Http://www.edge.org/conversation.php?cid=social-networks-and-happiness
Before or after you read this text, view the following. Thanks Ebru for the link!
Level of difficulty: **
This activity is dedicated to two friends with the warmest smiles I know: Ebru McCallum and Müjde Akmenek.Thanks are due to Füsun for providing this lovely text.
BEFORE YOU READ
1. How often do you think you smile during the day?
2. Now ask the student sitting next to you how often he / she thinks you smile during the day?
3. When do you think you smile or conversely, why don’t you smile and look worried or harassed?
4. What are the advantages of smiling? What are your reactions to a warm smile?
QUESTIONS
1. Read the synopsis of the article. Which of the views below best summarizes all the views expressed?
a. Happiness has a ripple effect
b. People’s happiness is interrelated with other people’s happiness and vice versa.
c. Happy people seem only to be friends with other happy people.
d. Happy people seem to be more popular.
2. What are the two most important feelings that govern us?
3. We understand from paragraph two that in addition to the widely known causes of happiness, there is another. It is ……………………………………………………………………………..
4. What was the two researchers’ hypothesis concerning happiness?
5. What conclusion can we draw from the results of the experiment?
6. Why do the researchers believe “emotional clustering” must exist in social networks too?
7. What two conclusions were reached as a result of the study involving 1700 students connected in Facebook?
8. What is the overall take-home point of the text as a whole?
WRITING
Write a paragraph describing the advantages of smiling. Alternatively, write short summary of the text of 120 to 150 words.
KEY AND TEACHER’S NOTES
This brilliant and heartwarming text should be preceded by a class discussion. I think many people will come to realize how rarely they smile and conversely, how positively they react to people that do. This should help to predict the advantages of smiling as well. It would be a good idea to let the students see the original text on a laptop so they can distinguish the colors of the image at the end of the text. The beauty of this text is that it is original yet simple. It should, therefore, give students a sense of achievement.
1. b
2. Happiness or pleasure and pain
3. The happiness of others
4. The fact that emotions might spread more widely… (statements not questions)
5. Emotions are collective phenomenon
6. Because it is so fundamentally rooted in our ancient evolutionary psychology.
7. People who smile tend to have more friends / Those who smile are measurably more central to the network.
8. When you smile the world smiles with you.
For me it's not easy to answer these questions.
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