A Health Profile
A health profile is a portrait of all of the factors that influence your health. To draw your health profile, you will(1)what diseases run in your family, what health hazards you may be exposed to(2)work, how your daily(3)compares to the recommended standards, how much time per week you(4)exercising and what type of exercise you engage(5), how stressful your work and family environments are, what kinds of illnesses you get regularly, and(6)or not you have any one of a number of addictions.(7)this portrait, your should have a checkup to determine how your blood, heart, and lungs are functioning. This checkup will serve(8)a baseline, to which you can then compare later tests.
(9)this profile is thoroughly drawn, you can begin to think about setting health priorities based(10)your particular portrait. For example, if you drink two martinis every evening, have a high-stress(11), are overweight, smoke a pack of cigarettes a day, and use marijuana occasionally on weekends, you should quit smoking first, followed(12)losing the excess weight, reducing the stress of your job, giving up your marihuana habit, and then finally giving some(13)to those martinis if you want to prevent first cancer, and then heart disease. Even for the youthful working person who has never been sick a day in his life, who is(14)excellent health, a good look at all health habits and at work and home environments may suggest changes that will(15)him in the future.
profile n. 侧影,概貌
hazard n. 危险,危害
checkup n. 健康检查,体检
martini n. 马提尼酒
baseline n. 基础,起点
marihuana n. 大麻烟 (一种毒品)
A. know
B. have known
C. need know
D. need to know
Pushbike Peril
Low speed bicycle crashes can badly injure--or even kill--children if they fall onto the ends of the handlebars so a team of engineers is redesigning the humble handlebar in a bid to make it safer.
Kristy Arbogast, a bioengineer at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia in Pennsylvania, began the project with her colleagues after a study of serious abdominal injuries in children in the past 30 years showed that more than a third were caused by bicycle accidents." The task was to identify how the injuries occurred and come up with some countermeasures." she says.
By interviewing the children and their parents, Arbogast and her team were able to reconstruct many of the accidents and identified a common mechanism responsible for serious injures. They discovered that most occur when children hit an obstacle at a slow speed, causing them to topple over. To maintain their balance they turn the handlebars through 90 degrees--but their momentum forces them into the end of the handlebars. The bike then falls over and the other end of the handlebars hits the ground, ramming it into their abdomen.
The solution the group came up with is a handgrip fitted with a spring and damping system. The spring absorbs up to 50 per cent of the forces transmitted through the handlebars in an impact. The group hopes to commercialize the device, which should add only a few dollars to the cost of a bike. "But our task has been one of education because up until now, bicycle manufacturer were unaware of the problem." says Arbogast.
The team has also approached the US Consumer Product Safety Commission to try to persuade manufacturers to adopt the new design A decision is expected later this year.
handlebar n(常用复数) (自行车等的) 车把
abdominal adj. 腹部的 redesign v. 重新设计
bioengineer n. 生物工程师 reconstruct vt. 重建; 重构
countermeasure n. 对策 abdomen n. 腹部
momentum n. 冲力 handgrip n. 握柄
damping adj. 制动的;减速的,缓冲的 commercialize vt. 使商品化
According to the passage, some engineers are trying to improve the handlebars because
A. they are not noble enough
B. they may kill children
C. they are likely to crash
D. they make the bike move at a low speed