hce_tcu
111年
英文
第 50 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.
Which is true according to the available information in the passage?
- A We are able to confirm the stance and the nationality of the writer of this passage.
- B European countries are the center of attention in this passage.
- C African people may be more vulnerable to diseases other than Covid.
- D After the outbreak of the Covid pandemic, healthcare projects had provided better services in African countries.
思路引導 VIP
如果一個地區的人口結構非常年輕（平均不到 22 歲），而新冠病毒在統計上對高齡者的致死率較高，那麼根據文中的描述，這個地區在疫情期間面臨的「生命威脅」，更有可能直接來自病毒本身，還是來自因防疫而停擺的其他常態醫療資源？
🤖
AI 詳解
AI 專屬家教
太棒了！你能準確掌握文中關於「陰影大流行（shadow pandemic）」的論點，代表你具備優異的資訊整合能力。這題的正解關鍵在於理解開發中國家與已開發國家在公共衛生上的脆弱點差異。雖然新冠病毒席捲全球，但對平均年齡較輕（18至22歲）的非洲國家而言，病毒本身的直接威脅有時反而低於防疫封鎖導致的醫療中斷，例如愛滋病（HIV）、瘧疾（malaria）與肺結核（TB）的診治受阻，這正是選項 (C) 提到非洲人可能更易受新冠以外疾病傷害的推論基礎。
資訊整合與細節推敲
這道題目具備不錯的鑑別度，因為它考驗的不只是字面翻譯，而是對因果關係的整合。選項 (D) 的描述與文中提到的「診療次數大幅下降」完全相反；而 (A) 則是常見的推論陷阱，作者雖提到在非洲有家人，但並未明確揭露自己的國籍。你能避開這些干擾項，敏銳地察覺文中強調「防疫措施的次生效應」才是開發中國家的致命傷，顯示你已能精確抓取長篇論說文的核心觀點。