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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  51
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 is the purpose of letting volunteers solve math problems?
选项 A、To see whether they are qualified to the investigation.
B、To criticize their poor performance in the investigation.
C、To find the relationship between their mood and stress.
D、To judge the degree of each one’s "urbanicity".
答案C
解析 事实细节题。本题考查研究者让志愿者们做数学题的目的。定位句中的to do that意为“为了这样做”，that指代的内容已经在上文中出现。联系上文可知，该研究的目的就是为了调查大脑如何对由他人引起的压力做出反应。因此，C)“为了找出人们的情绪和压力之间的关系”为答案。A)“为了检查人们是否有资格参加研究”原文未提及，故排除；B)“为了批评人们在研究中的不佳表现”和原文意思不符，文章中虽然提到研究员们批评人们的不佳表现，但这是研究的手段而不是目的，故排除；D)“为了判断每个参加者的城市化程度”是对原文的错误理解，研究员对每个参加者的城市化程度进行评分，是为了看成长环境的不同对人们的影响有何差异，和做数学题无关，故排除。
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