BBC 6分钟英语 孤独感是否根植于我们的基因之中？

English, from

BBC, learning English. Hello, and welcome to Six Minute English.

I'm Sophie, and I'm Neil. How was your weekends now?

Well, not great. I hadn't got anything planned, so I didn't see

anyone for two days. And to be honest, I felt very lonely.

There was a real physical feeling in the pit

of my stomach. Oh, poor Neil, you do sound really down in the dumps.

And that means unhappy, while the subject of to day show is loneliness.

And loneliness is sometimes described as a social pain, a pain that tells us that were isolated or lacking contact with others, which motivates us to seek out companionship.

I have no idea that feeling lonely had a biological explanation.

How does being sociable help us as a species?

Then Sophie, it's all about cooperation, or working together to get something done, e.g.

finding food. Well, I suppose I cooperated with the pizza delivery guy for a shared outcome.

You paid him and he gave you the pizza, exactly.

But it wasn't as socially enriching experience.

That's the bad thing about London.

You can feel lonely, even surrounded with people.

It isn't easy to meet people you really like, so often you might as well just be on your own.

Good points. And I have a question about cities and living alone, neil, because it's on the rise.

Which country has the highest proportion of people living on their own?

Is it A, the US? B Japan or C?

Sweden? Oh, well, I'm going to guess B Japan.

OK, we'll see if you got that right later on in the show.

So, getting back to loneliness, the idea is that because it makes us feel bad, it motivates us to go out and meet people.

Some people are more likely to feel lonely than others, because our genes play a role in this tendency.

Hmm, I wonder if I inherited loneliness genes?

I don't know, neil. But while in some situations, being lonely may be a good thing because it encourages you to be sociable, in other situations, it may be useful to tolerate or put up with loneliness.

Let's listen to Professor Dorrit Bumsmer at Free University in Amsterdam talking about this.

So the intriguing question is, why do genes that influence loneliness still exist?

And one explanation is that probably they do not only have negative effects in some situations, it is an advantage to be able to tolerate high levels of loneliness, and that is why the genes are maintained in the population, so inheriting genes for loneliness might not be a bad thing.

Why is that nail? Because it means you can tolerate being alone for a long time without feeling bad.

Well, that's an intriguing or very interesting idea, but it shows that you probably don't have those jeans, neil, because you did feel bad at the weekend.

That's true. And actually that was despite spending a lot of time on Facebook.

That's a form of social contact.

But does all the tweeting, messaging and chatting online that we do make us lonely because we're getting out less in meeting fewer people, or do virtual connections stop us from feeling lonely?

Those are intriguing questions. Let's listen to Professor Eric Leninberg, sociologist at New York University, an author of a book about living alone, he talks about this We just don't have great research showing that we are significantly more lonely or isolated today than we were ten or 20 or 30 years ago.

Which means that critics who say that Facebook or the Internet, or whatever device you carry with you is making you lonelier and more miserable, they just don't have that much evidence to back it up.

So there isn't enough evidence to back up or support the claim that social media is making us feel lonelyer.

No, there isn't. OK? Now, before I give you the answer to today's quiz question, neil, did you know that loneliness is contagious?

You mean you can catch it from someone like a cold?

Yes. There are environmental factors involved in loneliness too, e.g.

if somebody you talk to every day is always unfriendly towards you, this makes you statistically more likely to be negative in your interactions with somebody else.

Well, let's try and stay friendly towards each other, then, sophie, you can start by telling me whether I got today's quiz question right.

OK? I asked which country has the highest proportion of people living on their own?

Is it A, the US, B, japan or C, sweden?

And I said, japan. This is the wrong answer.

I'm afraid it's actually See, sweden, nearly half of all Swedish households are single occupancy, or for one person.

Living alone in Sweden is arguably the norm because it's so

easy. There are many affordable single occupancy apartments, and young Swedes can expect to move into their

own apartment once they graduate high school.

Ok Now, let's hear the words we learned today again.

Sophie, yes. Okay. They are down in the dumps.

Loneliness, isolated, cooperation, tolerate, intriguing, backup, contagious, single occupancy.

Well, that's the end of this edition of Six Minute English.

Join us again soon. Meanwhile, visit our website, BBC learning english com, where you'll find guides to grammar exercises, videos and articles to read and improve your English.

扫码查看听力音频