2007年医学博士外语真题试卷

Many Canadians enjoy the luxury of a large amount of living space. Canada is vast, and the homes are large according to the standards of many countries. Even【C1】______inner cities do not reach the extremes found in other parts of world.

Canadians appreciate the space and value their privacy. Since families are generally small, many Canadian children enjoy the luxury of their own bedroom. Having more than one bathroom in a house is also considered a modern【C2】______

Many rooms in Canadian homes have specialized functions. “Family rooms” are popular features in modern houses; these are【C3】___, “living rooms” since many living rooms have become reserved for entertaining. Some homes have formal and informal dining areas, 【C4】___

Recreational homes are also popular【C5】___Canadians. Some Canadians own summer homes, cottages, or camps. These may【C6】from a small one-room cabin to a luxurious building that rivals the comforts of the regular residence. Some cottages are winterized for year-round use. Cottages offer people the chance to “get away from it all. ” They are so popular that summer weekend traffic jams are common, especially in large cities such as Toronto, where the number of people leaving town on Friday night and returning Sunday night【C7】___the highways for hours.

Sometimes, living in Canada means not only having privacy, but also being isolated. Mobility has become a part of modern life; people often do not live in one place long enough to【C8】___to know their neighbors. Tenants live their own lives in their apartments or town houses. Even in private residential areas, where there is some【C9】, neighborhood life is not as close-knit as it once was. There seems to be【C10】___of a communal spirit. Life today is so hectic that there is often little time.

The popular idea that classical music can improve your maths is falling from favor. New experiments have failed to support the widely publicized finding that Mozart’ s music promotes mathematical thinking.

Researchers reported six years ago that listening to Mozart brings about short-temporal reasoning , the type of thinking used in maths. Gordon Shaw of the University of California at Irvine and Frances Rauscher of the University of Wisconsin in Oshkosh had asked students to perform spatial tasks such as imagining how a piece of paper would look if it were folded and cut in a certain pattern.

Some of the students then listened to a Mozart sonata and took the test again. The performance of the Mozart group improved, Shaw found. He reasoned that listening to Mozart increases the number of connections between neurons.

But Kenneth Steele of Appalachian State University in North Carolina learnt that other studies failed to find this effect. He decided to repeat one of Shaw’ s experiments to see for himself.

Steele divided 125 students into three groups and tested their abilities to work out how paper would look if cut and folded. One group listened to Mozart, another listened to a piece by Philip Glass and the third did not listen to anything. Then the students took the test again.

No group showed any statistically significant improvement in their abilities. Steele concludes that the Mozart effect doesn’ t exist. “ It’ s about as unproven and as unsupported as you can get,” he says.

Shaw, however, defends his study. One reason he gives is that people who perform poorly in the initial test get the greatest boost from Mozart, but Steele didn’ t separate his students into groups based on ability. “We’re still at the stage where it needs to be examined,” Shaw says. “I suspect that the more we understand the neurobiology, the more we’ 11 be able to design tests that give a robust effect. “

Long-suffering couples take heart. There is a good reason for those endless arguments in the front of the car: men and women use different parts of the brain when they try to find their way a-round, suggesting that the strategies they use might also be completely different.

Matthias Riepe and his colleagues at the University of Ulm in Germany asked 24 healthy volunteers—half of them men, half women—to find their way out of three virtual-reality mazes displayed on video goggles. Meanwhile, the researchers monitored the volunteers’ brain activity using a functional magnetic resonance imaging(fMRI)scanner. This showed that men and women called on strikingly different brain areas to complete the task. “I didn’ t expect it to be so dramatic,” says Riepe.

Previous studies have been shown that women rely mainly on landmarks to find their way. Men use these cues too, but they also use geometric cues, such as the angle and shape of a wall or a corner. Such studies also suggest that men navigate their way out of unfamiliar spaces more quickly, as Riepe found in his study, too.

Riepe discovered that both men and women used parts of the parietal cortex towards the top of the brain, the right side of the hippocampus and a few other well-established areas to find their way out. Neuroscientists think that the parietal regions help translate what the eyes see into information about where the body is in space, while the hippocampal region helps process how objects are arranged.

But other regions seemed to be exclusively male or female. The men engaged the left side of their hippocampus, which the researchers say could help with assessing geometry or remembering whether they have already visited a location. The women, by contrast, recruited their right frontal cortex. Riepe says this may indicate that they were using their “working memory” , trying to keep in mind the landmarks they had passed.

“It fits very well with the animal studies,” says Riepe. He points out that there seem to be similar differences in rats. For example, damage to the frontal lobe will impair a female’ s sense of direction, but not a male’ s.

Work has left you frazzled. Your legs ache when you get back from the gym don’ t pop those aspirins just yet think hot springs. Cranking up a hot tub and hopping in is a natural remedy that can provide significant relief from physical pain and stress.

There are more than three million home spas in the U. S. today. There are numerous reasons spas have made the move from the decks of Hollywood producers to the back yards of middle America. Spas help reduce the effect of stress on your body, assist in muscle recovery after the stress of exercise, and help heal muscles near arthritic joints.

There are three elements to hydrotherapy that, in tandem, provide these healing effects on the body: heat, buoyancy, and motion. When you exercise, your muscles develop thousands of microscopic tears which result in painful lactic acid build-up in the muscle tissue. Hydrotherapy’ s motion and warmth cause blood vessels to dilate, lowering blood pressure and speeding the flow of oxygen, Endorphins, and cell-repairing nutrients to injured muscles. Additionally, buoyancy of the water reduces the strain on your knees and joints which allow the surrounding muscles to relax. This can be of crucial help to arthritis suffers, because when joints are inflamed, the surrounding muscles become tense to protect them. Relaxing in a spa then makes your muscles more limber and reduces the pain. Water’ s healing potential has long been known.

We don’t tend to associate intelligence with our bodies, yet as Thomas Edison said. “Great i-deas originate in the muscles. ” Radical psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich believed that many of us inhibit or deny impulses, feelings, traumas, and stresses by tightening our muscles and creating a kind of “ body armor. ” He felt that as you cut off the source of pain, you also cut off the source of pleasure. By loosening body armor, by letting muscles relax, you can return to a feeling of flow and creativity.

Few things can relax the body more than a home spa. And a relaxed body leads to a relaxed mind. There is no better place to start relaxing than an hour in your home hot springs.

Convincing the public to follow health advice can be tough and time-consuming. This may be why changes to health messages are often fiercely resisted by those whose job is to get the advice across. So, for example, the suggestion that smokers who cannot quit should reduce their exposure to harm by switching to chewing tobacco met with extreme opposition.

A still more ferocious debate is emerging over the health impact of sunshine. For the past 20 years, advice on sunlight has come from dermatologists who rightly warn people to cover up when they venture outside for fear of developing skin cancer. But evidence from researchers in other fields now suggests that short periods in the sun without protection—sometimes as little as a few minutes a day—can prevent most other major forms of cancer.

This surprising conclusion stems from findings that vitamin D, which is made by skin cells exposed to the sun’ s ultraviolet rays, is a potent anti-cancer agent. The researchers who made this discovery are eager to be heard. But their message is about as welcome as a bad rash, particularly in countries such as Australia and the US where fair-skinned immigrants living at Mediterranean latitudes have made skin cancer a huge problem.

The American Academy of Dermatology argues that advocating one carcinogen—UV radiation—to protect against other forms of cancer is dangerous and misleading. If people need more vitamin D, they should take a multivitamin or drink milk fortified with it, says the academy. Unfortunately , the solution is not as simple as that. Critics also argue that the protective effect of sunlight is not yet proved. While this may be true, the evidence is very suggestive. The case is built on several studies that bring together cellular biology, biochemistry and epidemiology.

And all the criticism of this theory counts for nothing if, as some of its advocates, suggest, the number of people dying for lack of sunlight is four times as high as those dying from skin cancer. At the same time, those advocates must not overstate their case. Everyone wants to save as many lives as they can.

What we need now is for national medical research bodies and cancer research organizations to investigate the relative risks and benefits of sunshine. This will almost certainly mean more epidemiological work, which should start as soon as possible. As for the public: give them the facts, including risk estimates for short periods in the sun—and for covering up, It is patronizing(施恩于人的)to assume that people cannot deal with complex messages.

What we definitely do not want is a war of words between groups with polarized views, and no prospect of the issue being resolved. That way will only lead to confusion, distrust of doctors and more unnecessary deaths.

I make my way down the three chilly blocks to an old diner on Commercial Street. I am meeting a new friend for lunch. I’ ve never been here before; this is not my part of town. And so I arrive early, to sit in an old wooden booth and learn what I can about the place.

They call it Katie’ s Kitchen. One hundred years ago, it was a bar. The barstools remain, but through community donations, it’ s now a respectable restaurant. The hostess, casher, and waiters are residents of a nearby hotel for the transient and unemployed and work here to gain dignity and job skills. Both the hotel and restaurant are run by Sister L, a nun with a heart and a great deal of business sense.

My new friend arrives. He works down the street, in a clinic for indigent(贫穷的)persons; he knows these people. The workers and many of the clients seem to know him too, for I see warmth and proud smiles on their faces as he greets them. Behind him, a few nameless souls wander in from the street in a swirl of December wind.

I focus on our waitress. A pretty girl of perhaps 18 years, she is all smiles and grace. I wonder for a moment why she’ s here—what her story is; what her dreams are; whether she is raising children on her own. But I cannot hold the thought, for she reminds me of another waitress at my favorite coffee shop—a college student with a bright future.

Some time later, I finish my soup and sandwich—a good meal made better because of the smile of the girl who served it. I wipe my mouth and go to pay. Eight dollars and sixty-four cents, for two. To our embarrassment, my friend and I discover that neither of us has cash, and my credit card is not good here. We sheepishly approach Sister L, who smiles and takes my bill. “It’ s o-kay,” she says. “We’ll buy your lunch. It’ll be our pleasure.

Slowly, I leave the world of the diner. Back at the hospital where I work, my boss laments our financial woes. “We’ re really tight,” he says. “The executive committee tells me we may not even have enough money to build the new critical care wing this year. ” He frowns, hesitates, then adds, “ It’ s flu season, though, and perhaps by seeing patients in person rather than treating so many over the phone, we’ 11 recoup some of our losses. “

It’ s budget time, and I know that this means our gratis(免费的)fitness center memberships may be cancelled. We’re in a tough bind.

Three streets away, a tattered man in a throwaway overcoat sits shivering in the diner. Sister L slowly fills his cup full of hot coffee. Holding the cup with trembling hands, he stares deeply into its dark center. There is healing in its rising steam.

Confronted with patient facing death, physicians may feel a sense of medical impotence and failure. Years of training and zeal to heal have focused on doing anything and everything to save the patient. Death is treated as the enemy. One might ask, “What use can I be if I cannot fix?” One may be tempted to withdraw. There may be no meaningful closure with a patient other than referral to home care or hospice.

Feelings evoked by a patient’s dying are also antithetical(对立的)to the original “call” to medicine—the desire to make a difference in people’ s lives and the alleviation of pain and suffering. Over time these inner directives may have been obscured by the rigors of a pressured practice, not to mention the climate of malpractice litigation(诉讼). This threat necessitates obsessive attention to the details of intervention options, possibly at the cost of considering the needs of the whole person at hand.

So the moment when death raises its specter(恐惧)is a crossroads. Herein lies the opportunity for physicians to go beyond their conventional model of relating to patients. This is when the conventional therapeutic tools can be set aside in favor of the most powerful contribution of all: the physician ’ s caring itself. The only requirement is a willingness to extend conscious listening and basic humanity to the dying patient. The simple act of visitation, of presence, of taking the trouble to witness the patient’s process can be in itself a potent healing affirmation—a sacramental(圣礼的)gesture received by the dying person who may be feeling helpless, diminished, and fearful that they have little to offer others. The patient may also fear that he or she has failed.

How meaningful it is to be told by my physicians that they are learning from me! I feel honored and joined by my physicians as we participate in these human, vulnerable, and mysterious moments at the end of my life. I and many dying persons would agree that beyond pain control, the three elements we most need are feeling cared about, being respected, and enjoining a sense of continuity, be it in relationships or in terms of spiritual awareness.