Text 2

    Running may be the single most effective exercise to increase life expectancy, according to a new review and analysis of past research about exercise and premature death. The new study found that, compared to non-runners, runners tended to live about three additional years, even if they run slowly or sporadically and smoke, drink or are overweight. No other form of exercise that researchers looked at showed comparable impacts on life span.
    The findings come as a follow-up to a study done three years ago, in which a group of distinguished exercise scientists scrutinized data from a large trove of medical and fitness tests conducted at the Cooper Institute in Dallas. That analysis found that as little as five minutes of daily running was associated with prolonged life spans.
    After that study was released, the researchers were inundated with queries from fellow scientists and the general public, says Duck-chul Lee, a professor of kinesiology at Iowa State University and co-author of the study. Some people asked if other activities, such as walking, were likely to be as beneficial as running for reducing mortality risks.
    High-mileage runners wondered if they could be doing too much, and if at some undefined number of miles or hours, running might become counterproductive and even contribute to premature mortality.
    And a few people questioned whether running really added materially to people’s life spans. Could it be, they asked rather peevishly, that if in order to reduce your risk of dying by a year, you had to spend the equivalent of a year’s worth of time on the trails or track, producing no discernible net gain?
    So for the new study, which was published in March in Progress in Cardiovascular Disease, Lee and his colleagues set out to address those and related issues by reanalyzing data from the Cooper Institute and also examining results from a number of other large-scale  recent studies looking into the associations between exercise and mortality.
    Over  all,  this  new  review  reinforced  the  findings  of  the  earlier  research,  the  scientists determined.  Cumulatively,  the  data  indicated  that  running,  whatever  someone’s  pace  or  mileage, dropped a person’s risk of premature death by almost 40%, a benefit that held true even when the researchers controlled for smoking, drinking and a history of health problems such as hypertension or obesity.

It is implied in Paragraph 1 that runners________.

The analysis of the medical and fitness tests showed that________.

The following aspects are the reasons why the researchers were inundated with queries EXCEPT that ________.

According to the passage, the new review indicated that________.

The author’s attitude toward running is________.