Passage Three
Questions 11 to 15 are based on the following passage.
Every body gets sick. Disease and injury make us suffer throughout our lives, until finally some attack on the body brings our existence to an end. Fortunately, most of us in modern industrialized societies can take relatively good health for granted most of the time. In fact, we tend to fully realize the importance of good health only when we or those close to us become seriously ill. At such times we keenly appreciate the ancient truth that health is our most precious asset, one for which we might readily give up such rewards as power, wealth, or fame.
Because ill health is a universal problem, affecting the individual and society, the human response to sickness is always socially organized. No society leaves the responsibility for maintaining health and treating ill health entirely to the individual. Each society develops its own concepts of health and sickness and authorizes certain people to decide who is sick and how the sick should be treated. Around this focus there arises, over time, a number of standards, values, groups, statuses, and roles: in other words, an institution. To the sociologist, then, medicine is the institution concerned with the maintenance of health and treatment of disease.
In the simplest pre-industrial societies, medicine is usually an aspect of religion. The social arrangements for dealing with sickness are very elementary, often involving only two roles: the sick and the healer (治疗者). The latter is typically also the priest, who relies primarily on religious ceremonies, both to identify and to treat disease: for example, bones may be thrown to establish a cause; songs may be used to bring about a cure. In modern industrialized societies, on the other hand, the institution has become highly complicated and specialized, including dozens of roles such as those of brain surgeon, druggist, hospital administrator, linked with various organizations such as nursing homes, insurance companies, and medical schools. Medicine, in fact, has become the subject of intense sociological interest precisely because it is now one of the most pervasive and costly institutions of modern society.
11. Which of the following statements is true according to Paragraph 1 ?
A. Nowadays most people believe they can have fairly good health.
B. Human life involves a great deal of pain and suffering.
C. Most of us are aware of the full value of health.
D. Ancient people believed that health was more expensive than anything else.
12. The word “authorize” in Paragraph 2 means“______”.
A. make way for B. give power to
C. write an order for D. make it possible for
13. In Paragraph 2, we learn that the sociologist regards medicine as ______.
A. a system whose purpose is to treat disease and keep people healthy
B. a universal problem that affects every society
C. a social responsibility to treat ill health
D. a science that focuses on the treatment of disease
14. According to Paragraph 3, which of the following is NOT true?
A. In the past, bones might be used to decide why people fell ill.
B. In pre-industrial societies priests sometimes treated patients by singing.
C. Modern medicine is so complicated that sociology no longer has a place in it.
D. There were only two roles in an elementary medical system, the patient and the one who tried to cure him.
15. The author of this passage is mainly concerned with ______.
A. sociological aspects in medicine
B. medical treatment of diseases
C. the development of medical science
D. the role of religion in medicine
