Passage Four
At one time, it was thought that cancer was a “disease of civilization,” belonging to much the same causal domain as “neurasthenia” and diabetes, the former a nervous weakness believed to be brought about by the stress of modem life and the latter a condition produced by bad diet and indolence. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, some physicians attributed cancer — notably of the breast and the ovaries — to psychological and behavioral causes. William Buchan’s wildly popular eighteenth—century text “Domestic Medicine” judged that cancers might be caused by “excessive fear, grief and religious melancholy.” In the nineteenth century, reference was repeatedly made to a “cancer personality.” As Susan Sontag observed, cancer was considered shameful, not to be mentioned. Among the Romantics and the Victorians, suffering and dying from tuberculosis might be considered a badge of refinement; cancer death was nothing of the sort. “It seems unimaginable,” Sontag wrote, “to aestheticize cancer. ”
Cancer is “the modem disease” not just because we understand it in radically new ways but also because there’s a lot more about cancer. For some cancers, the rise in incidence is clearly connected with things that get into our bodies that once did not — the causal link between smoking and lung cancer being the most spectacular example. But the rise in cancer mortality is, in its way, very good news: as we live longer, and as many infectious and epidemic diseases have ceased to be major causes of death, so we become prone to maladies that express themselves at ages once rarely attained. At the beginning of the twentieth century, life expectancy at birth in America was 47.3 years, and in the middle of the nineteenth century it was less than forty. The median age at diagnosis for breast cancer in the United States is now sixty—one; for prostate cancer it is sixty—seven; for colorectal cancer it’s seventy. “Cancer has become the price of modern life,” an epidemiologist recently wrote. In the U.S., about half of all men and about a third of women will contract cancer in their lifetime; cancer now ranks just below heart disease as a cause of death in the U.S. But in low—income countries with shorter life expectancies it doesn’t even make the top ten.
Questions 16—20 are based on Passage Four.
16. What is the first paragraph mainly about?
A. Common causes of cancers.
B. Treatments for different cancers.
C. Traditional bliefs on cancer.
D. People’s attitudes to cancer patients.
17. What can we learn about the Victorians from Paragraph 1?
A. They believed that some diseases were superior to others.
B. They thought that some diseases were unimaginable.
C. They attributed some diseases to behavioral causes.
D. They held superstitious ideas towards some diseases.
18. The word “maladies” in Paragraph 2 means ______.
A. tunes B. illnesses
C. serious problems D. advanced ages
19. Why are more and more people diagnosed with cancers today?
A. People nowadays have more bad habits.
B. People nowadays enjoy longer life expectancy.
C. People nowadays are exposed to more sources of stress.
D. People nowadays are more vulnerable psychologically.
20. “It” in the last sentence refers to ______.
A. life expectancy B. heart disease
C. modernity D. cancer
