填空题

Questions 47 to 51 are based on the following passage,
There are more than 300 million of us in the United States, and sometimes it seems like we’re all friends on Face book. But the sad truth is that Americans are lonelier than ever. Between 1985 and 2004,the number of people who said there was no one with whom they discussed important matters tripled, to 25 percent. according to Duke University researchers. Unfortunately, as a new study linking women to increased risk of heart disease shows, all this loneliness can be harmful to our health.
The bad news doesn’t just affect women. Social isolation in all adults has been linked to a series of physical and mental ailments, including sleep disorders. high blood pressure, and an increased risk of depression and suicide. How lonely you feel today actually predicts how well you’ll sleep tonight and how depressed you’ll feel a year from now, says John T,Cacioppo, a neuroscientist at the University or Chicago and coauthor of Loneliness: Human Nature and the Need for Social Connection. Studies have shown that loneliness can cause stress levels to rise and can weaken the immune system. Lonely people also tend to have less healthy lifestyles. drinking more alcohol. eating more fattening food, and exercising less than those who arc not lonely.
Though more Americans than ever are living alone. the connection between single-living and loneliness is in fact quite weak. "Some of the most profound loneliness can happen when other people are present," says Harry Reis, professor of psychology at the University of Rochcster. Take college freshmen: even though they’re surrounded by people almost all the time, many feel incredibly isolated during the first quarter of the school year with their friends and family members far away. Cacioppo says. Studies have shown that how lonely freshmen will feel can be predicted by how many miles they are from home. By the second quarter, however, most freshmen have found social replacements for their high-school friends. Unfortunately. as we age, it becomes more difficult to recreate those social relationships. And that can be a big problem as America becomes a more transient society, with an increasing number of Americans who say that they’re willing to move away from home for a job.
Loneliness can be relative: it has been defined as an aversive (反感的) emotional response to a perceived discrepancy between a person’s desired levels of social interaction and the contact they’re actually receiving. People tend to measure themselves against others. feeling particularly alone in communities where social connection is the norm. That’s why collectivist cultures, like those in Southern Europe, have higher levels of loneliness than individualist cultures, Caciopposays. For the same reason. isolated individuals feel most acutely alone on holidays like Christmas Eve or Thanksgiving, when most people arc surrounded by family and friends.
A new study about women’s increased heart attack risk shows that loneliness is bad for______.