2014年医学博士外语真题试卷

For years, scientists have been warning us that the radiation from mobile phones is detrimental to our health, without actually having any evidence to back these【C1】___up. However research now suggests that mobile phone radiation has at least one positive side effect it can help prevent Alzheimer’s,【C2】___in the mice that acted as test subjects.

It’s been suspected, though never proven, that heavy use of mobile phone is bad for your health. It’s thought that walking around with a cellphone permanently attached to the side of your head is almost sure to be【C3】______your brain. And that may well be true, but I’d rather wait until it’s proven before giving up that part of my daily life.

But what has now been proven, in a very perfunctory manner, is that mobile phone radiation can have an effect on your brain. 【C4】______in this case it was a positive rather than negative effect.

According to BBC News, the Florida Alzheimer Disease Research Center conducted a study on 96 mice to see if the radiation given off by mobile phone could affect the onset of Alzheimer’s.

Some of the mice were “genetically altered to develop beta-amyloid plagues in their brains”【C5】___they aged. These are a marker of Alzheimer’s. All 96 mice were then “exposed to the lector-magnetic【C6】___generated by a standard phone for two one-hour periods each day for seven to nine months. “The lucky things.

【C7】___, the experiment showed that the mice altered to be predisposed to dementia were protected from the disease if exposed before the onset of the illness. Their cognitive abilities were so unimpaired as to be virtually【C8】___to the mice not genetically altered in any way.

Unfortunately, although the results are positive, the scientists don’t actually know why exposed to mobile phone radiation has this effect. But it’s hoped that further study and testing could result in a non-invasive【C9】______for preventing and treating Alzheimer’s disease.

Autopsies carried out on the mice also concluded no ill-effects of their exposure to the radiation. However the fact that the radiation prevented Alzheimer’s means mobile phones【C10】______our brains and bodies in ways is not yet explored. And it’s sure there are negatives as well as this one positive.

I have just returned from Mexico, where I visited a factory making medical masks. Faced with fierce competition, the owner has cut his costs by outsourcing some of his production. Scores of people work for him in their homes, threading elastic into masks by hand. They are paid below the minimum wage, with no job security and no healthcare provision.

Users of medical masks and other laboratory gear probably give little thought to where their equipment comes from. That needs to change. A significant proportion of these products are made in the developing world by low-paid people with inadequate labor rights. This leads to human misery on a tremendous scale.

Take lab coats. Many are made in India, where most cotton farmers are paid an unfair price for their crops and factory employees work illegal hours for poor pay.

One-fifth of the world’s surgical instruments are made in northern Pakistan. When I visited a couple of a years ago I found most worker toiling 12 hours a day, seven days a week, for less than a dollar a day, exposed to noise, metal dust and toxic chemicals. Thousands of children, some as young as 7, work in the industry.

To win international contracts, factory owners must offer rock-bottom prices, and consequently drive down wages and labor conditions as far as they can. We laboratory scientists in the developed world may unwittingly be encouraging this: we ask how much our equipment will cost, but which of us asks who made it and how much they were paid?

This is no small matter. Science is supposed to benefit humanity, but because of the conditions under which their tools are made, many scientists may actually be causing harm.

What can be done? A knee-jerk boycott of unethical goods is not the answer; it would just make things worse for workers in those manufacturing zones. What we need is to start asking suppliers to be transparent about where and how their products are manufactured and urge them to improve their manufacturing practices.

It can be done. Many universities are committed to fair trade in the form of ethically sourced tea, coffee or bananas. That model should be extended to laboratory goods.

There are signs that things are moving. Over the past few years I have worked with health services in the IK and in Sweden. Both have recently instituted ethical procurement practices. If science is truly going to help humanity, it needs to follow suit.

A little information is a dangerous thing. A lot of information, if it’s inaccurate or confusing even more so. This is a problem for anyone trying to spend or invest in an environmentally sustainable way. Investors are barraged with indexes purporting to describe companies eco-credentials, some of dubious quality Green labels on consumer products are ubiquitous, but their claims are hard to verify. The confusion is evident from the New Scientists’ analysis of whether public perception of companies’ green credentials reflect reality. It shows that many companies considered “green” have done little to earn that reputation, while others do not get sufficient credit for their efforts to reduce their environmental impact. Obtaining better information is crucial, because decisions by consumers and big investors will help propel us towards a green economy.

At present, it is too easy to make unverified claims. Take disclosure of greenhouse gas emission, for example. There are voluntary schemes such as a Carbon Disclosure Project, but little scrutiny of the figures companies submit, which means investors may be misled.

Measurements can be difficult to interpret, too, like those for water use. In this case, context is crucial: a little from rain-soaked Ireland is not the same as a little drawn from the Arizona desert.

Similar problems bedevil “green” labels attached to individual products. Here, the computer equipment rating system developed by the Green Electronics Council shows the way forward. Its criteria come from the IEEE, the world’s leading, professional association for technology.

Other schemes, such as the “sustainability index” planned by US retail giant Walmart, are broader. Devising rigorous standard for a large number of different types of products will be tough, placing a huge burden on the academic-led consortium that is doing the underlying scientific work.

Our investigation also reveals that many companies choose not to disclose data. Some will want to keep it that way. This is why we need legal requirements for full disclosure of environmental information, with the clear message that the polluter will eventually be required to pay. The market forces will drive companies to lean up their acts.

Let’s hope we can rise to this challenge. Before we can have a green economy we need a green information economy—and it’s the quality of information, as well as the quality, that will count.

People are extraordinarily skilled at spotting cheats — much better than they are at detecting rule-breaking that does not involve cheating. A study showing that just how good we are at this adds weight to the theory that our exceptional brainpower arose through evolutionary pressures to acquire specific cognitive skills.

The still-controversial idea that humans have specialized decision systems in addition to generalized reasoning ability has been around for decades. Its advocates point out that the ability to identity untrustworthy people should be favored evolutionally since cheats risk undermining the social interactions in which people trade goods or services for mutual benefit.

To test whether we have a special ability to reason about cheating, Leda Cosmides, an evolutionary psychological test called the Wason selection test, which tests volunteers’ ability to reason about “if/then” statements.

The researchers set up scenarios in which they asked undergraduate volunteers to imagine they were supervising workers sorting applications for admission to two schools: a good one in a district where school taxes are high, and a poor one on an equally wealthy, but lightly taxed district. The hypothetical workers were supposed to follow a rule that specified “if a student is admitted to the good school, they must live in the highly taxed district”.

Half the time, the test subjects are told that the workers had children of their own applying to the schools, thus having a motive to cheat; the rest of the time they were told the workers were merely absent-minded and sometimes made innocent errors. Then the test subjects were asked how they would verify that the workers were not breaking the rule.

Cosmides found that when the “supervisors” thought they were checking for innocent errors, just 9 of 33, or 27 percent, got the right answer—looking for a student admitted to the good school who did not live in the highly-taxed district. In contrast, when the supervisors thought they were watching for cheats, they did much better with 23 of 34, or 68 percent getting the right answer.

This suggests that people are, indeed more adept at spotting cheat than at detecting mere rule-breaking. Cosmides says, “Any cues that it’s just an innocent mistake actually inactivate the detection mechanism. “

The result is what you would expect if natural selection had favored this specific ability in early, pro-social humans — and is not at all what would happen under selection for generalized intelligence, Cosmides says. “My claim is that there is nothing domain-general in the mind, just that that can’t be the only thing going on in the mind. “

Other psychologists remain skeptical of this conclusion. “If you want to conclude that therefore there’s a module in the mind for detecting cheater, I see zero evidence for that, ” says Steven Sloman, a cognitive scientist at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island. “It’s certainly possible that it’s something we learned through experience. There is no evidence that it’s anything innate. “

For many environmentalists, all human influence on the planet is bad. Many natural scientists implicitly share this outlook. This is not unscientific, but it can create the impression that greens and environmental scientists are authoritarian tree-huggers who value nature above people. That doesn’t play well with mainstream society, as the apparent backlash against climate scientist revels.

Environmentalists need to find a new story to tell. Like it nor not, we now live in the antropocent (人类世) —an age in which humans are perturbing many of the planet’s natural systems, from the water to the acidity of the oceans. We cannot wish that away we must recognize it and manage our impacts.

Johan Rockstrom, head of the Stockholm Environment Institute in Sweden, and colleagues have distilled recent research on how Earth systems work into a list of nine “planetary boundaries” that we must stay within to live sustainably. It is preliminary work, and many will disagree with where the boundaries are set. But the point is to offer a new way of thinking about our relationship with the environment—a science-based picture that accepts a certain level of human impact and even allow us some room to expand. The result is a breath of fresh air: though we are already well past three of the boundaries, we haven’t trashed the place yet.

It is in the same spirit that we also probe the basis for key claims in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s 2007 report on climate impacts. This report has been much discussed since our revelations about its unsubstantiated statement on melting Himalayan glaciers. Why return to the topic? Because there is a sense that the IPCC shares the same anti-human agenda and, as a result, is too dangerous of unverified numbers. While the majority of the report is assuredly rigorous, there is no escaping the fact that parts of it make claims that go beyond the science.

Above all, we need a dispassionate view of the state of the planet and our likely future impact on it. There is no room for complacency: Rockstrom’s analysis shows us that we face real dangers, but exaggerating our problems is not the way to solve them.

Humanity has passed a milestone: more people live in cities than in rural areas. The current rate of urbanization is unprecedented in our history. In 1950, only 29% of people lived in cities, by 2050, 70% are projected to do so — most of them in poorer countries. Among many other issues, this rapid concentration makes cities a front line in the battles against climate change and pollution. Confronting the challenges of rampant urbanization demands integration multidisciplinary approaches, and new thinking. Take the building boom associated with the increased wealth of urban areas, and its impact on greenhouse-gas emissions as example. In China alone, the United Nations Environmental Program estimates the energy demand for heating homes build over the next decade could increase by some 430 terawatt-hours, or 4% of China’s total energy use in 2003. Worldwide, the energy consumed by buildings already accounts for around 45% of greenhouse-gas emissions.

Fortunately, researchers in Germany and elsewhere have already shown that they can reduce that energy consumption by 80%-90%, just by overhauling obsolete building designs and using existing technologies. These ultra-efficient buildings demand that planners, architects, engineers and building scientists work together from the outset, and require higher levels of expertise the conventional buildings. But such buildings are often cheaper than those built using conventions methods. Research is also needed to develop technologies, materials and energyconcepts; the green building research today is fragmented and poorly funded.

Expanding cities must embrace such technologies and strategies — and not just in the developed nations. Many poorer countries have a rich tradition of adapting buildings to look at practices, environments and climates—a home-grown approach to integrated design that has been all but been lost in the West. They now have an opportunity to combine these traditional approaches with modern technologies.

Integrated thinking is also needed to mitigate urban air pollution, which is becoming serious health and environmental risk in many regions—as shown by China’s struggle to clean up Beijing’s air for the Olympics. Understanding air pollution will require researchers from multiple disciplines, from atmospheric chemistry to meteorology, working over scales from street level to global. And reducing it will require integrated policies for urban planning, transport and housing — not least to reduce the use of cars.

On June 26, 2000, two scientific teams announce at the White House that they had deciphered virtually the entire human genome, a prodigious feat that involved determining the exact sequence of chemical units in human genetic material. An enthusiastic President Clinton predicted a revolution in “the diagnosis, prevention and treatment of most, if not all, human diseases”.

Now, 10 years later, a sobering realization has set in. Decoding the genome has led to stunning advances in scientific knowledge and DNA-processing technologies but it has done relatively little to improve medical treatments or human health.

To be fair, many scientists at the time were warning that it would be a long, slow slog to reap clinical benefits.

And there have been some important advances, such as powerful new drugs for a few cancers and genetic tests that can predict whether people with breast cancer need chemotherapy. But the original hope that close study of the genome would identify mutations or variants that cause diseases like cancer, Alzheimer’s and heart ailments—and generate treatments for them—has given way to realization that the causes of most diseases are enormously complex and not easily traced to a simple mutation or two.

In the long run, it seems likely that the genomic revolution will pay off. But no one can be sure. Even if the genetic roots of some major diseases are identified, there is no guarantee that treatments can be found. The task facing science and industry in the coming decades is at least as challenging as the original deciphering of the human genome.