1 . Directions: After reading the passage below, fill in the blanks to make the passages coherent and grammatically correct. For the blanks with a given word, fill in each blank with the proper form of the given word; for the other blanks, use one word that best fits each blank.

Hospital Food — The Best Medicine

Few sick people consider the quality of the food when choosing a hospital. That is perhaps just as well. Even in America, a country where private hospitals have long provided individual rooms with such comforts as personal cable television, patients are often still fed institutional food “Mystery meat” and     1     (process) cheese slices are common.     2     gets cooked in a microwave. Many of country’s biggest hospitals get their food from the likes of Ara-mark, a giant global caterer that also provides meals to schools and prisons.

More hospitals are starting to feed their patients better food. Inter-mountain, a nonprofit group based in Utah that runs 32 hospitals across the Mountain West, has since 2019 served freshly made meals to patients. Chefs in proper kitchens now source local ingredients to serve in cafeterias. Doctors are consulted to meet patients’ dietary needs. Christopher Delissio, the head chef at Inter-mountain, describes     3     (create) a meal for a Mexican child who was being treated for cancer. “He     4     not eat, mumbling the food was tasteless,” Mr Delissio recalls, and that was making it harder for him to recover from chemotherapy. “I was able to go up on the floor, speak to this boy’s parents and him and kind of     5     (figure) out what he wanted,” he says.

The link between eating well and good health has long been clear, says David Eisenberg, a nutrition specialist at the Harvard School of Public Health. Heart disease, which has a direct connection to diet, is America’s     6     (big) killer. Roughly two-fifths of American adults are clinically obese, and over 14% suffer from diabetes. The right food can help patients avoid going back to hospital. Yet doctors     7     have often been slow to re-cognise the need to encourage healthy eating, says Dr Eisenberg. Most health care remains curative,     8     preventive. Medical schools still rarely teach much about nutrition.

A decade ago Henry Ford Hospital in West Bloomfield, outside Detroit, opened a teaching kitchen     9     staff could help patients plan affordable, healthy meals and learn how to cook them. The idea is now spreading widely. In October a conference for health and food professionals in Los Angeles will encourage the adoption of such kitchens. Participants will tour a new one that has just opened at UCLA’s hospital.

Challenges remain. Doctors do not get paid more     10    , owing to healthier eating, patients no longer need treatment. But at least, says Dr Eisenberg, insurers are starting to balk at the expense associated with chronically sick patients.