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Figuring out if millions of American workers are at risk from on-the-job exposure to hazardous chemicals has long been a thorny

admin2015-03-25  98
问题     Figuring out if millions of American workers are at risk from on-the-job exposure to hazardous chemicals has long been a thorny scientific problem. Last week, it became a prickly political issue too. Two senior Democrats in Congress demanded that the Bush Administration kill a proposal to change how the Department of Labor conducts the risk assessments that underpin worker safety regulations. Senator Edward Kennedy(D-MA)and Representative George Miller(D-CA), who lead Congress’s labor committees, charged that a leaked draft of the proposal shows that the Administration is rushing to " slip through a rule that may have profound negative impacts on worker safety" before leaving office in January.
    Labor Department officials reject the charge, saying that the changes they’re proposing—including one that could reduce a worker’s estimated exposure to dangerous substances—are designed to make risk assessments more "consistent, reliable, and transparent." And they say that if the new guidelines move forward, there will be plenty of time to hash out scientific issues.
    Critics are skeptical. "There certainly could be an interesting and worthwhile debate about the technical assumptions that go into risk assessment, but you don’t do that by shoving new guidelines out at the last minute," says David Michaels, an epidemiologist and worker safety advocate at George Washington University in Washington, D. C.
    The Administration had not publicly released the proposal as Science went to press. But the draft leaked to The Washington Post calls for several changes in how two agencies, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration(OSHA)and the Mine Safety and Health Administration, approach risk assessments. One is bureaucratic: It would require the agencies to do more to notify the public—a move critics claim is designed to entangle new rules in red tape.
    Another more controversial section calls for altering how regulators calculate a key risk measure called "working life." Currently, in most cases the agencies assume that a person works for 45 years(from age 20 to 65)and use that span to calculate potential total exposure to hazardous substances. From that, they estimate how many workers might get sick or die.
    But that approach likely overstates risks, the draft says, because few workers stay in the same job for 45 years. To back that view, it includes statistics showing that less than 5% of American workers stay with the same employer for even 35 years. "Thus, the actual exposure of the overwhelming majority of workers will likely be substantially less" than current methods estimate, according to the proposal. Instead, it calls for basing assessments on studies of how long workers actually work each day, and how long they stay in the same industry.
    That may not be a bad idea—but it’s not good enough to dump the 45-year assumption, says Adam Finkel, a former OSHA regulator who now teaches at the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey in Piscataway. For one thing, regulators often don’t have the time or money to collect such detailed information—if it actually exists, he says. And just because workers change jobs doesn’t necessarily mean that their exposure risks go down, he adds.
The word "controversial"(Line 1,Para.5)probably means
选项 A、eligible.
B、feeble.
C、debatable.
D、durable.
答案C
解析 语义理解题。由题干提示定位至第五段。根据第五段和第六段的内容，人们对是否改变风险评估的方法有不同说法，存在争议，故选[C]，debatable的意思是“有争议的”。eligible表示“合格的，有资格的，适当的”；feeble表示“虚弱的，无力的”；durable意思是“耐用的，持久的，有永久性的”，均排除。
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