Question

If you’re ever reading a book or watching a movie and get the distinct feeling you’ve come across the story before — or even better, can predict exactly what's going to happen next — there could be a good reason for that.

Researchers from the Computational Story Laboratory at the University of Vermont studied the complete text of some 1,737 fiction works available on Project Gutenberg, an online collection of more than 50,000 digital books in the public area. They discovered that English literature consists of just six kinds of emotional arcs (情感弧线) that make up nearly all of the most well-known stories. By analysing the sentiment (情感) of language used in these texts, the researchers were able to show the emotional ups and downs for the stories as a whole. They discovered that negative words like “poverty”, “dead”, and “punishment” dragged the emotion down, while positive terms like “love”, “peace”, and “friend” brought it up.

According to the researchers, those six core (核心的) emotional arcs are:

“Rags to riches” (An ongoing emotional rise)

“Tragedy, or riches to rags” (An ongoing emotional fall)

“Man in a hole” (A fall followed by a rise)

“Icarus” (A rise followed by a fall)

“Cinderella” (Rise–fall–rise)

“Oedipus” (Fall–rise–fall)

Interestingly, based on download statistics from Project Gutenberg, the researchers say the most popular stories are ones that use more complex emotional arcs, with the “Cinderella” and “Oedipus” arcs registering the most downloads. Also popular are works that combine these core arcs together in new ways within one story, such as two “Man in a hole” arcs stuck together, or the “Cinderella” arc coupled with a tragic ending.

1.Readers often feel familiar when reading a new story because stories have similar ______.

A. beginnings B. endings

C. characters D. emotional arcs

2.How did researchers carry out their study?

A. By conducting surveys among readers.

B. By reading books borrowed from libraries.

C. By analysing works from an online collection.

D. By interviewing authors of the well-known stories.

3.Which set of works may drag emotion down?

A. Hope, fortune and riches.

B. Disease, murder and war.

C. Smile, health and beauty.

D. Cold, earthquake and spring.

4.According to the last paragraph, which kind of works are most popular among readers?

A. Works with an ongoing emotional rise.

B. Works with an ongoing emotional fall.

C. Works with a rise followed by a fall.

D. Works with more than one rise and fall.

Answer 1