单选题 Imagine a world where your doctor could help you avoid sickness, using knowledge of your genes as well as how you live your life. Or where he would prescribe drugs he knew would work and not have debilitating side-effects.
Such a future is arriving faster than most realise: genetic tests are already widely used to identify patients who will be helped or harmed by certain drugs. And three years ago, in the face of a torrent of new scientific data, a number of new companies set themselves up to interpret this information for customers. Through shop fronts on the internet, anyone could order a testing kit, spit into a tube and send off their DNA—with results downloaded privately at home. Already customers can find out their response to many common medications, such as antivirals and blood-thinning agents. They can also explore their genetic likelihood of developing deep-vein thrombosis, skin cancer or glaucoma.
The industry has been subject to conflicting criticisms. {{U}}On the one hand, it stands accused of offering information too dangerous to trust to consumers; on the other it is charged with peddling irrelevant, misleading nonsense.{{/U}} For some rare disorders, such as Huntington's and Tay-Sachs, genetic information is a diagnosis. But most diseases are more complicated and involve several genes, or an environmental component, or both. Someone's chance of getting skin cancer, for example, will depend on whether he worships the sun as well as on his genes.
{{U}}America's Government Accountability Office (GAO) report also revealed what the industry has openly admitted for years: that results of disease-prediction tests from different companies sometimes conflict with one another, because there is no industry-wide agreement on standard lifetime risks.{{/U}}
Governments hate this sort of anarchy and America's, in particular, is considering regulation. But three things argue against wholesale regulation. First, the level of interference needs to be based on the level of risk a test represents. The government does not need to be involved if someone decides to trace his ancestry or discover what type of earwax he has. {{U}}Second, the laws on fraud should be sufficient to deal with the snake-oil salesmen who promise to predict, say, whether a child might be a sporting champion. And third, science is changing very fast.{{/U}} Fairly soon, a customer's whole genome will be sequenced, not merely the parts thought to be medically relevant that the testing companies now concentrate on, and he will then be able to crank the results through open-source interpretation software downloadable from anywhere on the planet. That will create problems, but the only way to stop that happening would be to make it illegal for someone to have his genome sequenced— and nobody is seriously suggesting that illiberal restriction.
Instead, then, of reacting in a hostile fashion to the trend for people to take genetic tests, governments should be asking themselves how they can make best use of this new source of information. Restricting access to tests that inform people about bad reactions to drugs could do harm. The real question is not who controls access, but how to minimise the risks and maximise the rewards of a useful revolution.
单选题 Current genetic tests are able to ______.
  • A. identify customers'response to common medications
  • B. diagnose customers' health state in the future
  • C. judge customers' genetic inclination to some diseases
  • D. find the cause for some diseases, such as glaucoma
【正确答案】 A
【答案解析】具体细节题 [解析] 基因测试的功能主要在原文第二段论及。第二段第四句话提到基因测试的结果能够帮助顾客发现他们对许多普通药物的反应。这里注意“许多”这个词，选项中的[C]乍一看和原文内容一致，但是没有“许多”一词，显得过于绝对。第二段第五句话提到基因测试还能够检测客户未来可能患某些疾病的可能性。这里特别注意“可能性”这个词，基因测试的结果只是一种预测，不能直接作为诊断结果，因此[B]说基因测试能够对客户未来的健康状况作出诊断，是不正确的。[A]为正确选项。[D]偷换概念。
单选题 It can be inferred from Paragraph 2 toParagraph 4 that ______.
  • A. Huntington's and Tay-Sach can be diagnosed by genetic information because they are rare disorders
  • B. someone who has a lower-than-average genetic risk of skin disease can suffer a terminal skin cancer
  • C. genetic test companies have tried to justify the uniqueness of their disease-prediction results
  • D. customers have to order genetic test online because it is illegal in real life
【正确答案】 B
【答案解析】推理引申题 [解析] [D]顾客只能在网上进行基因测试是因为在现实生活中这种测试是违法的 [解析] 这是一道综合性推理引申题，考查范围较广，因此难度较大。根据[A]中的线索词可锁定第三段第三句话和第四句话。这一句话提到对于某些罕见疾病，例如Huntington和Tay-Sachs，基因测试的结果本身就是一种诊断，但对于大多数疾病来说，复杂的环境因素也可能成为患病的原因，因此基因测试的结果并不足以成为诊断结果。对比之下，可推理得出基因测试结果之所以能直接诊断Huntington和Tay-sachs，并不是因为两种疾病是罕见疾病，而是因为它们是单纯受遗传因素影响的疾病。[A]错误。由第三段第四句话同样可以得知一个人罹患皮肤癌的原因是多方面的，有可能是遗传因素影响，也有可能是后天因素影响，因此[B]正确。[C]考查的是对于原文第四段的理解，第四段中提到美国政府问责局最近揭露了一个基因测试行业内早就公开的秘密，那就是各个公司之间的预测结果往往是互相冲突的，因为缺乏统一的行业标准。由此可见这些公司并没有竭力证明自己预测结果的权威性，[C]错误。[D]考查的细节在文中的第二段，第二段中间部分提到了现在顾客很方便地在网上订购自己的基因检测报告，但是并没有提到为什么会在网上操作，[D]属无中生有。
单选题 The author seems to suggest that the restriction prohibiting customers from having their genome sequenced is ______.
  • A. inhuman and unethical
  • B. inhuman but legal
  • C. illiberal but necessary
  • D. illiberal and oppressive
【正确答案】 B
【答案解析】作者态度题 [解析] 本题考查的是对第五段中一个细节点的理解。第五段通过说理论证，说明了为什么政府对基因测试行业的监管需要审慎而为的原因。其中第三条原因就是这里提到的“基因组测序”的问题。现在的基因测试一般只集中在对集中基因的检查上，而不久的将来也许人们就能够对自己整个的基因组进行测序。从字里行间我们可以揣测出作者对于个人测序基因组的态度。人们一定认为自己有权了解自己的基因组排序，但是在这么做会引发一系列问题的情况下，政府只有禁止它。由此可判断，作者承认这种禁止行为是反自由的，但同时又认为它是完全必要的。[C]为正确答案。
单选题 By using the example of "snake-oil salesmen", the author intends to emphasize that ______.
  • A. the results of genetic tests may fall into hands of dishonest people
  • B. the salesmen of genetic tests are malicious like snakes
  • C. the prediction of genetic tests are largely misleading nonsense
  • D. legislation should be strengthened to prevent the abuse of genetic test results
【正确答案】 D
【答案解析】作者意图题 [解析] 通过题干中的线索词锁定原文第五段。本题也是对第五段中一个细节点的考查。第五段的第五句话作者提到夸夸其谈的销售员可能会向顾客承诺自己可以预测顾客的孩子是否会成为体育冠军。很明显基因测试结果不可能预测一个孩子有没有可能成为世界冠军，因此这个例子表明基因测试的结果有时候只是夸夸其谈，可能会被心怀不轨的人利用。有人因此觉得[A]和[C]是正确的。但是要注意这里考查的是作者的意图，根据上下文，作者举这个例子的真正意图是想要强调对基因测试可能导致的诈骗行为的立法的重要性，因此[D]为准确答案。
单选题 According to the author, what should the government do about genetic test?
  • A. Inform the public of the risk of it.
  • B. Legitimate the access to it.
  • C. Control the access to it.
  • D. Intervene when necessary.
【正确答案】 D
【答案解析】综合细节题 [解析] 作者在最后一段明确提出了政府在基因测试行业管制中应该扮演的角色。[A]中出现了干扰词infom，但是稍加判断，即可得知[A]虽然符合常识，但是原文并未提及。[B]无中生有，全文都没有提到基因测试是不合法的，因此使其合法化无从谈起。[C]断章取义，control access是干扰词，但原文说的是“重要的不是control access”，因此错误。[D]正确，原文第五段中提到了政府干预的问题，如果检测者只是想知道一些关于家族疾病史的知识，那么政府就不应干预，暗含的意思就是在必要的时候政府干预还是可行的。并且第六段最后一句话也说到政府应该在最大程度上降低基因测试行业的风险，充分利用这一新技术给人类带来的好处。