填空题
Instructions: There is one passage in this section with 5
questions. Read the passage quickly and answer the questions on the Answer
Sheet. If asked, "What are health decisions?", most of us
would answer in terms of hospitals, doctors and pills. Yet we are all making a
whole range of decisions about our health which go beyond this limited area; for
example, whether or not to smoke, exercise, drive a motorbike, or drink alcohol
really. The ways we reach decisions and form attitudes about our health are only
just beginning to be understood.
The main paradox is why
people consistently do things which are known to be very hazardous. Two good
examples of this are smoking and not wearing seat belts. Both these examples
underline elements of how people reach decisions about their health.
Understanding this process is crucial. We can then more effectively change
public attitudes to hazardous, voluntary activities like
smoking.
Smokers run double the risk of contracting heart
disease, several times the risk of suffering from chronic bronchitis and at
least 25 times the risk of lung cancer, as compared to non-smokers. Despite
extensive press campaigns ( especially in the past 20 years) , which have
regularly told smokers and car drivers the grave risks they are running, the
number of smokers and seat belt wearers has remained much the same. Although the
number of deaths from road accidents and smoking are well publicised, they have
aroused little public interest.
If we give smokers the real
figures, will it alter their views on the dangers of smoking? Unfortunately not.
Many of the "real figures" are in the form of probabilistic estimates, and
evidence shows that people are very bad at processing and understanding this
kind of information.
The kind of information that tends to be
relied on both by the smoker and seat belt non-wearer is anecdotal, based on
personal experiences. All smokers seem to have an Uncle Bill or an Auntie Mabel
who has been smoking cigarettes since they were twelve, lived to 90, and died
because they fell down the stairs. And if they don't have such an aunt or uncle,
they are certain to have heard of someone who has. Similarly, many motorists
seem to have heard of people who would have been killed if they had been wearing
seat belts.
Reliance on this kind of evidence and not being able
to cope with "probabilistic" data form the two main foundation stones of
people's assessment of risk. A third is reliance on press-publicised dangers and
causes of death. American psychologists have shown that people overestimate the
frequency (and therefore the danger) of the dramatic causes of death (like
aeroplane crashes)and underestimate the undramatic, unpublicised killers (like
smoking) which actually take a greater toll of life.
What is
needed is some way of changing people's evaluations of and attitudes to the
risks of certain activities like smoking. What can be done? The "national"
approach of giving people the "facts and figures" seems ineffective. But the
evidence shows that when people are frightened, they are more likely to change
their estimates of the dangers involved in smoking or not wearing seat belts.
Press and television can do this very cost-effectively. Programmes like Dying
for a Fag (a Thames TV programme) vividly showed the health hazards of smoking
and may have increased the chances of people stopping smoking
permanently.
So a mass-media approach may work. But it needs to
be carefully controlled. Overall, the new awareness of the problem of health
decisions and behaviour is at least a more hopeful sign for the future.
{{B}}For answers 51-55, mark{{/B}}
Y (for
YES) if the statement agrees with the information given in the
passage;
N (for NO) if the statement contradicts the
information given in the passage;
NG (for NOT GIVEN) if
the information is not given in the passage.