2000年医学博士外语真题试卷

When someone asks you to his or her home, it is very clear who is the guest and who is the host, but invitations to restaurant for lunch, dinner, coffee, a drink, etc,【B1】______, and the customs vary in different parts of the United States.

In many instances it is the inviter who pays, as one would expect, but in some instances each one pays his or her own check; You “【B2】___” This is often the case with friends in informal situations, such as “Let’ s go get a beer” or “Want a cup of coffee?” In some parts of the country, however, some people like to【B3】by taking them to a restaurant for a dinner instead of having dinner at home. In this case, the host expects to pay and the guest may offer to leave the tip, which【B7】by the host. If so, just let the matter drop. If the invitation is expressed【B8】, such as: “ Let’ s go to a Greenwillow for dinner,” it may be more of a suggestion than an invitation, so you should be prepared to pay【B6】___

If you want to invite somebody for a meal at a restaurant, be explicit; “I’d like to take you to Greenwillow. ” Americans should be【B7】______, but they often assume you know the local customs in the matter. Ask a friend’ s advice if you are not sure.

Despite growing numbers of joggers, Canada Fitness Surveys across the country demonstrate that Canadians are less physically fit than their U. S. or Swedish counterparts. Many people were【C1】___that they do not exercise often or vigorously enough for optimal benefits. Only about 25 per cent of Canadian adults paddle【C2】the recommended level that increases the heart beat to a target level【C3】there for at least 15 minutes thrice weekly. Men are more likely to be either “sedentary” or “very active” , while women are【C4】___to be “moderately active”.

Common reasons【C5】___are no willpower, poor facilities, boredom, fatigue, no partner, sheer laziness or lack of lime. Experts【C6】that better use of available time is the answer, with incentives and rewards to help sustain the exercise habit until the benefits become so【C7】___that activity is automatically scheduled into daily routines.

A modest increase in daily activity【C8】___the sedentary could improve the overall health of our population more than increased activity in those already dedicated to exercise. Activity in older people helps them【C9】agile, work and feel better. Many elderly people who remain active have a lower-heart rate than inactive youngsters.【C10】, one famous marathoner(Clarence Demar), e-ven after age 60, was in better shape than【C11】Currently only 35 per cent of the over【C12】take regular walks. Even a small gain in fitness among the elderly may permit them to replace a restricted lifestyle with【C13】in which they can play golf, dance, cycle and【C14】The overall【C15】___is clear; physical activity benefits body and mind, and should be encouraged for all, especially those who are now the least active.

People have worried about smog for many years, and the government has spent billions of dollars to try to clean up the air of big cities. Now we find that there is no escape from unhealthful air. Recent studies have shown that air inside many homes, office buildings, and schools is full of pollutants; chemicals, bacteria, smoke, and gases. These pollutants are causing a group of unpleasant and dangerous symptoms that experts call “sick building syndrome”. A “sick building” might be a small house in a rural area or an enormous office building in an urban center.

A recent study reached a surprising conclusion: Indoor air pollution is almost always two to five times worse than outside pollution! This is true even in buildings that are close to factories that produce chemicals. The solution to this problem would seem very clear; Open your windows and stay out of modern office buildings with windows that don’t open.

Unfortunately, the solution might not be so simple, better ventilation—a system for moving fresh air—can cut indoor air pollution to a safe level, but lack of ventilation is seldom the main cause of the problem. Experts have found that buildings create their own pollution. Imagine a typical home. The people who live there burn oil, wood, or gas for cooking and heating. They might smoke cigarettes, pipes, or cigars. They use chemicals for cleaning. They use hundreds of products made of plastic or particle board; these products—such as the shelves in Oakland High School— give off chemicals that we can’ t see but that we do breathe in. And in many areas, the ground under the building might send a dangerous gas called radon into the home. The people in the house are breathing in a “chemical soup” , and medical experts don’t yet know how dangerous this is for the human body.

The truth may well be self-evident that all humans are created equal, but one thing our Maker did not endow us with equally is the speed at which we take in words on the printed page. This seems not so much a function of brains as of how efficiently the machinery works. A few of us are industrial vacuum cleaners, able to suck up “The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire” in a matter of hours. At the other extreme are the lint-pickers, those who must lip-read even Danielle Steel. The rest of us are left to carpet-sweep at the rate of three or four words at a glance, and dream of the hours that would be saved if only we were better endowed.

Onto this uneven field charged Evelyn Wood back in the late 1950’ s. She was convinced that with a little pushing, all of us, even the lint-pickets, could be transformed into vacuum cleaners. All we had to do was stop saying the words out loud in our heads—” subvocalizing” , she called it— and to stop pausing to reread words as our minds drifted away. The point was to start consuming print in bites instead of nibble. To do this, Wood wanted us to drag our fingers down the middle of the page to act as pacers, to be rabbits for the greyhounds of our eyes. She promised that the words wouldn’ t blur; the faster we went, the more we would take in.

Did her method really work? Multitudes believed it did and flocked to her Evelyn Wood Reading Dynamics Institutes as they spread across the land. Presidents of the United States packed members of their staffs off to her schools, the better to keep from drowning in Presidential memos. Her students devoured George Orwell’ s “Animal Farm” at the rate of 1,400 words a minute.

Wood had guaranteed that her method worked on all manner of material. Not likely. So there had to be a drop of snake oil in the ointment. Still the essence of Wood’ s notion was sound.

OFF THE CHANNEL ISLANDS, California—Large numbers of giant endangered blue whales have gathered offshore attracting dozens of marine biologists who want to know why.

Scientists aboard six ships from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and other experts are working on a three-week project this summer to tag and track the whales electronically.

Three blue whales were tagged and followed last week, but scientists have seen many more.

” This is cetascean soup out here,” said Fred Benko, owner of a private charter boat that shuttles scientists to and from their research area.

The mammals, some up to 30 metres long, have congregated about 30 kilometres west of the Channel Islands, which are about 40 kilometres southwest of Santa Barbara and 120 kilometres northwest of Los Angeles.

Scientists first noticed the increase in blue whales in local waters in 1991, and a 1993 study indicated about 2,000 blue whales along the California coast. Preliminary research suggests that the Channel Islands National Marine Sanctuary contains the most concentrated blue whale population in the world.

The US Government has listed the animals as endangered since 1966, victims of the over zealous whaling industry in the first half of the century. Scientists believe there once were 400,000 blue whales roaming the world’ s oceans, but now only about 12,000.

The blue whales feed on krill, bright red crustaceans similar to shrimp. But since the Channel Islands are hardly the only place where krill thrive, researchers wonder what else might be drawing the whales to the area.

To tag the whales, scientists use a crossbow to fire a dart into blubber on the creature’ s back. A computer records the depth and length of every dive the whale takes.

” It’ s important for me that people know that they have a treasure out here,” said sanctuary Manager Ed Cassano. “ This is something everybody should be proud of. It’ s the jewel in the crown. “

I had never been in the public ward of a hospital before, and it was my first experience of doctors who handle you without speaking to you or, in a human sense, taking any notice of you. They only put on six glasses in my case, but after doing so they scarified the blisters and applied the glasses again. Each glass now drew out about a dessertspoonful of dark-colored blood. I had aches and pains all over. As I lay down again, humiliated, disgusted and frightened by the thing that had been done to me, I reflected that now at least they would leave me alone. But no, not a bit of it. There was another treatment coming, the mustard poultice, seemingly a matter of routine like the hot bath. Two slatternly nurses had already got the poultice ready, and they lashed it round my chest as tight as a strait-jacket while some men who were wandering about the ward in shirt and trousers began to collect round my bed with half-sympathetic grins. I learned later that watching a patient having a mustard poultice was a favorite pastime in the ward. These things are normally applied for a quarter of an hour and certainly they are funny enough if you don’ t happen to be the person inside. For the first five minutes the pain is severe, but you believe you can bear it. During the second five minutes this belief evaporates, but the poultice is bucked at the back and you can’ t get it off. This is the period the onlookers enjoy most. During the last five minutes I noted a sort of numbness supervenes. After the poultice had been removed a waterproof pillow packed with ice was thrust beneath my head and I was left alone, I did not sleep, and to the best of knowledge this was the only night of my life—I mean the only night spent in bed—in which I have not slept at all, not even a minute.

It is a natural marvel. All of the life of the earth dies, all the time, in the same volume as the new life that dazzles us each morning, each spring.

In our way, we human beings conform as best we can to the rest of nature. The obituary pages tell us of the news that we are dying away, while the birth announcements inform us of our replacement , but we get no grasp from this of the enormity of scale. There are 3 billion of us on the earth, and all 3 billion must be dead, on a schedule, within this lifetime. The vast mortality, involving something over 50 million of us each year, takes place in relative secrecy. We can only really know of the deaths in our households, or among our friends. These, detached in our minds from all the rest, we take to be unnatural events, anomalies, outrages. We streak of our own dead in low voices; struck down, we say, as though visible death can only occur for cause, by disease or violence , avoidably. We send off for flowers, grieve, make ceremonies, scatter bones, unaware of the rest of the 3 billion on the same schedule. All of that immense mass of flesh and bone and consciousness will disappear by absorption into the earth, without recognition by thetransient survivors.

Less than a half century from now, our replacements will have more than doubled the numbers. It is hard to see how we can continue to keep the secret, with such multitudes doing the dying. We will have to give up the notion that death is catastrophe, or detestable, or avoidable, or e-ven strange. We will need to learn more about the cycling of life in the rest of the system, and about our connection to the process. Everything that comes alive seems to be in trade for something that dies, cell for cell. There might be some comfort in the recognition of synchrony, in the information that we all go down together, in the best of company.

People can be addicted to different things—e. g. , alcohol, drugs, certain foods, or even television. People who have such an addiction are compulsive; i. e. , they have a very powerful psychological need that they feel they must satisfy. According to psychologists, many people are compulsive spenders; they feel that they must spend money. This compulsion, like most others, is irrational—impossible to explain reasonably. For compulsive spenders who buy on credit, charge accounts are even more exciting than money. In other words, compulsive spenders feel that with credit, they can do anything. Their pleasure in spending enormous amounts is actually greater than the pleasure that they get from the things they buy.

It is not only scientists, of course, who understand the psychology of spending habits, but also business people. Stores, companies, and advertisers use psychology to increase business; They consider people’ s needs for love, power, or influence, their beliefs and opinions, and so on in their advertising and sales methods.

Psychologists often use a method called “behavior therapy” to help individuals solve their personality problems. In the same way, they can help people who feel that they have problems with money: They give them “ assignments. ” If a person buys something in every store that he enters, for instance, a therapist might teach him self-discipline in this way: On the first day of his therapy, he must go into a store, stay five minutes, and then leave. On the second day, he should stay for ten minutes and try something on. On the third day, he stays for fifteen minutes, asks the salesclerk a question, but does not buy anything. Soon he will learn that nothing bad will happen to him if he doesn’ t buy anything, and he can solve the problem of his compulsive buying.

Physics and chemistry have furnished the techniques for biologists to take the exploration of life to its logical conclusion. This event demands a wider audience. The pattern of discovery cannot be predicted, but the tool kit now in the possession of biologists is so powerful that no known problem seems likely to hold its mysteries for long. By usurping the tools with which living cells manipulate DNA, biologists can cut the genetic material at chosen points and amplify target segments for further study. Techniques and software for sequencing the order of chemical units in DNA are now so sophisticated that the full human gene set seems likely to be sequenced within the next ten years.

It is only a matter of time before biologists catalogue the 75 ,000 or so human genes; identify the signals that switch each gene on and off; figure out what sets of active genes characterize each of the 200 or so major types of human cells, and determine how the consortium of interacting cells, and determine how the consortium of interacting cell types operates as an organism.

Such knowledge has larger consequences than scientists can deal with alone. Genes do not determine everything, but they set the boundaries of an individual’ s full potential. They probably decree major elements of personality and intelligence. They create a predisposition to various diseases. Knowledge of how the human machine is assembled implies the knowledge to repair, refine and improve it.

The first attempts at gene therapy have mostly stumbled, but the technique will surely be made to work eventually. The idea of correcting defective genes is not particularly controversial. But a fundamental solution to the creeping burden of Medicare—equipping every embryo with a birthright package of genes for good health, longevity and aversion to nicotine and violence—would raise knottier issues.

Critics will doubtlessly warn darkly of dangerous knowledge. But more knowledge is generally better than less. Molecular biology, long gathering speed, is about to take off. It is almost ready to become a spectator sport, not just a private club for academics and biotechnology companies.