2. 外语
  3. Medical consumerism -- like all sorts of consumerism, only more menacingly -- is designed to be unsatisfying. The prolongation o

Medical consumerism -- like all sorts of consumerism, only more menacingly -- is designed to be unsatisfying. The prolongation o

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问题    Medical consumerism -- like all sorts of consumerism, only more menacingly -- is designed to be unsatisfying. The prolongation of life and the search for perfect health (beauty, youth, happiness) are inherently self-defeating. The law of diminishing returns necessarily applies. You can make higher percentages of people survive into their eighties and nineties. But, as any geriatric ward shows, that is not the same as to confer enduring mobility, awareness and autonomy. Extending life grows medically feasible, but it is often a life deprived of everything, and one exposed to degrading neglect as resources grow over-stretched and politics turn mean.
   What an ignominious destiny for medicine if its future turned into one of bestowing meagre increments of unenjoyed life! It would mirror the fate of athletics, in which disproportionate energies and resources -- not least medical ones, like illegal steroids -- are now invested to shave records by milliseconds. And, it goes without saying, the logical extension of longevism -- the "abolition" of death -- would not be a solution but only an exacerbation. To air these predicaments is not anti-medical spleen, but simply to face the growing reality of medical power not exactly without responsibility but with dissolving goals.
   Hence medicine’s finest hour becomes the dawn of its dilemmas. For centuries, medicine was impotent and hence unproblematic. ’From the Greeks to the Great War, its job was simple: to struggle with lethal diseases and gross disabilities, to ensure live births, and to manage pain. It performed these uncontroversial tasks by and large with meagre success. Today, with mission accomplished, medicine’s triumphs are dissolving in disorientation. Medicine has led to vastly inflated expectations, which the public has eagerly swallowed. Yet as these expectations grow unlimited, they become unfulfillable. The task facing medicine in the twenty-first century will be to redefine its limits even as it extends its capacities.
In the second paragraph a comparison is drawn between
选项 A、medicine and life.
B、resources and energies.
C、predicaments and solutions.
D、athletics and longevism.
答案D
解析 此道题问在第二段，作者在哪两者之间进行了比较。从“It would mirror the fate of athletics，in which disproportionate energies and resources——not least medical ones，like illegal steroids—are now invested to shave records by milliseconds.”一句中，我们能看到作者把延长寿命比作在运动中服用兴奋剂那样会带来不良后果。所以正确答案是D。
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