听力课堂英语四级频道为各位备考四级的同学们，整理了大学英语四级听力美文第47篇:The Road to Happiness，希望对大家有所帮助，一起来看一下吧！
英语四级听力美文第47篇:The Road to Happiness
If you look around at the men and women whom you can call happy, you will see that they allhave certain things in common. The most important of these things is an activity which atmost gradually builds up something that you are glad to see coming into existence. Women whotake an instinctive pleasure in their children can get this kind of satisfaction out of bringingup a family. Artists and authors and men of science get happiness in this way if their own workseems good to them. But there are many humbler forms of the same kind of pleasure. Manymen who spend their working life in the city devote their weekends to voluntary andunremunerated toil in their gardens, and when the spring comes, they experience all the joysof having created beauty.
The whole subject of happiness has, in my opinion, been treated too solemnly. It had beenthought that man cannot be happy without a theory of life or a religion. Perhaps those who havebeen rendered unhappy by a bad theory may need a better theory to help them to recovery, just as you may need a tonic when you have been ill. But when things are normal a man shouldbe healthy without a tonic and happy without a theory. It is the simple things that reallymatter. If a man delights in his wife and children, has success in work, and finds pleasure in thealternation of day and night, spring and autumn, he will be happy whatever his philosophy maybe. If, on the other hand, he finds his wife fateful, his children's noise unendurable, and theoffice a nightmare; if in the daytime he longs for night, and at night sighs for the light of day, then what he needs is not a new philosophy but a new regimen — different diet, or moreexercise, or what not.
Man is an animal, and his happiness depends on his physiology more than he likes to think. This is a humble conclusion, but I cannot make myself disbelieve it. Unhappy businessmen, I am convinced, would increase their happiness more by walking six miles every day than byany conceivable change of philosophy.
