全屏显示专题章节

This is the VOA Special English Health Report.

What makes people happier: money or having happy friends and neighbors? Researchers from Harvard University and the University of California, San Diego, have found an answer as part of a study.

Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler based the study on the 1) ____ health of almost five thousand people. They used information gathered over a period of twenty years, until two thousand three, in the Framingham Heart Study. That study began sixty years ago in Framingham, Massachusetts, to learn more about the risks of heart attack and 2) _____.

The new study found that friends of happy people had a greater chance of being happy themselves. And the smaller the 3) __ between friends, the larger the effect they had on each other’s happiness.

For example, a person was twenty percent more likely to feel happy if a friend living within one and a half kilometers was also happy. Having a happy neighbor who lived next door increased an individual’s chance of being happy by thirty-four percent. The effects of friends’ happiness lasted for up to a year.

The researchers found that happiness really is contagious. Sadness also 4) _____ among friends, but not as much as happiness.

People 5) _____ by as much as three degrees of separation still had an effect on a person’s happiness. Three degrees of 6)____ means the friend of a friend of a friend.

The study showed that having an 7) ____five thousand dollars increased a person’s chances of becoming happier by about two percent. But the researchers found that the influence of a friend of a friend of a friend can be greater than that.

8) ____.The findings appeared in the British Medical Journal. The National Institute on Aging in the United States helped pay for the study.

9) ____. In other words, that your emotions can be affected by someone you do not directly know.

Earlier studies by the two researchers described the effects of social networks on obesity and efforts to stop smoking. 10) ____.

And that’s the VOA Special English Health Report.

Contagious: (of a disease) capable of being passed on by direct contact with a diseased individual or by handling clothing, etc, contaminated with the causative agent 传染性的