For decades many U.S. veterans who took part in atmospheric nuclear tests have wondered whether their exposure to radiation migh

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问题     For decades many U.S. veterans who took part in atmospheric nuclear tests have wondered whether their exposure to radiation might ultimately cost them their lives. Their private fears became a public issue in 1976 after a veteran claimed his leukemia was caused by radiation from a 1957 test series.
    The atomic veterans and their families, as well as researchers and policy-makers, continue to struggle for definitive answers. These have been elusive, at least in part, because a crucial piece of information has been difficult to get--the radiation dose that each individual received.
    In the largest study to date, researchers from the Institute of Medicine (IOM) have come up with some partial answers. But they too were limited in their ability to draw conclusions by the lack of usable information on radiation exposure.
    The new study focused on participants in five series of nuclear tests, all of which took place either in the Nevada desert or the South Pacific. Nearly 70,000 soldiers, sailors, airmen, and marines were involved in at least one of these, and about 30 percent of them have now died. For comparison, researchers selected a group of 65,000 military people serving at the same time under similar conditions, except that they did not take part in nuclear tests.
    After an intensive review of service and death records, researchers found no difference between the two groups in overall death rates or in total deaths from cancer. Had there been a dramatic radiation effect, it would have shown up in this comparison.The researchers also analyzed specific causes of death, including diseases linked in other studies to radiation. Here there were some differences. Among the nuclear test veterans, 14 percent more died from leukemia than those in the comparison group, although the difference lacked statistical significance and could have resulted from chance.
    When comparisons were made based on whether the veterans participated in nuclear tests in Nevada or in the Pacific Ocean, the differences were sharper: a 50 percent higher leukemia death rate among Nevada atomic veterans than among the comparison group. This was not true among Pacific test participants, who actually had a slightly lower, though not statistically significant leukemia death rate than those in their comparison group.
The passage tells us that researchers wish that they could find out ______.

选项 A、when and where the veterans received the nuclear radiation
B、why the amount of radiation cannot be accurately measured
C、who was responsible for the veterans’ deaths
D、how much radiation each veteran got during the nuclear tests

答案C

解析 综观全文,C项为正确答案。
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