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  3. There is a lot to feel down about this month: the subprime mortgage crisis, stormy, unpredictable weather, rising gas prices, pr

There is a lot to feel down about this month: the subprime mortgage crisis, stormy, unpredictable weather, rising gas prices, pr

admin2019-08-01  14
问题     There is a lot to feel down about this month: the subprime mortgage crisis, stormy, unpredictable weather, rising gas prices, presidential primary free-for-alls. So, it would be easy to believe the theory set forth by Professor Arnall, a researcher from Cardiff University, that the third Monday of the month—a day he calls Blue Monday—will be our most depressing day of the year. Arnall bases his yearly prediction on a formula he developed which factors in the weather, consumer debt from holiday spending and failed New Year’s resolutions and arrives at that conclusion that we will hit rock bottom on Monday the 21st. Aside from the fact that Arnall’s theory has been discounted by many in the academic community, I have got a better way of finding the true nadir of depression: Look to our search behavior.
    In the digital age we are likely to turn to search engines just as often as we would confide in friends and medical professionals to gauge our psychological state. If we think we are suffering from a real bout of the blues or a mental crisis, we are likely to Google the symptoms or find a chat group in the hopes of performing a self-diagnosis. In fact online searches "depression" are among the most popular searched word, sending traffic to the 5,900 sites that we track in the Hitwise Health and Medical category, but the peak is not in January. According to our internet behavior, our depression spikes reliably in mid-November every year, right in time for Thanksgiving, the launch of the holiday season.
    To confirm this timing I took a look from a different perspective. If we are depressed, we are probably also seeking pharmacological help. By aggregating the traffic to the websites of the top antidepressants and charting visits to those sites over the last three years, a very interesting pattern emerges. The spike in traffic to the official websites for drugs like Lexapro, Prozac, Paxil and Cymbalta occurs in late October and early November, two weeks ahead of the height in searches on "depression". It is almost as if people anticipate their holiday depression and start shopping early for their drug of choice.
    Another surprise lies in the demographics of visitors to antidepressant websites—they are not who you would expect. If visitors to Lexapro website, for example, are at all representative of the typical depressed individual, depression during November is an affliction primarily of the young and the old, but not of the middle-aged. The two age groups that account for the largest portion of site visitors are 18 to 24 and over 55. Visitors to Lexapro’s site also tend to have average to above-average incomes: 51% of visitors come from households earning between $60,000 and $ 150,000 per year, while 20% come form households that earn over $150,000—a sample, perhaps, not of the depressed in general, but of those who can afford to seek treatment.
    So, despite the failing economy, the storm of the century here in Northern California, a disappointing roster of presidential candidates and deciding that New Year’s resolutions are not for me this year, I am feeling pretty good about things. If research date is any indication, I am not alone.
On which of the following would the author most probably agree?
选项 A、We might as well google our symptoms instead of turning to shrinks.
B、Arnall’s theory has been discounted in that it does not quite fit the fact.
C、There lies a relation between the demographics of visitors and their incomes.
D、Depression during November primarily affects the young and the old.
答案C
解析 属信息推断题。选项A断章取义，第二段第一句说“我们倾向于使用搜索引擎，就像过去我们向朋友和医师倾吐心事一样”，并不是说我们最好使用谷歌搜索，而不求助精神医生，故A错误。原文并没有阐述阿奈尔教授的理论受到忽视的原因，故选项B不可选。选项D是在假定依稀普兰官网的访问人群是所有典型抑郁患者的代表的情况下得出的一个条件性结论，并非事实，故选项D错误。作者在第四段的第四句着重阐述了网站访客分布和访客收入高低的关系，故选项C符合题意。
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