【高考专题辅导】湖北省2014版高考英语 专题检测卷（十八）阅读理.docVIP

阅读理解 (建议用时: 25分钟) A (2013·北京模拟) 体裁 说明文 题材 消息的传播 词数 387 　　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 tragedies like wars, earthquakes, floods, fires and murders. This is the classic rule for mass media. “They want your eyeballs and don’t care how you’re feeling, ”Jonah Berger, a psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania, the US, told The New York Times. But with social media getting increasingly popular, information is now being spread in different ways, and researchers are discovering new rules—good news can actually spread faster and farther than disasters and other sad stories. Berger and his colleague Katherine Milkman looked at thousands of articles on The New York Times’ website and analyzed the “most e-mailed” list for six months. One of his findings was that articles in the science section were much more likely to make the list. Those stories aroused feelings of awe 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, the more likely it was to be shared, ”Berger wrote in his new book, Contagious: Why Things Catch On. For example, “stories about newcomers falling in love with New York City”, he writes, tend to be shared more than “the death of a popular zookeeper”. The difference between the two is due to the fact that the mass media prefers news that gets attention, while when you share a story with your friends “you care a lot more about how they react”, Berger explained. But does all this good news actually make the audience feel better? Not necessarily. According to a study by researchers at Harvard University, people tend 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 sh