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  3. This may come as no surprise to residents of New York City and other big urban centers: Living there can be bad for your mental

This may come as no surprise to residents of New York City and other big urban centers: Living there can be bad for your mental

admin2012-08-10  18
问题     This may come as no surprise to residents of New York City and other big urban centers: Living there can be bad for your mental health.
    Now researchers have found a possible reason why. Imaging scans show that in city dwellers or people who grew up in urban areas, certain areas of the brain react more vigorously to stress. That may help explain how city life can boost the risks of schizophrenia (精神分裂症) and other mental disorders, researchers said.
    Previous research has found that growing up in a big city raises the risk of schizophrenia. And there’s some evidence that city dwellers are at heightened risk for mood and anxiety disorders, although the evidence is mixed.
    The study, done in Germany and published in Thursday’s issue of the journal Nature, focused on how the brain reacts to stress caused by other people.
    To do that, investigators had volunteers lie in a brain scanner and solve math problems. The volunteers expected easy problems, but they were in fact hard enough that each volunteer ended up getting most of them wrong.
    While in the scanner, volunteers heard a researcher criticize their poor performance, saying it was surprisingly bad and disappointing, and telling the volunteers they might not be skilled enough to participate.
    To assess any effect of where the volunteers grew up, the researchers assigned each an "urbanicity" score based on how many years they’d spent by age 15 in a city, town or rural area. The higher the score, the more urban their childhood life was, and the more activity showed up in the amygdale-regulating (杏仁核控制的) circuitry during the experiment.
    A slightly different stress-producing test produced similar results with a different group of 23 volunteers.
    Jens Pruessner, a study co-author from the Douglas Mental Health University Institute in Montreal, said the study illustrates a new avenue for understanding the risk factors for developing mental illness.
    An expert in emotion and the brain who wasn’t involved with the study, Elizabeth Phelps of New York University, said it’s premature to draw conclusions about what the results mean for mental illness.
    "These results are interesting but preliminary," she said. "This will raise a lot of interest in this idea. Whether or not it pans out in future research, who knows, but I think it’s worth investigating. "
What can we learn from Paragraph 3?
选项 A、Researchers have made the cause of mental diseases clear.
B、City dwellers are more likely to suffer from mental diseases.
C、Mental diseases are caused by growing up in urban areas.
D、The level of mental diseases is in proportion to the size of the city.
答案B
解析 事实细节题。由原文可知，以前的研究已经发现在大城市长大会增加患精神分裂症的风险。也有证据表明城市居民也处于情绪失控和焦虑的高风险之中，尽管原因是复杂的。因此，B)“城市居民更有可能罹患精神疾病”为答案。A)“研究者已经弄清楚了造成精神疾病的原因”和原文意思不符。原文提出精神疾病的原因是多重复杂的，但是研究者们目前研究的只是其中的一个，故排除；C)“精神疾病是由于生长在城市中造成的”，该说法过于绝对，故排除；D)“精神疾病的程度和城市的规模成正比”原文未提及，故排除。
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