2. 职称英语
  3. Human beings, unlike oysters, frequently reveal their emotions. And they are

Human beings, unlike oysters, frequently reveal their emotions. And they are

游客2025-04-23  20
问题     Human beings, unlike oysters, frequently reveal their emotions. And they are prolific at discovering new "rights." Today they speak often, and crossly, about their "right" to health. They are paying a lot for medicine and are not getting all that they think they are paying for, a guarantee to endless betterment. Their disappointment is rooted in mistaken inferences from a few spectacular medical achievements.
    Twenty-five summers ago, many children were kept home from theaters that were packed with peers watching Randolph Scott cowboy movies. Many parents were afraid, and rightly so, of polio. The-Salk vaccine made summers safer, but that achievement has given rise to unreasonable expectation based on the "polio paradigm." Many people assume that advances in public health have generally resulted from a conquest of a disease by a new technology. This is misunderstanding of the social history of health.
    When Shakespeare, Coke, Bacon and Drake were advancing drama and poetry, jurisprudence, experimental science, navigation and exploration, John Donne, who was doing as much for poetry and preaching, was being treated for fever by doctors who placed a dead pigeon at his feet to draw "vapours" from his brain. Until this century, medicine developed slowly, in a social setting in which infant mortality was high, life expectancy was low even for those who survived childhood, and diagnostic and therapeutic skills were few. The sudden development of sophisticated medicine has coincided, in fortunate societies, with sharp improvements in infant survival and life expectancy, and undreamed-of freedom from many diseases. As a result, medicine has been given undue credit for mankind’s betterment.
    Many people believe that society’s level of health depends primarily on medical treatment of the sick. But the relationship between increased investment in medicine and improvements in health is tenuous. Behavior usually has more to do with how long and healthily people live than does the soaring investment in medical treatments to restore health, or to slow its decline. Leon Kass of the University of Chicago notes that other animals "instinctively eat the right foods (when available) and act in such a way as to maintain their naturally given state of health and vigor. Other animals do not overeat, under sleep, knowingly ingest toxic substances, or permit their bodies to fall into disuse through sloth, watching television and riding in automobiles, transacting business or writing articles about health." For humans, health must be nurtured by "taming and moderating the admirable yet dangerous human desire to live better than sows and squirrels." So in one way, it makes little more sense to claim a right to health than to claim a right to wisdom or courage.
    As Kass says, in an age that has cracked the genetic code, built Kidney machines, and performed organ transplants, the idea that prudence is the path to health seems banal. But there is much to be learned about the sociology of health, such as why some subgroups of the population are especially healthy. "If the incidence of each kind of cancer could be reduced to the level at which it occurs in the population in which its incidence is lowest, there would be 90 percent less cancer. Recent studies show that cancers of all sorts—not only cancers clearly correlated with smoking and dninkiny—are less frequent among the clean-living Mormons and Seventh-Day Aventists."  [br] The word "tenuous" (4th paragraph) most probably mean ______.
选项 A、close
B、obvious
C、crucial
D、remote
答案 D
解析
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