2. 外语
  3. Opinion polls repeatedly tell us that the only thing Americans worry about more than the environment is their health. This is en

Opinion polls repeatedly tell us that the only thing Americans worry about more than the environment is their health. This is en

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问题     Opinion polls repeatedly tell us that the only thing Americans worry about more than the environment is their health. This is entirely understandable, for health is obviously preferable to illness. What makes today’s preoccupation with health slightly surprising is that Americans are far healthier now than they have ever been.
    16.____________
    Nonetheless, health — and the various threats to it — remains everyone’s permanent concern. After all, more than half of us will die from either heart disease or cancer, if current trends continue.
    17.____________
    For instance, AIDS — if you get it—will probably be fatal after a number of years. Cancer induced by smoking or exposure to radiation, on the other hand, may take 20 to 30 years before its catastrophic effects show up. In making choices about health risks, therefore, it is important to bear in mind the likely time lag between taking a risk and suffering its consequences.
    Those with a mind to "live for today" are apt to be indifferent to health risks that have a very long incubation period. Although this is short-sighted, it does make sense to discount long-term risks more than short-term ones.
    18.____________
    One commonly used measure to deal with such problems is a concept called years of potential life lost. The idea is that for a 25-year-old, doing something that will kill him in 5 years is much more "costly" than doing something that will kill him in 40 years. Both may involve the same element of risk—the same probability of eventually dying from that activity — but a risk that may cause immediate damage is much more costly than one for which the piper needn’t be paid for a long time. In the first case, he will have his normal life span cut short by about 45 years; in the latter case, the deficit is about 5 years. Thinking about matters in this light inevitably causes a reassessment of many of the threats to health. For instance, heart disease is the single largest killer of Americans, way in front of cancer or strokes.
    19.____________
    Hence, more YPLLs are lost to cancer than to heart disease despite the greater incidence of fatal heart cases. Specifically, cancers claim about 25 percent more YPLLs than heart disease.
    The concept of YPLLs has an important, if controversial, influence on issues in health care economics. It is frequently argued that money devoted to medical research on curing diseases should be divided up on the basis of the number of lives lost to each disease. Thus, some critics of the massive levels of funding devoted to AIDS research claim that compared to killers such as heart disease and cancer — AIDS receives a disproportionately high support.
    20.____________
    Put differently, finding a cure for AIDS would be likely to add about 25 to 30 years to the life of each potential victim. Finding a cure for heart disease, although it might save far more lives, would probably add only another 5 to t0 years to the life of its average victim.
    The assessment of the seriousness of a risk changes, depending upon whether we ask how many lives it claims or how many YPLLs it involves. Some of the differences are quite striking. For instance, accidental deaths appear relatively insignificant compared to cancer and heart disease when we just count the deaths caused. But once we look at the number of lost years, accidents loom into first place among the killers of Americans. These data show that we need to ask not only how large a risk is but also when it becomes payable.
    [A] However, heart disease tends to strike the elderly in much greater proportions than younger people. Cancer, by contrast, kills fewer people but tends to strike somewhat earlier than heart disease.
    [B] After all, when virtually any of us is confronted with the choice of doing something likely to kill us today versus doing something likely to kill us in two decades, the choice is going to be the lesser of the two evils.
    [C] Many diseases that once struck terror into hearts have either been completely eliminated or brought under control. Although AIDS is a notable exception, few new mass killers have come along to replace the ones that have been eliminated.
    [D] Other things being equal, the sooner a risk causes damage or death, the more that risk is to be avoided.
    [E] That criticism fails to consider the fact that AIDS, by virtue of striking people 20, 000 deaths per year, bad as that is, might suggest.
    [F] One major problem with any comparison of health risks — especially life-threatening ones — is that they differ enormously in their immediacy.
选项
答案B
解析 在该空白段之前讲到在就健康风险作选择时，应牢记冒险和遭受其带来的后 果之间的可能时间距，在B选项中，提到当我们面临这种选择时，我们的选择往往是两害 之较轻者。从而可以推出B为正确项。
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