Passage Three
As a professor of business and government policy, I’ve long been interested in the pursuit of happiness as a national concept. According to hundreds of reliable surveys of thousands of people across the land, happy people increase our prosperity and strengthen our communities. They make better citizens—and better citizens are vital to making our nation healthy and strong. So when I chanced upon data a couple of years ago saying that certain Americans were living in a manner that facilitated happiness—while others were not—l jumped on it.
I wanted to be able to articulate which personal lifestyles and public policies would make us the happiest nation possible. I also wanted to know which of my own values were the most conducive to happiness. I had always thought that marching to the beat of my own drummer and making up my own values as I went along were the right things to do, and that traditional values, to put it bluntly, were for fools.
Turns out that I was in for some surprises.
You might suspect that Americans are getting happier all the time. After all, many (though clearly not all) are getting richer, and this should make them better able and equipped to follow their dreams. On the other hand, there's a lot of talk about the good old days, when kids could play outside without any worry about being kidnapped. And there's a great deal of stress in this country right now, due to financial concerns, negative workplace environments, and chronic health problems, among other pressing issues.
But average happiness levels in America have stayed largely constant for many years. In 1972, 30 percent of the population said they were very happy with their lives, according to the National Opinion Research Center's General Social Survey. In 1982, 31 percent said so, and in 2006, 31 percent said so as well. The percentage saying they were not too happy was similarly constant, generally hovering around 13 percent.
The factors that add up to a happy life for most people are not what we typically hear about Things like winning the lottery and earning a master's degree don't make people happy over the long haul. Rather, the key to happiness, and the difference between happy and unhappy Americans, is a life that reflects values and practices like faith, hard work, marriage, charity, and freedom.
We can learn from the last paragraph that______.
A、winning a lottery doesn’t bring sustained happiness
B、hard work can give people a sense of achievement
C、hard work is a virtue which people are proud of
D、winning a lottery mainly depends on sheer luck
【正确答案】：A
【题目解析】：根据winning the lottery and earning a master's degree don't make people happy over the long haul.得出答案。
