Learning English with TED Talks: “What are the big causes of happiness?”

Заповніть пропуски в кожному реченні.

1. People want a lot of things ... of life, but I think, more than ... they want happiness.

2. People have been ... the causes of happiness for a really long time, in fact for ... of years, but it seems like many of those debates remain unresolved.

3. In fact, in the last few years, there’s been an ... in research on happiness. We’ve learned a lot about its demographics, how things like ... and education, gender and ... relate to it. But one of the ... this has revealed is that factors like these don’t seem to have a particularly strong effect.

4. Which ... the question, what are the big causes of happiness? ... Maybe happiness has an awful lot to do with the contents of our moment-to-moment ...

5. A few years ago, I came up with a way to ... people’s happiness moment to moment as they’re going about their daily lives on a ... scale all over the world, something we’d never been able to do before.

6. The idea is that, if we can watch how people’s happiness goes up and down over the ... of the day, minute to minute in some cases, and try to understand how what people are doing, who they're with, what they’re thinking about, and all the other factors that describe our day, how those might relate to those changes in happiness, we might be able to ... some of the things that really have a big influence on happiness.

7. We’ve been ... with this project to collect quite a lot of data, a lot more data of this kind than I think has ever been collected before.

8. This graph shows happiness on the ... axis, and you can see that bar there representing how happy people are when they're focused on the ...

Answer the following questions:

1. How often does you mind wander?

2. When and where does you mind wander?

3. Does it make you happy? Why / Why not?

4. Do you think that mind-wandering has a generally positive or negative effect on people’s happiness?

5. What do you think we should do in order to stay focused?

Extra task.