23. Which of the following is closest in meaning to the word ‘empathy’ (line 5)?
(A) A desire or willingness to do something
(B) The feeling of happiness, enjoyment or satisfaction
(C) A feeling of sadness that makes people think there is no hope for the future
(D) The ability to understand other people’s feelings and problemsReading 2Under stress, we all tend to seek comfort – sometimes in not-so-healthy ways – but a new studysuggests that challenging experiences are as likely to promote good habits as they are to support bad ones.In several different experiments, researchers including Wendy Wood, a professor of psychology andbusiness at the University of Southern California, found that under various types of stress, all types ofhabits got stronger – not just the ones that cause trouble.“When your willpower is low and you have little motivational energy, you are likely to fall back intoold, bad habits of eating too much and not exercising – but only if those are, in fact, your habits,” saysWood. “Our novel finding is that people fall back into good habits in just the same way.” The studywas published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.Stress depletes willpower; indeed, the brain is wired so that extreme stress actually shuts down thehigher regions involved in long-term planning and thoughtful consideration. That’s because thosefunctions are superfluous when survival is at stake. When under threat, the brain relies on faster, moreprimitive regions whose behavior is largely automatic under such circumstances. Automatic doesn’tmean built-in; however, many of our automatic behaviors, like riding a bike or eating French fries whenfeeling anxious, become automatic through repetition.