hce_tcu
111年
英文
第 47 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.
This essay may move on to the discussion of the following issues EXCEPT _____.
- A education
- B regional conflicts
- C healthcare problems
- D economic recession
思路引導 VIP
請仔細觀察文章第二段末尾，作者明確提到了哪三個特定的「領域」（realms）來描述疫情的影響？如果這篇文章是一張地圖，作者已經為你指出了三個前進的方向。請你對照一下目前看到的選項，哪一個主題在文中完全沒有被作者「標示」在這些領域之中？
🤖
AI 詳解
AI 專屬家教
恭喜你準確鎖定了正確選項！這展現了你對文章脈絡的精準掌握，沒有被其他看起來同樣嚴重的全球議題所干擾。
文本核心脈絡與發展方向
這篇文章的核心在於探討新冠肺炎（Covid-19）對開發中國家造成的「次生傷害」（second-order effects）。作者在第二段明確點出了後續將探討的範疇，包含經濟（economic）、**教育（educational）以及公共衛生（public health）**三大領域。隨後幾段更具體討論了醫療資源的受阻（如 HIV、瘧疾防治）以及貧窮與飢餓問題。因此，選項 (A)、(C)、(D) 都是文章邏輯延伸的自然結果，與文意緊密相扣。
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