Goodnewsforpeoplewhoalwaysfailtoseethesilverlinin...
問題詳情：
Good news for people who always fail to see the silver lining on clouds. A report in New Scientist, suggests that a tendency to get down when life knocks you down can be good for you. A growing number of warning voices from the world of mental-health research are claiming that it isn’t a good idea to use antidepressant（抗抑鬱劑）to help do away with unhappiness caused by marriage breakdown, death or redundancy（下崗）because “they fear that the increasing tendency to treat normal sadness as if it were a disease is playing fast and loose with an important part of our biology. Sadness serves an evolutionary（進化的）purpose.”
Jerome Wakefield, a clinical social worker at New York University explains that depressive feelings are part of our biological makeup. “When you find something deep in us biologically, you should believe that it was selected because it could bring us some advantage, otherwise we wouldn’t have been burdened with it. I think that one of the functions of strong negative emotions is to stop our normal functioning, to make us focus on something else for a while.” While Paul Keedwell, a psychiatrist at Cardiff University claims that ever full-blown depression may have its purpose, saying the sufferer from the effects of long-term stress. “Without a mental pause,” he argues, “you might stay in a state of chronic（慢*的）stress until you’re exhausted or dead.”
Although it is important to be careful when talking about depression, having the upside traced in your downside will have an irresistible（不可抵抗的）appeal to all those who take the phrase “cheer up, love, it might never happen” as a personal insult（侮辱）. It will be manna especially for creative types, who have long doubted that crying a lot is a sign of their inward genius（天賦）. In the tests at Harvard, New Scientist reports, people with signs of depression performed better at creative task, especially after receiving feedback that was designed to reinforce their low spirits. Although it is old-fashioned to claim that creativity is connected to gloomy moods and a grey outlook on life, all the best works are written by some grim-faced（面孔鐵青的）people with a heart full of anxiety.
Richard Yates has written seven novels and two collections of short stories, each more hopelessly miserable（悲催的）than the last. After years of writing about his toothless, drunken mother, his experiences in the second world war and divorces, Yates finally rounds things off in Disturbing the Peace by fictionalizing how a cocktail of alcoholism and psychotropic drugs had him take off his clothes and wander the streets of LA, giving all his money to beggars. it is miserable — but so readable.
So, although the grand majority will never write anything as good as Yates, there is something to be gained from looking on the dark side. In a work environment, for example, discontented people tend to have greater success than those of a sunny nature. It’s enough to make a pessimist dissolve into a Cheshire Cat grin（咧嘴笑）.
66. Mental-health researchers regard sadness as ________.
A. a contributing factor to success B. a ray of hope to people in difficulties
C. a biological part of human beings D. a normal disease of the depressed
67. What can we learn from the passage?
A. The number of people using antidepressants is on the rise.
B. Writers are at high risk of suffering from depression.
C. Discontented workers may be more popular than the sunny ones.
D. Jerome Wakefield and Paul Keedwell have similar views about depression.
68. What does the underlined word “manna” in Paragraph 3 mean?
A. Gift. B. Pain. C. Reward. D. Challenge
69. The story of Richard Yates is used to show that depressive men tend to be _______.
A. unfortunate B. creative C. serious D. brave
70. Which would be the best title of the passage?
A. How to treat depression B. Depressed people are creative
C. Depressive feelings are helpful D. Why people feel depressed
【回答】
CDABC
知識點：*經濟文化類閲讀
題型：閲讀理解
