Question

When I enrolled at Pepperdine University in 1974, my mother exercised her parental right to express her worry at my departure. I responded with typical teenage indifference and ignorance. “Mom , I’m only an hour away. What’s the bit deal?” “You just wait until you have one of your own,” she cried .“Then you’ll know what I’m feeling.” It has been a little more than a month since my daughter Devin moved into her dorm at Occidental college, and life as I know it has come to an end. Or that’s what it feels like. Mom, you were right.

The nest’s empty loneliness is almost unbearable. Why does it hurt so bad? Science has an answer: We are social mammals who experience deep attachment to our fellow friends and family, an evolutionary throwback to our Paleolithic(旧石器时代的)hunter-gatherer days of living in small bands. Bonding unified the group, aiding survival in harsh climates and against unforgiving enemies. Attachment between parents and offspring assured that there is no one better equipped to look after the future survival of your genes than yourself.

The empty-nest syndrome is real, but there is good news for this and all forms of loss and grief. According to Harvard psychologist Daniel Gilbert, we are not very good at forecasting our unhappiness. Most of us think that we would be miserable for a very long time. Gilbert calls this the durability bias, an emotional misunderstanding.

The durability bias and the failure to recognize the power of our emotional immune systems lead us to overestimate how depressed we will feel and for how long, and to underestimate how quickly we will get rid of it and feel better.

For me, taking the long view helps. How long? Deep time. Evolutionary time, in which 6,895 days represent a mere 0.000000005% of the 3.5 billion year history of life on Earth.

Each of us parents makes one small contribution to the evolutionary importance of life’s continuity from one generation to the next without a single gap, an unbroken link over the eons(永久)。

57. What message does the author want to express by telling us her experience in the first paragraph?

A. The empty-nest syndrome is really hard for old parents to bear.

B. All people should learn to love their parents no matter how old they are.

C. A person will not understand his parents´ love until he has his own child.

D. The love parents give to children is selfless and should be respected.

58. According to Daniel Gilbert, the empty-nest syndrome is­­­­         .

A. caused by our emotional misunderstanding

B. not a real problem but in our imagination

C. the result of overestimating our happiness

D. from our emotional immune systems

59. The author gets herself out of the empty-nest syndrome by holding a positive idea that        .

A. she can go to see her daughter regularly when she misses her

B. her daughter will one day come back to her after graduation

C. her daughter will understand her when she has her own children

D. the departure from her daughter is much shorter than the history of life on Earth

60. What kind of role do parents play in the human history, according to the last paragraph?

A. They cultivate talents for the development of history.

B. They help keep the life’s continuity without a broken link.

C. They accelerate the evolutionary pace of the human beings.

D. They point a right way for the next generation to develop themselves.

Answer 1

CADB