听力题 I am glad to be alive now. I''m a doctor. As I look round this hall, I see dozens of men and women who are over sixty years of age . If you had been born in the nineteenth century , very few of you would have reached the age of sixty. Today thanks to medical science, we can expect to live to a good old age. This was not true one hundred years ago. Few men and women lived to be sixty. The death rate among children was high, very high. It was common for a woman to have ten, twelve or fifteen children. Of course, perhaps five or six died very young. There are few illnesses that we cannot cure today. One hundred years ago many of those illnesses ended in death. They could not be cured. Today, of course, life is in someway dangerous than it was in the past. Thousands of people are killed or injured on the roads every year. But if you''re in a traffic accident today, if your leg is badly crushed, what happens? You''re taken to hospital. I put you to sleep. And when you wake up, your leg has been cut off, quite painlessly! That was not the case one hundred years ago. You''re much fortunate today.