工业和信息化部科技人员英语水平考试Passages文本

Passages第一套题目文本：

Passage One:

Coffee is one of the world‟s most widely-enjoyed beverages. Flavor aside, scientists have recognized it as a complex blend of chemical compounds with potential health effects, both good and bad. Now, new research suggests that if you drink enough coffee, it might help you avoid certain kinds of cancer.

Dr. Mia Hashibe of the University Of Utah School Of Medicine was interested in the link between coffee drinking and certain cancers of the head and neck. Researchers have looked into this before, but without reaching any firm conclusions.

“There were a few studies, but the findings were not consistent across the studies,” she said, “so this finding from our current study was quite a surprise. We didn‟t really have any expectati on of which direction it could go into. “To sort out the confusion, Hashibe and her colleagues used statistical techniques to, in effect, make one big study out of the previous smaller studies.

We combined data across nine individual studies, so we have a lot more power than previous studies that looked at this. And we included 4,000 cancer patients who have cancer of the oral cavity and pharynx throat. And then 9,000 controls, so controls are people who do not have cancer.

Those studies — in Europe and the United States — found that people who drank a lot of coffee were less likely to develop cancers of the mouth and throat.

In an interview via Skype, Mia Hashibe said there was a weak link between cancer risk and drinking decaffeinated coffee, but it was n‟t statistically significant.

Passage Two:

States with a highly educated populace and higher taxes on cigarettes have fewer smokers, according to a new Gallup study of poll data.

The study found that one out of five American adults smoke, a number that has held relatively steady in recent years. Utah had the fewest smokers, at just 13 percent, while Kentucky and West Virginia tied for first place at 31 percent.

The South and Midwest dominated in smoker-heavy states. Besides Kentucky and West Virginia, Tennessee, Indiana, Arkansas, Missouri, Ohio, Louisiana, South Carolina and Alabama all had populations in which 25 percent or more people smoked. States that were under the national smoking average of 21 percent included: California, Idaho, Montana, the District of Columbia, New Jersey, Minnesota, Hawaii, Massachusetts, Arizona and Maryland.

Higher rates of smoking correlated with lower rates of formal education, according to the Gallup organization. West Virginia, Kentucky, Arkansas, Indiana, Tennessee and Oklahoma, for example, are all states where fewer than 25 percent of residents have college degrees. Massachusetts, Connecticut, Maryland, New Jersey and the District of Columbia, all areas with high rates of education, had some of the lowest rates of smoking.

Cigarette taxes are also associated with low smoking rates, though it‟s not clear whether taxes discourage smoking or whether states with fewer smokers are more likely to pass high cigarette taxes. In states where smoking was well above average, the average state cigarette tax was $0.66 a pack. In average states, it was $1.59, and in below-average states, it was $2.02.

States that discourage smoking with regulations against smoking in public places also had lower smoking rates.

Passage Three:

A new report finds that West Africa has become a major hub of cocaine smuggling to Europe,