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  3. 　　The inner voice of people who appear unconscious can now be heard. For the fir

　　The inner voice of people who appear unconscious can now be heard. For the fir

游客2024-01-21  56
问题 　　The inner voice of people who appear unconscious can now be heard. For the first time, researchers have struck up a conversation with a man diagnosed as being in a vegetative (植物的) state. All they had to do was monitor how his brain responded to specific questions.
    "They can now have some involvement in their destiny," says Adrian Owen of the University of Cambridge, who led the team doing the work.
    In an earlier experiment, Owen’s team asked a woman previously diagnosed as being in a vegetative state to picture herself carrying out one of two different activities. The resulting brain activity suggested she understood the commands and was therefore conscious.
    Now Owen’s team has taken the idea a step further. A man also diagnosed with VS was able to answer yes and no to specific questions by imagining himself engaging in the same activities.
    The results suggest that it is possible to give a degree of choice to some people who have no other way of communicating with the outside world. "We are not just showing they are conscious, we are giving them a voice and a way to communicate," says neurologist (神经病学家) Steven Laureys of the University of Liege in Belgium, Owen’s partner.
    Doctors traditionally base these diagnoses on how someone behaves: for example, whether they can glance in different directions in response to questions. The new results show that you don’t need behavioural indications to identify awareness and even a degree of cognitive proficiency. All you need to do is tap into brain activity directly.
    The work "changes everything", says Nicholas Schiff, a neurologist at Weill Cornell Medical College in New York, who is carrying out similar work on patients with consciousness disorders. "Knowing that someone could persist in a state like this and not show evidence of the fact that they can answer yes/no questions should be extremely disturbing to our practice."
    One of the most difficult questions you might want to ask someone is whether they want to carry on living. But as Owen and Laureys point out, the scientific, legal and ethical challenges for doctors asking such questions are formidable. [br] Owen’s team can communicate with people in a VS by ________.
选项 A、enabling them to think
B、enabling them to speak
C、providing them with choices
D、providing them with activities
答案 C
解析 该句指出研究人员为植物人提供选择，而句中的no other way表明植物人作出的选择是他们和外界交流的唯一途径，由此可见，本题应选C。本文的研究认为，植物人是能思考的。但他们并不因为有思维而能与外界沟通，因此A不正确；第5段第2句提到的giving them a voice只是一种比喻的说法，植物人并不能真正地说话，因此，B不正确；如果仅仅为植物人提供一些活动，得到的结果只是证明了植物人有大脑的意识，第3段描述的试验过程就是这样。只有给他们提供二选一的问题，研究人员才能通过他们的选择与其沟通(如第4段描述的进一步实验)，因此，D也不正确。
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