题目内容
Part A
Directions: Read the following four texts. Answer the questions below each text by choosing A, B, C or D. (40 points)
It might take only the touch of peach fuzz to make an autistic child howl in pain. The odour of the fruit could be so overpowering that he gags. For reasons that are not well understood, people with autism do not integrate all of their senses in ways that help them understand properly what they are experiencing. By the age of three, the signs of autism—infrequent eye contact, over-sensitivity or over—sensitivity to the environment, difficulty mixing with others—are in full force. There is no cure; intense behavioural therapies serve only to lessen the symptoms.
The origins of autism are obscure. But a paper in Brain, a specialist journal, casts some light. A team headed by Marcel Just, of Carnegie Mellon University, and Nancy Minshew, of the University of Pittsburgh, has found evidence of how the brains of people with autism function differently from those without the disorder.
Using a brain-scanning technique called functional magnetic-resonance imaging (FMRI), Dr. Just, Dr. Minshew and their team compared the brain activity of young adults who had "high-functioning" autism (in which an autiat's IQ score is normal) with that of non-autistic participants. The experiment was designed to examine two regions of the brain known to be associated with language—Broca's area and Wernicke's area—when the participants were reading.
Three differences emerged. First, Wernicke's area, the part responsible for understanding individual words, was more active in autists than non-autists. Second, Broca's area—where the components of language are integrated to produce meaning—was less active. Third, the activity of the two areas was less synchronised.
This research has led Dr. Just to offer an explanation for autism. He calls it "underconnectivity theory". It depends on h recent body of work which suggests that the brain's white matter (the wiring that connects the main bodies of the nerve cells, or grey matter, together) is less dense and less abundant in the brain of an autistic person than in that of a non-autist. Dr. Just suggests that abnormal white matter causes the grey matter to adapt to the resulting lack of communication. This hones some regions to levels of superior ability, while others fall by the wayside.
The team chose to examine Broca's and Wernicke's areas because language-based experiments are easy to conduct. But if the underconnectivity theory applies to the rest of the brain, too, it would be less of a mystery why some people with autism are hypersensitive to their environments, and others are able to do certain tasks, such as arithmetic, so well. And if it is true that underconnectivity is indeed the main problem, then treatments might be developed to stimulate the growth of the white-matter wiring.
Which of the following is true according to the first paragraph？
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A．UnlessB．IF．C．AlthoughD．Before
Family and Health Care
"Chronic diseases, such as heart disease and cancer, have replaced acute infectious illness as the leading causes of death in the United States," says Thomas L. Campbell, a physician specializing in family related medicine. Since most of these diseases cannot be cured, Campbell believes more emphasis must be placed on health promotion and disease prevention.
The way to do this is through the family, Campbell says in a report published by the National Council on Family Relations. "The family has a powerful influence on health beliefs and behaviors because it is the primary social agent in the promotion of health and well-being. Preventive health-care programs and policies must focus on the family and use it as an important resource in health promotion."
Campbell points to a number of observable connections between health and family:
The family is the primary setting in which attitudes and behaviors regarding diet, exercise, smoking, alcohol consumption, and drug use are learned and maintained.
Unhealthy behaviors and genetic risk factors for diseases are frequently found within families, as family members tend to share not only genes, but diets, physical activities, and alcohol and tobacco use.
Chronic marital (婚姻的) distress and conflict can lead to acute and chronic health changes, such as rising blood pressure and heart rate and lowering immunity (免疫力) of cells. These physiological (生理上的) changes result in a wide range of diseases, especially heart disease and cancer.
Campbell believes that a number of measures be made within the health-care system to accommodate the influence of the family. For example, health education and preventive care should be targeted toward families as well as individuals and communities. Also, when a risk factor for a disease or condition is identified in one family member, all other family members should be tested.
Campbell also recommends that mental-health care be included in wellness programs and suggests that family professionals (therapists, sociologists, and family-life educators) become more actively involved in health promotion.
Campbell believes people should pay more attention to health promotion and disease prevention because most of these diseases
Using HIV Virus to Cure Cancer
Scientists are planning to use human immunodeficiency (免疫缺陷) virus (HIV), one of mankind's most feared viruses, as a carrier of genes which can fight cancer and a range of diseases that cannot be cured. The experts say HIV has an almost perfect ability to avoid the body's immune (免疫的) defenses, making it ideal for carrying replacement genes into patients' bodies, according to the Observer.
A team at the California-based Salk Institute, one of the world's leading research centers on biological sciences, has created a special new breed of HIV and has started negotiations with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to begin clinical gene therapy (治疗) trials this year. The first trials are expected to involve patients suffering from cancers that cannot be cured by surgery although project leader Professor Inder Verma said the HIV technique would have "far wider applications".
The plan remains very likely to cause controversy since it involves making use of a virus which has caused more than 22 million deaths around the world in the past two decades. Verma said that the idea of using HIV for a beneficial purpose was "shocking" but the fierce nature of HIV had disappeared by having all six of the potentially deadly genes removed.
Illnesses such as various cancers are caused when a gene in a patient's body fails to work properly. In the past two years, breakthroughs in genetics (遗传学) have led gene therapy scientists to try and replace the genes that de not function normally.
Unfortunately, the body's immune defenses have been known to attack the modified genes and make them lose their effects before they can start their task and progress in the field has been held up by the lack of a suitable carrier.
The HIV virus has the ability to escape from, and then destroy, the immune defense cells designed to protect our bodies and this makes it attractive to scientists as a way of secretly conveying replacement genes into patients' bodies.
FDA has approved the plan of using HIV to cure cancer in humans.
In the text the underlined sentence means "______".
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