The 2024 UN World Happiness Report ranked Denmark the world’s second happiest country for a sixth consecutive year. Denmark came just behind Finland, a country that has now held the top spot for seven years in a row. You might tend to think of the former consistently being runner-up. But that would mean you probably don’t understand the Danish way of thinking.
People in Denmark have a way of reframing (重新定义) situations that others might see as less than ideal. Simply put, Danish people are taught to reframe negative situations into positive ones. For instance, the headlines about the World Happiness Report don’t focus on the fact that Danes came second to Finland again, but that Denmark came in first in the 60 years and older category. And news reports don’t dwell on the fact that Finland once again comes first, but instead highlight that the gap between the two countries was smaller this year than last.
Denmark achieved an overall score this year of 7.586. Finland’s was just a tiny bit higher at 7.804. These scores are mainly calculated from the Gallup World Poll (盖洛普全球民意调查), where around 100,000 people in 130 countries are asked to score their lives on a scale of zero to 10 — zero being the worst possible life and 10 being the best. The Happiness Report then takes an average of the numbers given by those surveyed in each nation across the last three years from 2021. Data is also analyzed from a country’s GDP per capita (人均), social support, healthy life expectancy, freedom, generosity and corruption.
When I asked Catarina Lachmund, a senior analyst at Denmark’s Happiness Research Institute, what makes Finland happier than Denmark, she jokingly replied, “saunas (桑拿房).” Finland does have an impressive 3 million saunas for its population of 5.5 million, plus 188,000 lakes and forests that cover 75% of the land, according to Visit Finland. And then there are the Northern Lights, which you can see around 200 nights a year from Lapland, incidentally where Santa Claus lives.
分享本文十五分钟后截图给客服,获赠“阅读理解高频同义转换词”电子版!
奇速英语 原创编写 版权所有 侵权必究! 每日更新 个性化阅读 英语飙升!