
Supporting Sentence: But critics are demanding answers to big questions. What is the point of defining levels of haziness and classifying the virtues?
Keyword: critics, question
Keyword Location: Section C, 1st Line
Explanation: The purpose of categorising the virtues and defining different haziness levels is questioned in paragraph C. The first line states that critics want answers to important topics.

Question 10:

Answer: A catastrophic brain
Supporting Sentence: Survival in a time of adversity forged our brains into a persistent mould. Professor Seligman says: “Because our brain evolved during a time of ice, flood and famine, we have a catastrophic brain.”
Keyword: adversity, forged
Keyword Location: Section D, 9th Line
Explanation: According to the ninth line of paragraph D, surviving during a difficult time shaped our brains into a durable mould. According to Professor Seligman, "We have a catastrophic brain because our brain evolved during a time of ice, flood, and hunger."

Question 11:

Answer: landscapes or dolphins playing
Supporting Sentence: At Iowa University, neuroscientists studied what happens when people are shown pleasant and unpleasant pictures. When subjects see landscapes or dolphins playing, part of the frontal lobe of the brain becomes active.
Keyword: pleasant, unpleasant pictures, the frontal lobe of the brain.
Keyword Location: Section F, 3rd Line
Explanation: Neuroscientists at Iowa University investigated what happens when people are shown pleasing and unpleasant images, as stated in paragraph F. As per the third line of the paragraph, researchers at Iowa University looked at what happens when people are exposed to both happy and unpleasant images. There is an increase in activity in the frontal lobe of the brain when people view scenery or dolphins playing.

Question 12:

Answer: (more) primitive parts
Supporting Sentence: But when they are shown unpleasant images of a bird covered in oil, or a dead soldier with part of his face missing the response comes from more primitive parts of the brain.
Keyword: unpleasant images, response comes from
Keyword Location: Section F, 4th Line
Explanation: According to the fourth sentence of paragraph F, when confronted with unpleasant sights the brain's more primitive regions are responsible for the reaction.

Question 13:
Choose the correct letter, A, B, C or D.
Write your answers in box 13 on your answer sheet.
According to Daniel Nettle in the last two paragraphs, what is true as the scientists can tell us about happiness

Brain systems always mix liking and wanting together.
Negative emotions can be easily rid of if we think positively.
Happiness is like nicotine we are craving for but get little pleasure from.
The inner mechanism of human brains does not assist us to achieve durable happiness

Answer: D
Supporting Sentence: In essence, what the biology lesson tells us is that negative emotions are fundamental to the human condition and it’s no wonder they are difficult to eradicate. At the same time, by a trick of nature, our brains are designed to crave but never really achieve lasting happiness.
Keyword: negative emotions, fundamental, brains, designed to crave, never achieve lasting happiness.
Keyword Location: Section H
Explanation: The passage's final portion discusses how the brain is innately wired to want pleasure but is never truly satisfied. They say that since negative emotions are a natural part of being human, it makes sense that they are challenging to get rid of.

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