1 . Each year, half a million people die from brain aneurysms（动脉瘤）—when a blood vessel（血管）bursts in the brain. An aneurysm is a bulge（膨胀）in a blood vessel that can burst. If that happens in the brain, it can be deadly. For survivors, physical disabilities are often severe. They may include memory problems, loss of balance, trouble speaking and even blindness. But new technologies are increasing survival rates and reducing disabilities.
Beaumont Bacon is a survivor who makes light of her experience because she is a comedian（喜剧演员）. She uses humor to make others laugh. Now she’s working on a new show. Michael Alexander is her doctor. He operated on Beaumont Bacon after her attack. “She had bleeding in the frontal area of her brain, so right above the eyes. The part that was in the brain was about maybe the size of an egg. So, that’s a fairly large bleed.”
Ms. Bacon had a better chance at survival than most people because of Dr. Alexander. He directs the Neurovascular Center in Los Angeles. The center offers new technologies that include placing a catheter（导管）into an aneurysm, then threading wires to promote blood clots（血栓）. This technique reduces the chances of another burst blood vessel. “You don’t have to open up the skull（头盖骨）or open up the brain to do surgery. It’s all done from inside the blood vessels. So it reduces the amount of blood loss, and the recovery is much faster.”
For Beaumont Bacon’s recovery, the hospital worked to prevent problems commonly found in patients with a burst aneurysm. The problems include brain swelling that can shut down blood vessels. She spent a month in a coma（昏迷）—unable to communicate with doctors, friends and loved ones. But with a year of treatment, she recovered. Now, she is making people laugh.
1. What do you know about aneurysms?| A．No technologies can treat them nowadays. |
| B．They may cause severe disabilities. |
| C．Few people die from them every year. |
| D．They are deadly wherever they happen. |
| A．it is much faster for the patient to recover |
| B．it brings no problems after the operation |
| C．it reduces the amount of blood loss |
| D．it doesn’t need to open up the brain to operate |
| A．was always in an unconscious state after the operation |
| B．recovered soon after the treatment |
| C．returned to work after the treatment |
| D．was the first to try the new technology |
| A．providing an example | B．making comparisons |
| C．offering data | D．giving explanations |
2 . Chinese researchers have developed a robot designed to help doctors treat the new coronavirus and other highly infectious diseases. The machine has a long robotic arm attached to a base with wheels. It can perform some of the same medical examination tasks as doctors. For example, the device can perform ultrasounds (超声波扫描检查), collect fluid samples from a person’s mouth and listen to sounds made by a patient’s organs. Cameras record the robot’s activities, which are controlled remotely so doctors can avoid coming in close contact with infected patients. Doctors and other medical workers can operate the machine in another place.
The robot’s main designer Zheng Gangtie, an engineer and professor at China’s Tsinghua University, told Reuters news agency that he got the idea for the device when his medical friend told him that one of the biggest problems in dealing with COVID-19 was that healthcare workers treating patients were getting infected themselves. Zheng said he wanted to do something to help this situation. So the engineer gathered a team and went to work on the robotic device.
Zheng said the devices use the same technology that is used for space equipment, including moon explorers. The new robot is almost completely automated. It can even disinfect itself after performing actions involving patient contact.
However, Zheng said he had heard from some doctors that it would be better not to build such robots to be fully automatic. This is because many patients still desire a personal presence to help calm them during treatment.
The team currently has two robots and both have been tested by doctors at hospitals in Beijing. One machine was taken to Wuhan’s Union Hospital, where doctors there got trained to use it. The plan is to use the robot to help treat coronavirus patients, along with assistance from nurses and other hospital workers.
Zheng would like to build more of the robots, but says money from the university has run out. Each robot costs about $72,000 to make. He says he does not plan to commercialize the design, but hopes that a company can begin that process.
1. What do we know about the newly-invented robot?| A．It is used for space exploration. |
| B．It completely operates on its own. |
| C．It carries out complicated surgical treatments. |
| D．It protects doctors from risky contact with patients. |
| A．Assistance of AI. | B．Financial support. |
| C．Community help. | D．Professional advice. |
| A．The device may not be welcomed by all patients. |
| B．The device has been widely used to treat patients. |
| C．Zheng has received further funds from companies. |
| D．Zheng continued the production for official support. |
| A．Promising Future for the Robot |
| B．Novel Device to Cure Coronavirus |
| C．New Assistant to Fight Coronavirus |
| D．Helpful Design to Save the Patients |
1.完全来自大自然，副作用小；
2.对人的身体进行全面治疗；
3.能够作为治疗艾滋病和癌症的药物。
注意：
1.可适当增加细节，使行文连贯；
2.词数：100词左右。
参考词汇：传统中医药Traditional Chinese Medicine
Dear Jack,
____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Yours,
Li Hua
4 . In the future，we may not need to rely on human donations for life-saving skin grafts(移植）.
That’s the goal of Xeno Therapeutics, a biotech non-profit organization. The US Food and Drug Administration approved the group’s initial application for temporary skin grafts removed from genetically modified(基因改良）pigs. This means that they can start testing pig skin grafts on people who have experienced severe burns.
Skin，the body’s largest organ，plays an important role in blocking pathogens(病原体） from reaching our organs inside. It also helps the body keep a constant temperature. People with severe skin damage are at a high risk of developing deadly infections as a result of changes in temperature.
At the moment, the only skin grafts available in the US come from the dead people who have agreed to be organ donors, or patients who have gone through surgery to remove skin after large weight loss. These human skins used for grafts are not easy to find.
Xeno Therapeutics, which gets its name from animal-to-human transplants, has raised pigs that have skin remarkably similar to our own. Grafts from these pigs are therefore more likely to hide without being detected by the host's immune system—at least temporarily. The idea is that they could be used for immediate burn treatment, followed human skin graft treatment later.
“I’d say that just like comparing a Coke with Pepsi，it would be hard to tell which was the human skin and which was the pig graft，” said Xeno Therapeutics CEO Paul Holzer.
The non-profit organization has been working to conduct the clinical trials, which will only be testing the grafts’ safety and tolerability in six patients with severe burns. Assuming the results are positive after a month, the grafts will need to pass through two more stages of testing before they can be approved for widespread clinical use.
Several other groups around the world are working to make animal organs suitable for clinical medicine. In Brazil, researchers are exploring using tilapia skin as temporary bandages for burn victims whose skin is regrowing.
1. What’s the aim of Xeno Therapeutics?| A．To make profit from the grafts. | B．To apply pig skin on human patients. |
| C．To modify pigs genetically. | D．To test people with severe burns. |
| A．It acts as a protective layer for our body. | B．It helps us recover from deadly diseases. |
| C．It prevents itself from being damaged. | D．It keeps one’s temperature changing. |
| A．Doubtful. | B．Worried. |
| C．Confident. | D．Flexible. |
| A．Only skin removed from pigs can be used for grafts. |
| B．Brazilian doctors have also applied pig skin for grafts. |
| C．Animal skin has been used on six patients safely. |
| D．They won't be put to use until they pass test |
5 . Medicine is not only a human invention. Many other animals, from insects to birds to nonhuman primates (灵长类), have been known to self-medicate with plants and minerals for infections and other conditions. Behavioral ecologist Helen of the Borneo Nature Foundation has spent decades studying the island’ s orangutans (红毛猩猩) and says she has now found evidence they use plants in a previously unseen medicinal way.
During more than 20,000 hours of formal observation, Helen and her colleagues watched 10 orangutans occasionally chew a particular plant (which is not part of their normal diet) into a juice and then rub it into their fur. They spent up to 45 minutes at a time rubbing the mixture onto their upper arms or legs. The researchers believe this behavior is the first known example of a nonhuman animal using an external pain-killer.
Local people use the same plant—Dracaena cantleyi (龙血树), an unremarkable-looking bush with stalked leaves—to treat aches and pains. Helens, co-authors studied its chemistry. They added chemicals from the plant to human cells that had been grown in a dish and had been artificially stimulated to produce cytokines (细胞因子), an immune system response that causes inflammation (炎症) and discomfort. The plant chemical reduced the production of several types of cytokines. The scientists reported the finding in a study published last November in Scientific Reports.
The results suggest that orangutans use the plant to reduce inflammation and treat pain. Such findings could help identify plants and chemicals that might be useful for human medications.
1. What does “They” in Paragraph 2 refer to?| A．Birds. | B．Local people. |
| C．The ten orangutans. | D．The researchers. |
| A．It can produce cytokines. | B．It is effective as a pain-killer. |
| C．It is a special looking bush. | D．It can lead to inflammation and discomfort. |
| A．Orangutans mainly live on the particular plant. |
| B．Orangutans are the first animals to use a pain-killer. |
| C．Helens findings can be of great use for human drugs. |
| D．Helens co-authors added the chemicals from human cells to the plant. |
| A．By analyzing data. | B．By sharing experiences. |
| C．By making comparisons. | D．By giving examples. |
6 . As they reach school age, about 90 percent of children will have experienced a condition in which fluid (液体) fills the middle ear, muffling (使模糊) sound and sometimes causing infection. The fluid usually clears on its own, but if not, it can lead to a painful ear infection called acute otitis (中耳炎) media. In some cases the fluid can persist for more than a year, causing hearing loss during this period, and slowing down their development of language and social skills.
Diagnosis usually requires a visit to a specialist—but researchers have now developed an app that detects this fluid just as accurately, with only a smartphone and a paper funnel (漏斗).
Doctors typically detect the problem by peering into the ear for a visual assessment. Yet, this method has only a 50 percent accuracy rate. “Right now, if you bring your child to a pediatrician, or to any urgent care family doctor, the way they look at whether or not there’s fluid in the middle ear is by looking at the eardrum,” says Sharat Raju, a surgeon in the department of head and neck surgery at the University of Washington.
For a cheaper and more accessible alternative, researchers at the University of Washington turned to smartphones. First the user follows a template to cut and tape a piece of paper into a funnel, which can be placed between a smartphone and the patient’s ear. Next the app plays a chirping sound through the phone’s speaker; the sound waves bounce off the eardrum and hit the phone’s microphone, where they register and are analyzed by the app. An eardrum with fluid behind it will vibrate (振动) differently than if the middle ear is full of air, as it normally is.
To develop the app, the researchers first played chirps for patients with and without fluid in their ears. They recorded the echoes (回音), which indicate the eardrum’s mobility. Then they used a machine learning model to classify the returning sound waves, determining which audio characteristics indicated a normal ear and which suggested the presence of fluid. Once they tested the app on 98 children, ranging from 18 months to 17 years old, at Seattle Children’s Hospital. It correctly detected fluid in 85 percent of cases, and correctly identified fluid-free ears in 82 percent.
The researchers are currently trying to get FDA approval for the app, and have founded a company to commercialize it. They hope to make it available by the end of the year, to help parents track children’s ear health at home.
1. What do we know about the fluid from the first paragraph?| A．It is mostly part of children’s growth. | B．It is unavoidable for any child. |
| C．It is a permanent physical condition. | D．It is beyond any medical means. |
| A．A hospital. | B．A specialist. |
| C．A relative. | D．An app. |
| A．The application of the app. | B．The causes of the kid’s ear problem. |
| C．The purpose of developing the app. | D．The experiment of the smartphone. |
| A．It will upgrade the medical technology. | B．It will hit the market in the near future. |
| C．It will help children do better academically. | D．It will save doctors medical operations. |
7 . Even though vaccination (接种疫苗) is a powerful defense against disease, some voices are against it. In a recent letter, the American Medical Association (AMA) urged big social media including Amazon, Facebook and Google to take action to defend medical science on their platforms.
It said that vaccine -preventable diseases that do harm to the public health like measles (麻疹) are on the rise. Measles cases worldwide jumped more than 30% in 2017 compared to 2016, with the largest increases seen among nations in the Americas, Europe and the Eastern Mediterranean. Vaccine-preventable diseases are increasing largely because many people are unwilling to get vaccinated. And some of these people even encourage others to refuse vaccination. So this year, the World Health Organization (WHO) declared the anti-vaccination movement a top 10-health threat.
“Vaccination is one of the most cost-effective ways of avoiding disease—it currently prevents 2-3 million deaths a year, and a further 1.5 million could be avoided if global coverage of vaccinations improved,” WHO said.
A research article published in 1998 in a medical journal suggested a link between a vaccine and the development of autism (孤独症) in young children. Although the research has been suspected and many other studies have proved that vaccinations do not cause autism, the article is still impressing people strongly today. Another reason for the growth in the anti-vaccination movement is widespread misinformation on social media, which can turn people against vaccination.” If a concerned parent consistently sees information in their Newsfeed that casts doubt on the safety of vaccines, it could cause them to disregard the advice of their children’s physicians and public health experts and refuse to follow the recommended vaccination schedule. So access to true information about vaccine safety is badly needed.
1. What does the AMA require social media to do on their platforms?| A．Stop vaccine misinformation. |
| B．Unite to develop new vaccines. |
| C．Give up the anti- vaccination movement. |
| D．Introduce Vaccine-preventable diseases. |
| A．To declare measles can be prevented, |
| B．To show the result of anti-vaccination. |
| C．To prove some countries refuse vaccination. |
| D．To explain the reason for avoiding vaccination. |
| A．The costs of vaccination. | B．The social media platforms. |
| C．The concerns of vaccine safety. | D．The articles about autism. |
| A．A novel. | B．A brochure. |
| C．A diary. | D．A magazine. |
8 . China’s domestically developed, long-acting experimental AIDS drug is undergoing a final review by the China Food and Drug Administration, the last stage in the approval process.
Different from traditional oral drugs that require daily use, but it’s a heavy burden for patients to take medicine every day for years. As a result, long-acting drugs are the future direction in developing innovative AIDS medicine. For Chinese patients, the number of oral drugs available in the domestic market is very limited, so there is an urgent need for drugs to solve the problem of drug resistance.
Zhao Yan, a treatment specialist at the National Center for AIDS said seven or eight oral drugs for AIDS are currently provided to patients for free. “The injection solution could give an alternative to patients ... if it could be included in the country’s health insurance system,” she said.
“Now very few patients are using drugs from the health insurance system, both because no differentiated drugs are provided and because the procedure is more complex and could harm their privacy,” she said. “New drugs will be broadly used only if the system can embrace more varieties of drugs.”
Albuvirtide went into the research and development stage in 2002 and entered phase three of clinical trials—a step to assure safety and effectiveness before market approval—in 2014. Phase three is the last round of clinical trials for new drug tests in China. If the drug can pass the reviews of the country’s drug watchdog, usually at least two rounds, it can then enter the market. The time needed for the review ranges from months to years.
Clinical trials showed that the new drug performs even better than the oral drugs being used. Most of the oral drugs for AIDS being used in China are generic drugs developed in the 1970s and „80s that are not so efficient. In terms of safety and effectiveness, evidence so far showed that Albuvirtide is better than most second-line drugs—drugs used when first-line standard drugs fail—in developed countries because of lower toxicity (毒性) and fewer side effects.
Worldwide, a number of long-acting AIDS drug are in development. None has been approved for sale. Only Albuvirtide and a few in the United States have entered phase three of clinical trials.
1. Albuvirtide is ________.| A．a China-developed long-acting oral AIDS drug |
| B．undergoing a clinical test on dogs to assure its safety |
| C．more efficient than other AIDS drugs and has fewer side effects |
| D．the only AIDS drug that has entered the last round of clinical trials |
| A．it’s a new drug and they are not resistant to it |
| B．it is one of the most effective first-line drugs |
| C．it has been included in the health insurance system |
| D．they can keep their privacy by being injected once a week |
| A．The research and development of Albuvirtide began in 2002. |
| B．There are usually three phases in the clinical trial for a new drug. |
| C．Albuvirtide is now in the stage of carrying out clinical trials. |
| D．The time needed for review varies from drug to drug. |
| A．Albuvirtide can spare patients from taking oral drugs every day |
| B．the health insurance system has room for further improvement |
| C．most AIDS drugs being used now were developed in last century |
| D．China is leading the whole world in the field of AIDS research |
9 . “Don’t get sick in July!”
This is a common concern in teaching hospitals in the U.S. It’s driven by the academic calendar: July is when the new interns, fresh out of medical school, start work. In other words, it’s when everyone is most
So is medical experience good or bad? Well, in most cases, your doctor’s experience is very helpful, allowing her to pick up on a(n)
In a variety of situations, though, experience can backfire. The reason is simple
Doctors are usually locked onto a diagnosis early and disregard new and
Also, some experienced doctors tend to believe evidence when it supports their previous opinion while subconsciously ignoring information opposing it. Let’s say your doctor is pretty certain you have ill digestion and orders a test to
In fact, there are clearly many benefits to having a highly experienced doctor, such as technical proficiency. But there may actually be some unexpected benefits to having a less-experienced one too. She may have a more up-to-date education, boundless energy and perhaps is less vulnerable to biases, freed from the same
To safeguard yourself as a patient, one thing you should always do is
| A．innocent | B．productive | C．inexperienced | D．prohibited |
| A．slight | B．objective | C．complex | D．sustainable |
| A．media | B．tradition | C．reality | D．textbook |
| A．psychology | B．education | C．procedure | D．priority |
| A．take advantage of | B．make sense of | C．fall victim to | D．play fire with |
| A．spring | B．depart | C．benefit | D．distinguish |
| A．highly-motivated | B．well-seasoned | C．deeply-offended | D．wide-eyed |
| A．moderate | B．visible | C．conflicting | D．permanent |
| A．initial | B．tough | C．multiple | D．private |
| A．evaluate | B．operate | C．confirm | D．revise |
| A．preoccupied | B．labelled | C．associated | D．concerned |
| A．professional circle | B．thinking pattern | C．academic background | D．operating order |
| A．investigating | B．questioning | C．monitoring | D．observing |
| A．obstacle | B．trap | C．horizon | D．struggle |
| A．practice | B．accommodate | C．justify | D．remove |
| A. clinician B. concerned C. course D. engaging E. innovation F. manage G. reassure H. safe I. scare J. unfortunately K. unsurprisingly |
Virtual reality cured my fear of heights
Fay Nugent, who developed a fear of heights in her 30s, heard about a phobia therapy trial taking place in Oxford University. She applied and was invited to join in. But,
The ones in the treatment group--44 in all---were given five or six 30-minute sessions (时间段）of the VR treatment over the
The results, which are being published by The Lancet Psychiatry, were significant. About 70% of the VR group no longer had a fear of heights, while,
Fay has now had the same therapy herself. “Once the trial was finished, they offered it to me and I am so pleased that I said yes,” she says. “Heights don’t
The VR simulator（模拟器）made people feel like being in a safe situation where they can learn to
Lead researcher Prof Daniel Freeman said: “We wanted tasks that would be fun and
The therapy is also delivered by virtual coaches who
