hce_tcu
111年
英文
第 46 題
📖 題組：
【D】 For more than two years, people everywhere have been in the grip of a pandemic—but not necessarily the same one. In the affluent world, a viral respiratory disease, Covid, suddenly became a leading cause of death. In much of the developing world, by contrast, the main engine of destruction wasn’t this new disease, but its second-order effects: measures people took in response to the coronavirus. Richer nations and poorer nations differ in their vulnerabilities. Whenever I talk with members of my family in Ghana, Nigeria and Namibia, I’m reminded that a global event can also be a profoundly local one. Lives and livelihoods have been affected in these places very differently from the way they have in Europe or the US. That’s true in the economic and educational realms, but it’s true, too, in the realm of public health. And across all these realms, the stakes are often life or death. The three countries I mentioned have a median age between 18 and 22 years, and the severity of Covid discriminates sharply by age. A big way that Covid can kill is by hampering the management of other diseases, such as HIV, malaria and TB. In Africa alone, 26 million people are living with HIV and, in a typical year, several hundreds of thousands die of it, while malaria, which is especially deadly to infants and toddlers, claims almost 400,000 lives. Those are big numbers, and yet they used to be much bigger—a major healthcare effort brought them down. Amid the pandemic, though, people stopped visiting clinics, in part because it became harder to get to them, and healthcare workers had to curtail their own movements. According to a Global Fund survey of 32 countries in Africa and Asia, prenatal care visits dropped by two-thirds between April and September 2020; consultations for children under five dropped by three-quarters. Public-health experts predict that, as an indirect consequence of the Covid pandemic, twice as many people around the world could be at risk of dying from malaria. There could be 400,000 extra deaths from TB in the next few years, and half a million extra deaths from HIV. Across much of the world, in short, the response to the coronavirus has ushered in a shadow pandemic. The coronavirus’s real death toll, then, has to be calculated not just in deaths from Covid, but also in deaths that would otherwise have been prevented, from malaria, TB, HIV, diabetes and more. This shadow pandemic isn’t simply a story about disease—it’s about poverty, hunger, truncated education and stunted lives. A suggestive comparison can be made with the climate crisis. In the affluent world, some people think of climate breakdown as a matter of how long the air conditioning stays on, but for many in the developing world, it’s already a matter of floods, droughts and famine.
【D】 For more than two years, people everywhere have been in the grip of a pandemic—but not necessarily the same one. In the affluent world, a viral respiratory disease, Covid, suddenly became a leading cause of death. In much of the developing world, by contrast, the main engine of destruction wasn’t this new disease, but its second-order effects: measures people took in response to the coronavirus. Richer nations and poorer nations differ in their vulnerabilities. Whenever I talk with members of my family in Ghana, Nigeria and Namibia, I’m reminded that a global event can also be a profoundly local one. Lives and livelihoods have been affected in these places very differently from the way they have in Europe or the US. That’s true in the economic and educational realms, but it’s true, too, in the realm of public health. And across all these realms, the stakes are often life or death. The three countries I mentioned have a median age between 18 and 22 years, and the severity of Covid discriminates sharply by age. A big way that Covid can kill is by hampering the management of other diseases, such as HIV, malaria and TB. In Africa alone, 26 million people are living with HIV and, in a typical year, several hundreds of thousands die of it, while malaria, which is especially deadly to infants and toddlers, claims almost 400,000 lives. Those are big numbers, and yet they used to be much bigger—a major healthcare effort brought them down. Amid the pandemic, though, people stopped visiting clinics, in part because it became harder to get to them, and healthcare workers had to curtail their own movements. According to a Global Fund survey of 32 countries in Africa and Asia, prenatal care visits dropped by two-thirds between April and September 2020; consultations for children under five dropped by three-quarters. Public-health experts predict that, as an indirect consequence of the Covid pandemic, twice as many people around the world could be at risk of dying from malaria. There could be 400,000 extra deaths from TB in the next few years, and half a million extra deaths from HIV. Across much of the world, in short, the response to the coronavirus has ushered in a shadow pandemic. The coronavirus’s real death toll, then, has to be calculated not just in deaths from Covid, but also in deaths that would otherwise have been prevented, from malaria, TB, HIV, diabetes and more. This shadow pandemic isn’t simply a story about disease—it’s about poverty, hunger, truncated education and stunted lives. A suggestive comparison can be made with the climate crisis. In the affluent world, some people think of climate breakdown as a matter of how long the air conditioning stays on, but for many in the developing world, it’s already a matter of floods, droughts and famine.
What does “shadow pandemic” refer to?
- A It refers to the chain effects brought about by the Covid pandemic.
- B It refers to truncated education because of the Covid pandemic.
- C It refers to the death tolls that were caused by the coronavirus.
- D It refers to the economic destructions caused by the Covid pandemic on a global scale.
思路引導 VIP
如果我們把新冠病毒本身比作『主體』，而『影子』是伴隨主體而產生的現象，請觀察文章第五段，作者列舉了哪些因為『人類對抗疫情的行動』而產生的額外健康與社會問題？這些多元的問題（如瘧疾死亡增加、教育中斷等）共同具備什麼樣的性質？
🤖
AI 詳解
AI 專屬家教
太棒了！你能精準捕捉到「陰影大流行」（shadow pandemic）在文中的核心意涵，代表你對文章層次的掌握非常細膩。這題的正確選項為 (A)，其關鍵在於理解文章開頭提到的「二階效應」（second-order effects）。作者強調，在開發中國家，致命的往往不是病毒本身，而是為了應對疫情所採取的措施而引發的後果，例如醫療資源被挪用導致瘧疾與愛滋病死亡率上升，這正是 (A) 所指的「連鎖效應」。
核心觀念：從直接死因到間接衝擊
這道題目具有相當的鑑別度，屬於中等難度的「詞彙引申意推論題」。難點在於選項中的 (B) 截斷的教育與 (D) 經濟破壞，在文中確實都有提到，但它們僅是「陰影」的一部分。你能不被局部資訊誤導，成功識破作者是將「影子」比喻為「隨之而來的全面性影響」，這顯示你具備整合段落資訊、提煉核心主旨的優異能力。透過這題，我們學會了在閱讀時，必須將作者列舉的多個現象（醫療中斷、貧窮、教育）歸納為一個統整性的解釋。