2017职称英语《卫生A》阅读理解专项试题与答案
阅读理解
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U.S. to Start $3.2 Billion Child Health Study in January
A study that will cost $3.2 billion and last more than two decades to track the health of 100,000 U.S. children from before birth to age 21 will be launched in January, U. S. health officials said on Friday.
Officials from the U. S. government's National Institutes of Health said they hope the study, to be conducted at 105 locations throughout the United States, can help identify early-life influences that affect later development, with the goal of learning new ways to treat or prevent illness.
The study will examine hereditary and environmental factors such as exposure to certain chemicals that affect health.
Researchers will collect genetic and biological samples from people in the study as well as samples from the homes of the women and their babies including air, water, dust and materials used to construct their residences, the NIH said.
Officials said more than $200 million has been spent already and the study is projected to cost $3.2 billion.
"We anticipate that in the long term, what we learn from the study will result in a significant savings in the nation's health care costs," Dr. Duane Alexander, who heads the NIH's Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, told reporters.
The study will begin in January when the University of North Carolina and the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York start signing up pregnant women whose babies will then be followed to age 21.
Some of the early findings will be about factors behind pre-term birth, which has become more common in recent years, according to Dr. Peter Scheidt of the NIH, who heads the study.
The people taking part will be from rural, urban and suburban areas, from all income and educational levels and from all racial groups, the NIH said.
1.The aim of the study is to find new ways to __________.
A. conduct research
B. track public health
C. prevent or treat illness
D. speed up development
2.Researchers will collect all the following EXCEPT __________.
A. genetic samples from people in the study
B. biological samples from people in the study
C. samples from the homes of the women and their babies
D. samples of air and water from hospitals
3.It is expected that through the study the nation's health care costs __________.
A. will be lowered in the long run
B. will be significantly increased
C. will be more than $200 million
D. will reach $3.2 billion
4.The babies of the participants will be followed__________.
A. throughout their lives
B. for more than two decades
C. from birth to 21 months
D. until they get married
5.Which is NOT true of the people in the study?
A. They'll be from various areas.
B. They'll be from all income levels.
C. They'll be from all educational levels.
D. They'll be from all age groups.
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Older Volcanic Eruptions
Volcanoes were more destructive in ancient history, not because they were bigger, but because the carbon dioxide they released wiped out life with greater ease.
Paul Wignall from the University of Leeds was investigating the link between volcanic eruptions and mass extinctions. Not all volcanic eruptions killed off large numbers of animals, but all the mass extinctions over the past 300 million years coincided with huge formations of volcanic rock. To his surprise, the older the massive volcanic eruptions were, the more damage they seemed to do. He calculated the "killing efficiency" for these volcanoes by comparing the proportion of life they killed off with the volume of lava that they produced. He found that for size, older eruptions were at least 10 times as effective at wiping out life as their more recent rivals.
The Permian extinction, for example, which happened 250 million years ago, is marked by floods of volcanic rock in Siberia that cover an area roughly the size of western Europe. Those volcanoes are thought to have pumped out about 10 gigatones of carbon as carbon dioxide. The global warming that followed wiped out 80 percent of all marine genera at the time, and it took 5 million years for the planet to recover. Yet 60 million years ago, there was another huge amount of volcanic activity and global warming but no mass extinction. Some animals did disappear but things returned to normal within ten thousands of years. "The most recent ones hardly have an effect at all," Wignall says. He ignored the extinction which wiped out the dinosaurs 65 million years ago, because many scientists believe it was primarily caused by the impact of an asteroid. He thinks that older volcanoes had more killing power because more recent life forms were better adapted to dealing with increased levels of CO2.
Vincent Courtillot, director of the Paris Geophysical Institute in France, says that Wignall's idea is provocative. But he says it is incredibly hard to do these sorts of calculations. He points out that the killing power of volcanic eruptions depends on how long they lasted. And it is impossible to tell whether the huge blasts lasted for thousands or millions of years. He also adds that it is difficult to estimate how much lava prehistoric volcanoes produced, and that lava volume may not necessarily correspond to carbon dioxide emissions.