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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  36
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 Elizabeth Phelps’s opinion of the study?
选项 A、It can lead to conclusions about the meaning of the results.
B、It will achieve great success in the future research.
C、It is perfect enough in studying mental diseases.
D、It has some significance to the study of mental illness.
答案D
解析 事实细节题。由定位句可知，伊丽莎白·菲尔普斯认为，谁也不知道在未来的研究中它是否能成功，但是这是一个值得尝试的研究。由此判断D)“它对于研究精神疾病有一定意义”为答案。A)“它可以对结果的意义下结论”和原文相反，上文中提到，她认为对这个研究结果在精神疾病方面的意义下结论还为时过早，故排除；B)“它能在未来的研究中获得巨大成功”和原文相反，故排除；C)“它在研究精神疾病方面是完美的”不符合文意，文中提到这个结果虽然有趣，但却只是初步结果，因此不可能是完美的，故排除。
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