英语六级阅读材料.doc

本篇阅读材料“孕妇暴露于受污染空气将增加孩子发胖几率”选自时代（原文标题：Exposure to Air Pollution in Pregnancy May Boost Chances of Obesity in Kids 2012.4.17）。如果大家觉得比较简单，就当作泛读材料了解了解，认识几个新单词或新表达方式也不错。如果大家觉得这些材料理解上有难度，不妨当做挑战自己的拔高训练，希望大家都有进步Its easy to blame parents when young children gain too much weight, but the latest research suggests that certain obesity risk factors are out of Mom and Dads control.In a study published this week in the American Journal of Epidemiology, scientists at the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University found that exposure to air pollution during pregnancy may be associated with a greater chance of having heavier kids.Andrew Rundle, an associate professor of epidemiology, decided to study air pollution because he was curious about the role that environmental chemicals known as endocrine disruptors compounds that include BPA, phthalates and parabens play in determining weight. Endocrine disruptors, which mimic naturally occurring hormones like estrogen in the body and interfere with some developmental and metabolic functions, are also found in air pollution; animal studies have shown that mice exposed to estrogen-like compounds in air pollution gain more weight than unexposed mice.Rundle and his colleagues set about tracking air pollution exposure in 702 women in their third trimester of pregnancy, by equipping them with air monitors tucked into backpacks. The women wore the backpacks for 48 hours, except while sleeping or showering, measuring levels of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs), endocrine-disrupting chemicals found in cigarette smoke and car exhaust. The women, who were recruited from the university hospitals New York City clinics, lived in the neighboring area, including the Bronx and northern Manhattan areas that have heavy car traffic but are not known to have unusual amounts of industry-related pollution.Children born to mothers with the highest PAH levels during their third trimester had a 79% greater risk of becoming obese, compared with children born to moms with the lowest PAH levels. By age 7, the risk was even higher more than 2.25 times greater.Previous studies have linked air pollution to increased risk of heart disease and stroke, and Rundles colleagues have shown that PAH exposure during pregnancy can also increase the risk of behavioral problems in children by age 5 and 7, but this is the first study to link the pollutant to obesity.“Its a fairly big effect,” says Rundle. “Obesity is really, really complicated, and there are different things pushing us in the wrong direction in terms of energy consumption and physical activity. I think we have to embrace the idea that the obesity epidemic is not just about you and me making personal choices that are not good for us, or moms making bad choices for kids. Its a far more complicated problem than that, and environmental chemicals may play a role as one piece of the problem.”Not all of the children whose moms were exposed to the higher levels of PAH became obese, but a significant proportion of them did, and the connection between PAH exposure and obesity remained strong even after Rundles team adjusted for other factors that could influencing factors, including the mothers socioeconomic status, her income, and the median household income of the neighborhood in which the mothers lived. “We went through a long list trying to imagine all the reasons that could bias the relationship or explain it away,” says Rundle. “And after months and months of healthy skepticism, we came to the point of realizing that the data looked really solid.”To ensure that the obese childrens excess weight was due to fat, not added bone or muscle, the researchers measured body fat composition in a subset of 453 children; they found that fat almost exclusively accounted for the childrens heavier weight. That corresponded to animal studies as well, and could hint at how the PAHs are contributing to obesity by disrupting how fat cells are formed and develop during childhood. Normally, most of the fat cells adults have are generated during the first year of life, beginning in utero; weight gain results when these existing fat cells swell in size, not in number. But exposure to potential endocrine disruptors like PAHs could interfere with the normal development of fat cells in infancy, and lead to an increase in fat cells from an early age.Its hard to avoid air pollution, particularly for expectant mothers living in densely populated cities. But it is possible to avoid the worst sources of PAH exposure, such as cigarette smoke. Avoiding smoking while pregnant and asking friends and family to refrain from lighting up can help, but Rundle says its time that more ubiquitous sources of air pollution also be recognized by public health experts and mothers as potentially long-term health hazards. Although Rundles study did not examine whether a childs exposure to PAHs in his first five years of life could have been the driver of obesity rather than the mothers prenatal exposure, the findings still provide hard-to-ignore evidence that breathing in polluted air could have health effects that may last a lifetime.【重点单词及短语】be associated with 与有关be curious about 对好奇的endocrine disruptors 环境激素interfere with 干扰，干涉；妨碍；触动或弄坏；乱动；与抵触set about 着手；开始做tuck into 藏进polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) 【化】多环芳香烃，分子中含有两个或两个以上苯环结构的化合物，是最早被认识的化学致癌物。explain sth. away 为某事搪塞；把解释过去account for 对负有责任；对做出解释；说明的原因correspond to 符合；相当于hint at 暗示；对暗示health hazards 健康危害Question time:1. What kinds of research did people do up to now according to the introduction in the passage?2. How to avoid the worst sources of PAH exposure?本篇阅读材料“健康焦虑不是开玩笑它可能毁掉我们的生活”选自卫报（原文标题：Health anxiety is not a joke it can ruin lives 2010.7.27）。如果大家觉得比较简单，就当作泛读材料了解了解，认识几个新单词或新表达方式也不错。如果大家觉得这些材料理解上有难度，不妨当做挑战自己的拔高训练，希望大家都有进步The number of people who are wrongly convinced they are seriously ill is rising.I was living with this constant fear that I would be dead in three months, says Mark. The 32-year-old from Manchester had a pain in his lungs and immediately suspected advanced lung cancer. It became, he says, an obsession. His GP was certain it wasnt cancer, but Mark couldnt stop thinking about it. He returned to his doctor several times, eventually persuading him to arrange a scan at the hospital. This too showed he didnt have the disease. Eventually Mark realised what he was suffering from was not lung cancer, but health anxiety.Catherine ONeill, services manager at the helpline charity Anxiety UK, says the disorder is one of the things we get most calls about. The common fears are HIV, cancer and illnesses at the more severe end of the spectrum. Quite often, we get people who nursed someone through cancer and they become preoccupied with the thought that they have the disease too, or it develops because they have heard or read about someone with the illness.Health anxiety is characterised by the excessive seeking of reassurance, from doctors or from family members. What we always tell people on our helpline is that reassurance doesnt work, says ONeill. I have seen people who have convinced themselves they have a brain tumour they go to their GP, they go for scans. When they are reassured they dont have a tumour, they still think what if they missed it? What if it was too small to see? What if this is one of those NHS mistakes? Because the media highlights it so much when things do go wrong, it feeds the feeling in people with health anxiety that I could be the one that it goes wrong for. People ring up and ask, Do you think Ive got cancer? I cant offer that reassurance because how would I know? But we do know that reassurance only works in the short term. It isnt long before those fears return.Another problem, ONeill says, is that health anxiety which used to be called hypochondria is not taken seriously. It can be seen as a bit of a joke, but it can have a serious impact on someones life.Mark agrees. When youre in the grip of it, it can be terrifying. It affects all aspects of your life your work, your relationships because you cant think about anything else, and youre living with this expectation of impending death.According to Professor Peter Tyrer, head of the centre for mental health at Imperial College London, about 1-2% of the population have pathological health anxiety, and in people who have already had treatment for a condition, it can be around 10%. He thinks the number of people affected is rising.The internet, he says, is one reason. Everyone looks up their symptoms, but the internet tells you everything and nothing. ONeill agrees: Type in flu symptoms and you will be able to find a huge range of diseases from a common cold to the early stages of an HIV infection.Several studies have shown that cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT), which aims to change thought patterns and behaviour, can reduce the symptoms and hospital appointments. But waiting lists on the NHS can be long in some areas, and the therapy is not widespread. Tyrer is now leading a study of 448 people with health anxiety who are being treated in five hospitals. Treatment takes place in hospital clinics that deal with the illness the sufferer feels they have - such as cardiology or neurology clinics. If you say, We want you to see a psychologist or psychiatrist they say, Im physically ill, not mentally ill. So they are treated by general nurses who have been trained in this technique.The study will finish in 2012, but early results look promising. We have had dozen of letters from the patients saying how their lives have been turned around, says Tyrer. He describes a patient who had been treated for heart disease who had not been out of his house for a year because he was so terrified of having a heart attack; after a course of CBT, he was able to go on holiday. Tyrer is aiming to prove such treatment will eventually save the NHS money by reducing the need for tests and emergency hospital admissions.One CBT technique involves getting patients who believe their headaches are a sign of a brain tumour to create a pie chart where they imagine all the people who woke up that day with a headache, and list the causes for it according to probability: dehydration, a cold, migraine, tiredness, too much caffeine.Sometimes this is a complete revelation to them, says Dr Helen Seivewright, clinical research fellow at Imperial College, who is also working on the study. It opens up this world where not every symptom means the worst diagnosis.【重点单词及短语】GP: general practitioner 私人医生；家庭医生be preoccupied with 专注于；专心于in the grip of 受控制impending adj. 即将发生的；迫近的cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) 认知行为疗法turn around 转变；改观pie chart 饼状图；圆形分格统计图表revelation n. 启示；被揭露的真相Question time:1. What is health anxiety?2. Why do some people get health anxiety?3. Which way is considered to be effective to health anxiety?本篇阅读材料“互联网的碳足迹”选自卫报（原文标题：Whats the carbon footprint of the internet? 2010.8.12）。如果大家觉得比较简单，就当作泛读材料了解了解，认识几个新单词或新表达方式也不错。如果大家觉得这些材料理解上有难度，不妨当做挑战自己的拔高训练，希望大家都有进步The internet releases around 300m tonnes of CO2 a year as much as all the coal, oil and gas burned in Turkey or Poland, or more than half of the fossil fuels burned in the UK.All carbon footprints are hard or impossible to pin down accurately, but the internet is a particularly complex case. This isnt just due to the fact that the net consists of millions or even billions of machines owned by countless people and companies. Theres also another problem: even if we knew exactly how much energy all these devices consumed (which we dont), we still wouldnt know how much of that energy was spent on offline jobs (such as creating documents in Microsoft Office) and how much was spent on online jobs (such as emailing those documents to a friend or colleague).Its possible, nonetheless, to take a rough stab at working out the internets carbon footprint. A good place to start is the worlds data centres buildings packed top to bottom with servers full of the web pages, databases, online applications and downloadable files that make the modern online experience possible. Data centres use lots of electricity, both for powering the machines they contain and all importantly for the air conditioning needed to keep the servers from overheating.According to a report by Gartner, data centres already account for around a quarter of the energy consumed (and the carbon emitted) by the information and communication technology (ICT) sector as a whole. In other words, around half a percent of global CO2 emissions.By Gartners figures, the worlds PCs and monitors are even more power hungry, accounting for around 40% of the total ICT energy demand and 0.8% of global CO2 emissions. If we decided (somewhat arbitrarily) that half of the emissions from all these laptop and desktop machines were down to internet-based activity, and then add on the emissions from the data centres that make all this online activity possible, then the internet would clock in at around 1% of all the CO2 emissions released from burning fossil fuels. Put another way, the internet releases around 300m tonnes of CO2 as much as all the coal, oil and gas burned in Turkey or Poland in one year, or more than half of those burned in the UK.These figures tie in fairly well with a study by the UKs market transformation programme, which concluded that 343.5 million tonnes of CO2 was down to consumer and commercial ICT in 2005 equivalent to around 1.2% of current fossil-fuel CO2 emissions. ICTs footprint is due to climb by 60% by 2030, the same report suggests. If that was to happen, and global emissions had already fallen by then, as climate change experts suggest they must, then the internets share of total carbon output would climb significantly higher still.All this depends on what happens between now and then, of course. Companies have already been exploring technologies that can take the heat from data centres and use them to warm nearby buildings, thereby reducing internal air-conditioning requirements and local demand for heating fuels. And Iceland, which has an abundance of renewable, low-carbon energy is angling to be the worlds data-centre capital.In the meantime, its interesting to note that 1% is