Two years ago, my parents started collecting their Social Security checks, thereby confirming what I had always thought them to be old. When they talked to me about the need to save for my future, I'd just roll my eyes and turn up my stereo. Me, I was never going to be old.
College is a bubble of youthful idealism, nurturing the naive belief that young is forever, old is for parents. Several semesters and dozens of weekends separate most of us from entering the work-force, so how can we be expected to comprehend retirement? We see the money deducted from our part-time jobs that allows our grandparents to retire to Florida, but we never think for a moment that when we get that age, we won't be able to retire in style-or at all. But this is the picture President Bush painted for us in his assault on our Social Security system at a White House forum last Tuesday and in his State of the Union address on Wednesday.
"If you're 20 years old, in your mid-20s, and you're beginning to work, I want you to think about a Social Security system that will be flat bust, bankrupt, unless the United States Congress has got the willingness to act now," Bush told the forum, using his usual rhetoric of impending doom. He argues that the best way to avoid catastrophe is to privatize the system, giving me and my fellow classmates more choice in how we prepare for retirement through personal accounts and investments. The inevitable outcry of opposition soon followed, with critics arguing that the money needed for such an overhaul and the people it would disadvantage are not worth the change Bush suggests.
I went in search of student opinion here at Michigan State with the intention of keeping politics and Social Security reform. separate. We are, after all, talking about the financial future of generations to come, not something that should be decided on a partisan whim. But, to neglect the politics involved ultimately skews the whole issue, because .anything that involves allocating resources automatically becomes political. And as an inherent cynic about all politicians, I can't help but wonder if Bush truly has the best interest of my generation in mind. Through four years of his administration, be has barely acknowledged our needs and now he wants to save us from a threat looming a half century away? I can't help but be a little skeptical.
According to the passage, life is different from college in which _________.
A. we can nurture the belief that youth is forever
B. we can take part-time job to send our parents to Florida
C. our dreams burst
D. our grandparents once dreamed of
We cannot always ______ natural rainfalls, We should take some effective measures to fight
A. hang on
B. hold on
C. count on
D. come on
A couple weeks before he was scheduled to have his teeth cleaned, Gerald Zember. felt a slight pain in the back of his mouth. The retired lawyer figured he had burnt his tongue sipping hot soup or developed an ulcer from one too many spicy meals. And at first glance, Zember's Ft. Lauder- dale, Fla., dentist, William Balanoff, didn't notice anything unusual during a routine examination-until he pulled out a new oral-cancer screening tool called ViziLite.
After Zember rinsed with a raspberry-flavored acetic solution, Balanoff inserted a ViziLite light stick into his patient's mouth. Suddenly, a tiny white lesion became visible on the side of Zember's tongue. "It was tiny, but I couldn't explain it away," says Balanoff, since Zember had no history of canker sores that could have left such a mark. Zember, 78, did have a history of smoking, though, which put him at higher risk for oral cancer. So Balanoff referred him to an oral surgeon to have the lesion checked out. A biopsy revealed the cells were cancerous. "It was so tiny, I might not have noticed it until a year or a year and a half later [once it had grown]," says Balanoff. "By then, it would have been a stage-three cancer, and his chances wouldn't have been that good."
About 30,000 Americans will be diagnosed with oral or pharyngeal cancer this year, and more than 8,000 people will die from it. The death rate--about 50 percent over five years--hasn't changed much in the past few decades, in part because the cancer often isn't detected until it's visible to the naked eye. "Probably about two thirds of the cases at the time of diagnosis and treatment are already at an advanced stage," says Sol Silverman, a professor of oral medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, and an oral-cancer spokesman for the American Dental Association. "So what can we do today? Early detection."
Over the past few years, the American Dental Association has made detecting oral cancer earlier a priority, launching an awareness campaign in 1999. But it's taken a little while for the new screening tools to catch on. ViziLite, manufactured by Phoenix--based Zila Pharmaceuticals, was approved by the Food and Drug Administration in November 2001, but not widely marketed until this year. Another device, OralCDx's oral-brush biopsy, which uses a specialized brush to collect several test ceils from the tongue's surface, has been available since 2000. But it was only this year that Delta Dental Plan of Michigan and its affiliated plans in Ohio and Indiana became one of the nation's first dental benefits providers to include the diagnostic tool, distributed by Sullivan-Schein Dental, as part of its standard benefits (DaimlerChrysler was the first employer group to incorporate the benefit for it's 400,000 union workers).
Soon there may be another option, too. Zila's OraTest, a patented five-minute mouth rinse that uses a special dye, has already been approved for use in more than a dozen other countries, but still awaits approval from the FDA.
Zember's early detection of oral cancer was _________.
A. by accident
B. doctor-recommended
C. made during a thorough check
D. unfortunate