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  3. About Pain Pain, unfortunately, is a horrible necessity of life. It protects people by alerting them to things that might in

About Pain Pain, unfortunately, is a horrible necessity of life. It protects people by alerting them to things that might in

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问题                              About Pain
    Pain, unfortunately, is a horrible necessity of life. It protects people by alerting them to things that might injure them. But some long-term pain has nothing to do with any obvious injury. One estimate suggests that one in six adults suffer from a "chronic pain" condition.
    Steve McMahon, a pain researcher at King’s College, London, says that if skin is damaged, for instance with a hot iron, an area of sensitivity develops around the outside of the burn where although untouched and undamaged by the iron the behavior of the nerve fibers is disrupted. As a result, heightened sensitivity and abnormal pain sensations occur in the surrounding skin. Chronic pain, he says, may similarly be caused not by damage to the body, but because weak pain signals become amplified.
    This would also help explain why chronic pains such as lower-back fail to respond well to traditional pain therapies. Unexpected pains do not always come from the body. According to Irene Tracey, a pain researcher at the University of Oxford, how pain is experienced also depends upon a person’s state of mind. If successive patients suffer the same burn, the extent to which it hurts will depend on whether one is anxious, depressed, happy or distracted. Such ideas are being explored with brain scans which suggest that even if a low level of pain is being sent to the brain, the signal can be turned up by the "mind" itself. Indeed, patients can even be tricked into feeling pain.
    In one experiment volunteers were given a powerful analgesic and subjected to a painful stimulus—which, because of the analgesic, they could not feel. Then they were told the drug had worn off (although it had not), and subsequently complained that the stimulus hurt.
    People can, therefore, feel pain simply because it is expected. They can fail to feel pain for exactly the same reasons, for example when they are given placebos or are distracted. But although pain may be subjective, that does not mean the final experience is controlled solely by the mind.
Pain can protect people by signaling them to things that might______.
选项
答案injure them
解析 根据题干关键词protects people，alerting them定位到第一段第二句：ltprotects people by alerting them to things that might injure them．可知，疼痛可以对人们可能受到的伤害发出警告从而保护人们。题干中signal是原文alert的同义替换。
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