Question

Bad news travels fast – when you watch the evening news or read the morning papers, it seems that things that get the most coverage are all sad events or situations like wars, earthquakes, floods, fires and murders.

This is the classic rule for mass media (大眾傳媒). ―They want your eyeballs and don’t care how you’re feeling,‖ Jonah Berger, a psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania, US, told The New York Times.

But with social media getting more and more popular, information is now being spread in different ways, and researchers are discovering new rules – good news can actually spread faster and farther than bad accidents and other sad stories.

Berger and his colleague Katherine Milkman looked at thousands of articles on The New York Times’ website and analyzed (分析) the ―most e-mailed‖ list for six months.

One of his findings was that articles in the science part were much more likely to make the list. Those science stories waked up feelings of awe (敬畏) and made the readers want to share this positive emotion with others.

Besides science stories, readers were also found to be likely to share articles that were exciting or funny. “The more positive an article was, the more likely it was to be shared,”Berger wrote in his new book. “For example, stories about newcomers falling in love with New York City,” he writes, “seemed to be shared more than the death of a popular zookeeper.”

But does all this good news actually make the readers feel better? Not necessarily.

According to a study by researchers at Harvard University, people are more likely to say more positive things about themselves when they’re talking to a bigger audience, rather than just one person, which helps explain all the perfect vacations that keep showing up on micro blogs. This, researchers found, makes people think that life is unfair and that they’re less happy than their friends.

But no worries. There’s a quick and easy way to take the despair from you that you get from viewing other people’s seemingly perfect lives – turn on the television and watch the news. There is always someone doing worse than you are.

1.In Berger’s opinion, bad news covers most papers because ______.

A. the public cares for reading sad events

B. mass media wants to attract the public’s attention

C. the public tries to share positive feelings with each other

D. mass media wants the public to help those unlucky people

2.Which of the following might be e-mailed most according to Berger?

A. The perfect vacation of your friend.

B. The death of a popular zookeeper.

C. The story of a creative scientist.

D. The flood hitting a small town.

3.We can infer from the passage that ______.

A. bad news always makes people sad

B. good news sometimes has negative influence

C. people can remove despair by reading good news

D. people prefer to share bad news with a bigger audience

4.What would be the best title for the passage?

A. Good News Spreads Fast

B. The Power of Good News

C. The Effect of Bad News

D. Bad News Travels Fast

Answer 1