单选题   Para. 1 ①Suicide fascinates us. ②It is at once appalling and yet, in the darkest places in our minds, appealing. ③It is the most damaging sort of death. ④A child's suicide is a parent's worst nightmare, and a parent's marks their children for life. ⑤It is a manifestation not just of individual anguish but also of a collective failure: if society is too painful to live in, perhaps we are all culpable.
    Para. 2 ①The suicide rate in America is up by 18%. ②The rise is largely among white, middle-aged, poorly educated men in areas that were left behind by booms and crushed by busts. ③Nonetheless, beyond America's gloomy trend is a more optimistic story: that at a global level, suicide is down by 29%. ④The decline is particularly notable among three sets of people.
    Para. 3 ①One is young women in India. ②In most of the world, older people kill themselves more often than the young, and men more than women. ③But in India, young women have been unusually prone to suicide. ④That is decreasingly the case. ⑤Another group is middle-aged men in Russia. ⑥After the collapse of the Soviet Union, alcoholism and suicide rocketed among them. ⑦Both have now receded. ⑧A third category is old people all around the world. ⑨The suicide rate among the elderly remains, on average, higher than among the rest of the population, but has also fallen faster than among other groups.
    Para. 4 ①Why are these people now less likely to take their own lives? ②Urbanization and greater freedom have helped. ③As people move to cities and the grip of tradition loosens, women have more choice about whom they marry or live with, making life more bearable. ④Leaving the village helps in another way, too. ⑤Because farming involves killing things, rural folk are likelier to have the means to kill themselves—guns, pesticides—to hand.
    Para. 5 ①Social stability is also a factor. ②In the turbulence that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union, many middle-aged people saw their sources of income and status collapse. ③As crises recede and employment rises, so suicide tends to ebb. ④And falling poverty rates among the old, which have declined faster than among other groups globally, are reckoned to have contributed to the drop in the number of elderly suicides.
    Para. 6 ①But the decline is not just the consequence of big social trends. ②Policy plays a role, too. ③Active labour-market policies, which help re-train jobless workers and ease them back into work, prevent many suicides. ④And spending on health services, especially those that most benefit the old and sick, can make a big difference: fear of chronic pain is one of the things that leads people to seek a quick way out.
    Para. 7 ①For a few people—those who terminally ill, in severe pain and determined to die—suicide may be the least terrible option. ②In such circumstances, and with firm safeguards, doctors should be allowed to assist. ③But many of the 800,000 people who kill themselves each year act in haste, and more could be saved with better health services, labour-market policies and curbs on booze, guns, pesticide and pills. ④America, in particular, could spare much pain by learning from the progress elsewhere.