During the past two decades astonishing progress has been made in fighting infectious diseases in poor countries. Polio has almo

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问题     During the past two decades astonishing progress has been made in fighting infectious diseases in poor countries. Polio has almost been eradicated; malaria is being tamed; AIDS is slowly being brought under control. Yet almost unnoticed, another epidemic is raging across the developing world, this one man-made.
    Road crashes now kill 1.3 m people a year, more than malaria or tuberculosis. On present trends, by 2030 they will take a greater toll than the two together, and greater even than AIDS. The vast majority of victims die in poor and middle-income countries—1.2m in 2011, compared with 99, 000 in rich ones. For every 100,000 cars in the rich world, fewer than 15 people die each year. In Ethiopia the figure is 250 times higher.
    It is tempting to see the kill as the price of development. Building roads is a highly effective way of boosting growth: the World Bank finds many projects to fund that do better than its minimum acceptable economic rate of return of 12%. In the rich world road deaths and growth went hand-in-hand for decades: the first death-by-car was in 1896 and the peak came in the 1970s.
    However, since then, restraints on driver? and investment in safety have slashed road deaths in the rich world by more than half. New York’s roads are now at their safest since records began in 1910. Sweden is still some way from its stated goal of ending road deaths altogether, but in 2013 just one Swedish child under seven died in a crash. Technology such as alcolocks, which prevent drunk-driving, and self-driving cars will make roads in the rich world safer still.
    Governments in poor countries tend to assume that they, too, must see deaths soar before they are rich enough to think about saving lives. Aid donors and development banks may conclude that a dangerous road is better than no road at all. But the experience of rich countries has shown that roads can be made safer cheaply and simply. And far from being an unaffordable luxury, safe roads make better economic sense than dangerous ones. Most crash victims are boys and working-age men. Their death or disability leaves families in poverty and deprives countries of their most economically valuable citizens. In medical bills, care, lost output and vehicle damage, the kill costs desperately poor countries as much as 10% of GDP.
The underlined word "epidemic" (Para. 1, Line 3) may be closest to ______.

选项 A、polio
B、malaria
C、disease
D、death

答案C

解析 文章中的another epidemic表示“另一种______”,既然提到“另一种”,上文必然还提到类似的信息,由此我们可以推断上文的polio,malaria,AIDS都可以等同于epidemic,而选项A和B我们都可以选,因此可以确定这些词还不能完全与epidemic相等。我们再往前可以看到这么一句:...fighting infectious diseases in poor countries,而polio,malaria,AIDS就是上文提到的infectious diseases的具体例子,故可以推断出epidemic=infectious disease,即选项C是最佳的答案。
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