雅思阅读 031 · The Surprising Science of Friendship

改编自 Scientific American（Rachel Feltman et al., 2026）。题型：段落信息匹配 + T/F/NG + 填空。难度：中等偏上（Passage 2，约 800 词）。

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🎧 课文朗读音频（约 1 分钟）

正文 Passage

A. The friendship mystery

Friendships are key to our well-being, but what kind of friendships do we really want? Despite being such a foundational part of the human experience, the science of friendship is still mysterious.

Anthropologist Robin Dunbar famously landed on the number five for close friendships and around 150 for less intimate connections. Of course, friendship is hard to quantify, and results may vary wildly.

We know that having good friends is beneficial — one 2010 meta-analysis found that people with stronger social relationships are less likely to die in any given period of time. We also know that many people struggle to form and maintain these connections. In 2023, Pew Research found that 8 percent of American adults claimed to have no close friends at all.

B. Ayers's research

Jessica Ayers, an assistant professor of psychology at Boise State University, says that she and her colleagues see a lot of confusion about friendship and how to do it — and not a lot of research aimed at closing the knowledge gap. Their latest study challenges some common assumptions about how humans set out to build their social networks.

"When it comes to friendship, one of the strangest things is that we actually know very little about how human friendships function compared to all the other social relationships that we have in our lives: parenting relationships, relationships with other family members, romantic relationships," Ayers says.

C. The benefits of friendship

There are huge benefits associated with having friendships, like healing faster after surgeries. Not having friendships, so experiencing loneliness, can sometimes have the same negative physical impact as smoking.

So there are some really big positive benefits of having friendship, and we do not really know about them. Some people have a lot of friends; some people don't have a lot of friends. Some people with a lot of friends are lonely; some people with a lot of friends are not lonely.

D. Quantity vs quality

Previous research has always relied on the implicit foundation that it is one or the other: you want a lot of friends, or you want really emotionally close friendships.

But Ayers's study found that this is not quite as clear-cut. "One of the most surprising things that we found was that when people had a wide network of friendships, they could also still want really emotionally close friendships within that wide network," Ayers says.

The previous trade-off idea comes from evolutionary biology: when humans have fundamental goals to achieve, there is often a trade-off. You can think of reproduction: you grow, and you reach sexual maturity earlier. Or the trade-off between the quality and quantity of children.

E. A universal phenomenon

The researchers did five different studies. Most were done in the U.S. The fifth one also contained participants from the Philippines, Egypt and Brazil to show that this is not just a Western phenomenon.

"This seems to be kind of a universal phenomenon," Ayers says. "When we're making friendships, we're kind of making a decision between 'Do we want a quantity versus quality of friendships?'"

People who want a really wide network of friendships tend to be more extroverted. People who are worried about not having enough emotionally close friendships sometimes are actually more lonely.

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题目 Questions

Questions 1-5: Which paragraph mentions the following?

1. Dunbar's number of five close friends

2. loneliness being as harmful as smoking

3. the finding that people can want both quantity and quality of friends

4. research participants from the Philippines, Egypt and Brazil

5. 8 percent of American adults have no close friends

Questions 6-9: T/F/NG

6. Dunbar's number is universally accepted as exact.

7. People with stronger social relationships are less likely to die.

8. Previous research assumed you want either many friends or close friends.

9. Ayers's study was only done in the United States.

Questions 10-13: Complete the notes. Choose NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS.

• Robin Dunbar suggested (10) ____________ close friendships.
• Loneliness can have the same negative physical impact as (11) ____________.
• People who want a wide network of friends tend to be more (12) ____________.
• The researchers did (13) ____________ different studies.

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答案 Answers

题号	答案
1	A
2	C
3	D
4	E
5	A
6	FALSE（hard to quantify, results vary）
7	TRUE
8	TRUE
9	FALSE（also Philippines, Egypt, Brazil）
10	five
11	smoking
12	extroverted
13	five

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核心词汇

friendship / loneliness / social network / Dunbar's number / extroverted / close friendship / quantity vs quality / meta-analysis / well-being / psychology / evolutionary biology