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  3. As any human being knows, many factors govern whether people are happy or unhappy. External circumstances are important: employe

As any human being knows, many factors govern whether people are happy or unhappy. External circumstances are important: employe

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问题    As any human being knows, many factors govern whether people are happy or unhappy. External circumstances are important: employed people are happier than unemployed ones and better-off people than poor ones. Age has a role, too. But personality is the single biggest determinant: extroverts are happier than introverts, and confident people happier than anxious ones.
   That personality, along with intelligence, is at least partly heritable is becoming increasingly clear; so, presumably, the tendency to be happy or miserable is, to some extent, passed on through DNA. To try to establish just what that extent is, a group of scientists examined over 1,000 pairs of twins from a huge study on the health of American adolescents. They conclude that about a third of the variation in people’s happiness is heritable.
   But while twin studies are useful for establishing the extent to which a characteristic is heritable, they do not finger the particular genes at work. One of the researchers, Jan-Emmanuel De Neve, of University College, London, and the London School of Economics, has tried to do just that, by picking a popular suspect—the gene that encodes the serotonin-transporter protein, and examining how variants of that gene affect levels of happiness.
   Serotonin is involved in mood regulation. Serotonin transporters are crucial to this job. The serotonin-transporter gene comes in two functional variants—long and short. People have two versions (known as alleles). The adolescents in Dr. De Neve’s study were asked to grade themselves from very satisfied to very dissatisfied. Dr. De Neve found that those with one long allele were 8% more likely than those with none to describe themselves as very satisfied; those with two long alleles were 17% more likely.
   Which is interesting. Where the story could become controversial is when the ethnic origins of the volunteers are taken into account. All were Americans, but they were asked to classify themselves by race as well. On average, the Asian Americans in the sample had 0.69 long genes, the black Americans had 1.47 and the white Americans had 1.12.
   There is growing interest in the study of happiness, not just among geneticists but also among economists and policymakers dissatisfied with current ways of measuring humanity’s achievements. Future work in this field will be read avidly in those circles.

In the following part immediately after this text, the author will most probably focus on_____.
选项 A、policymakers’ studies on happiness
B、every continent’s levels of happiness
C、another factor that governs happiness
D、humanity’s achievement and happiness
答案A
解析 推断题。根据题干关键词定位在最后一段，该段指出“不仅是遗传学家，就连经济学家、政治决策者也对研究幸福越来越感兴趣……所以以上各界人士将会十分关注这个领域的未来研究成果”，故A项“决策者对幸福的研究”为正确答案。
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