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  3. Reading the papers and looking at television these days, one can easily be persuaded that the human species is on its last legs,

Reading the papers and looking at television these days, one can easily be persuaded that the human species is on its last legs,

admin2011-01-10  43
问题    Reading the papers and looking at television these days, one can easily be persuaded that the human species is on its last legs, still tottering along but only barely making it. In this view, disease is the biggest menace of all. Even when we are not endangering our lives by eating the wrong sorts of food and taking the wrong kinds of exercise, we are placing ourselves in harm’s way by means of the toxins we keep inserting into the environment around us.
   As if this were not enough, we have fallen into the new habit of thinking our way into illness: ff we take up the wrong kind of personality, we nm the risk of contracting a new disease called stress, followed quickly by coronary occlusion. Or if we just sit tight and try to let the world slip by, here comes cancer, from something we ate, breathed or touched. No wonder we are a nervous lot. The word is out that if we were not surrounded and propped up by platoons of health professionals, we would drop in our tracks.
   The truth is something different, in my view. There has never been a time in history when human beings in general have been statistically as healthy as the people now living in the industrial societies of the Western world. Our average life expectancy has stretched from 45 years a century ago to today’s figure of around 75. More of us than ever before are living into our 80s and 90s. Dying from disease in childhood and adolescence is no longer the common occurrence that it was 100 years ago, when tuberculosis and other lethal microbial infections were the chief causes of premature death. Today, dying young is a rare and catastrophic occurrence, and when it does happen, it is usually caused by trauma.
   Medicine must get some of the credit for the remarkable improvement in human health, but not all. The profession of plumbing also had much to do with the change. When sanitary engineering assured the populace of uncontaminated water, the great epidemics of typhoid fever and cholera came to an end. Even before such advances, as early as the 17th century, improvements in agriculture and nutrition had increased people’s resistance to infection.
   In short we have come a long way--the longest part of that way with common sense, cleanliness and a better standard of living, but a substantial recent distance as well with medicine. We still have an agenda of lethal and incapacitating illnesses to cause us anxiety, but these shouldn’t worry us to death. The diseases that used to kill off most of us early in life have been brought under control.
   Meanwhile, biomedical research has moved us into the early stage of a totally new era in medicine. So much has recently been learned about fundamental processes at cellular and subcellular levels that there are no longer any disease mechanisms that have the look of impenetrable mysteries. There is a great deal still to be learned about the ailments of our middle years and old age—cancer, heart disease, stroke, dementia, arthritis and the rest. But they no longer seem unapproachable, as they did just ten years ago.
   Today’s powerful technologies for basic research have made it possible for scientists to investigate almost any question. This does not guarantee a quick answer, of course, or even a correct one; but the ability to make intelligent guesses and then to formulate sharp questions concerning medicine’s hardest problems is something new.
   It no longer stretches the imagination to see a time ahead when human beings, in industrialized society, can be relatively free of disease for a full run through life. This does not mean that we shall be any happier or be living much longer than we do now. We shall still die most often by wearing out, according to our individual genetic clocks; but we shall not be so humiliated by the chronic illnesses that now make old age itself seem a disease.
One hundred years ago, people were ______.
选项 A、not as healthy as today
B、as strong as today
C、not as poor as today
D、as hard as today
答案A
解析
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