If you are happy, if you live each moment for everything it’s worth, then you are an intelligent person. Problem solving is a useful help to your happiness, but if you know that given your inability to resolve a particular concern you can still choose happiness for yourself, or at a minimum refuse to choose unhappiness, then you are intelligent. You are intelligent because you have the ultimate weapon against the big N.B.D.─Nervous Break Down.

　　“Intelligent” people do not have N.B.D.’s because they are in charge of themselves. They know how to choose happiness over depression, because they know how to deal with the problems of their lives.

　　You can begin to think of yourself as truly intelligent on the basis of how you choose to feel in the face of trying circumstances. The life struggles are pretty much the same for each of us. Everyone who is involved with other human beings in any social context has similar difficulties. Disagreements, conflicts and compromises are a part of what it means to be human. Similarly, money, growing old, sickness, deaths, natural disasters and accidents are all events which present problems to virtually all human beings. But some people are able to make it, to avoid immobilizing depression and unhappiness despite such occurrences, while others collapse or have an N.B.D. Those who recognize problems as a human condition and don’t measure happiness by an absence of problems are the most intelligent kind of humans we know; also, the most rare.

　　26. According to the author, the conventional notion of intelligence measured in terms of one’s ability to read, write and compute .

　　A) is a widely held but wrong concept C) is the root of all mental distress

　　B) will help eliminate intellectual prejudice D) will contribute to one’s self-fulfillment