For much of the past decade, American and British scientists have been annoy

游客2023-08-04  17

问题     For much of the past decade, American and British scientists have been annoyed by the phenomenon known as the French Paradox. Nutritionally speaking, the French have been getting away with murder: They eat all the butter, cream, foie gras, pastry and cheese that their hearts desire, and yet their rates of obesity and heart disease are much lower than ours. The French eat three times as much saturated animal fat as Americans do, and only a third as many die of heart attacks. It’s maddening.
    Baffled, scientists struggled to come up with a few hypotheses: Maybe it was something in the red wine, they said. But while winemakers worldwide celebrated that news, more sober research has suggested that any alcohol—whether Lafite Rothschild, a banana daiquiri or a cold bud—pretty much has the same nice, relaxing effect. So while a little wine is apt to do you good, the French aren’t so special in having a drink now and then though the fact that they drink wine moderately and slowly with meals, instead of downing shots at the bar, could make a difference.
    After the wine argument, scientists ventured that it must be the olive oil that keeps the French healthy. But this doesn’t explain the butter or brie. Then, French scientist Serge Renaud (made famous on "60 Minutes" as an expert on the French Paradox) said it’s the foie gras that melts away cholesterol. This, too, is dicey: While people in Toulouse—the duck-liver-eating area of France—do indeed have one of the lowest rates of heart disease in the developed world, they actually only eat the delicacy about six times a year. And they’re a lot more likely to die of stroke than we are anyway.
    Other researchers, perhaps sponsored by the garlic and onion industry, suggested that the French Paradox effect is due to garlic and onions. Claude Fischler, a nutritional sociologist at INSERM, says all these single hypotheses are more wishful thinking than science.
    Last May, researchers writing in the British Medical Journal came up with the least cheerful hypothesis of all. They argued that it’s just a matter of time before the French—who are in fact eating more hamburgers and French fries these days—catch up with Americans, and begin suffering the same high rates of cardiovascular disease.
    These researchers, Malcolm Law and Nicholas Wald, call this the "time lag explanation" for the French Paradox. As far as they are concerned, the McDonaldization (this is a French catch—all terms for the importation of fast food and other American cultural horrors) of France will continue at a frantic pace, and it is as inevitable that Frenchmen will start keeling over (晕倒) of heart attacks as it is that French women will eventually wear jean shorts and marshmallow tennis shoes on the streets of Paris. [br] What can we infer from the passage?

选项 A、The French Paradox is due to the influence of American values.
B、The French Paradox will disappear in time.
C、The McDonaldization of France has little effect on the French’s health.
D、There is no such thing as the French Paradox.

答案 B

解析 由题干中的me passage定位至全文。推理判断题。文章第五段指出,为《英国医疗杂志》撰稿的研究人员提出了一项最不令人振奋的假想:法国人赶上美国人并开始被同样高的心血管发病率所困扰只是时间问题。由此可推出B正确。
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