Former World’s Fattest Man Finds Love

He was once the world’s fattest man weighing in at an incredible 980 pounds and consuming 20,000 calories (卡路里) a day. But it seems that after losing 672 pounds following a surgery, it’s not just Paul Mason’s health that has a more promising     1    —his weight loss may have also promoted his love life.

Mr. Mason has only known his new girlfriend Rebecca for a month and the pair are yet to meet, but already   the 52-year old has     2     that Rebecca is the love of his life. The pair met online last month when Rebecca saw   a television     3     about Mr. Mason’s extreme fatness—the result of overeating when a previous relationship ended. She was so touched by his situation as to get in touch, keen to help Mr. Mason get the NHS (National Health Service) to pay for a second operation to     4     him of layers of extra skin.

Mr.   Mason said: “She didn’t really think of anything     5     at the beginning. It wasn’t until the second conversation that I realised there was more there than just friends. She felt the same and brought up the idea of us being boyfriend and girlfriend.”

Mr. Mason says that he doesn’t go for looks and finds Rebecca’s     6     attitude particularly attractive. “It is   her personality,   her     7     and passion that has made me fall for her. We share the same ideas and interests and she has made me look at life in a new way. For a long time I couldn’t really see light at the end of the tunnel, but since Rebecca’s been in my life I’ve got a whole new     8     of worth and excitement.”

Mr. Mason     9     to his incredible size by eating ten times the amount needed by a normal man due to a compulsive eating disorder. As his weight rose sharply he was left unable to stand or walk before finally becoming bed-ridden and being looked after full time by carers.

Firefighters had to knock down the front wall of his     10     home so they could use a fork lift truck to lift him out and put him into an ambulance when he needed an operation in 2002.

Air pollution triggers (引发)more heart attacks than using cocaine and poses as high a risk of sparking a heart attack as alcohol, coffee and physical exertion, scientists said on Thursday. Anger, marijuana (大麻)use and chest or respiratory (与呼吸有关的)     1     can also trigger heart attacks to different extents, the researchers said, but air pollution,       2     in heavy traffic, is the major cause.

The findings, published in The Lancet journal, suggest population-wide       3     like polluted air should be taken more       4     when looking at heart risks, and should be put into context besides higher but relatively rarer risks like drug use. Tim Nawrot of Hasselt University in Belgium, who led the study, said he hoped his findings would also encourage doctors to think more often about population level risks.

Nawrot’s team combined data from thirty-six       5     studies and calculated the relative risk posed by a series of heart attack triggers and their population-attributable fraction (PAF)—in other words the proportion of total heart attacks estimated to have been caused by each trigger. “Of the triggers for heart attack studied, cocaine is the most likely to trigger an event in an individual, but traffic has the greatest population effect as more people are       6     to it,” the researchers wrote. “PAFs give a measure of how much disease would be avoided if the risk was no longer       7    . ”

A report published late last year found that air pollution in many major cities in Asia exceeds the WHO’s air quality guidelines and that poisonous       8     of pollutants result in more than 530,000 earlier deaths a year. While       9     smoking was not included in this study, Nawrot said the effects of secondhand smoke were likely to be similar to that of outdoor air pollution, and noted previous research found that bans on smoking in public places have       10     reduced heart attack rates.