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  3. When the world was a simpler place, the rich were fat, the poor were thin, and right-thinking people worried about how to feed t

When the world was a simpler place, the rich were fat, the poor were thin, and right-thinking people worried about how to feed t

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问题     When the world was a simpler place, the rich were fat, the poor were thin, and right-thinking people worried about how to feed the hungry. Now, in much of the world, the rich are thin, the poor are fat, and right-thinking people are worrying about obesity.
    Evolution is mostly to blame. It has designed mankind to cope with deprivation, not plenty. People are perfectly tuned to store energy in good years to see them through lean ones. But when bad times never come, they are stuck with that energy, stored around their expanding bellies.
    Thanks to rising agricultural productivity, lean years are rarer all over the globe. Modern-day Malthusians, who used to draw graphs proving that the world was shortly going to run out of food, have gone rather quiet lately. According to the UN, the number of people short of food fell from 920m in 1980 to 799m 20 years later, even though the world’s population increased by 1. 6 billion over the period. This is mostly a cause for celebration. Mankind has won what was, for most of his time on this planet, his biggest battle: to ensure that he and his offspring had enough to eat. But every silver lining has a cloud, and the consequence of prosperity is a new plague that brings with it a host of interesting policy dilemmas.
    As a scourge of the modern world, obesity has an image problem. It is easier to associate with Father Christmas than with the four horses of the Apocalypse. But it has a good claim to lumber along beside them, for it is the world’s biggest public-health issue today — the main cause of heart disease, which kills more people these days than AIDS, malaria, war; the principal risk factor in diabetes; heavily implicated in cancer and other diseases. Since the World Health Organisation labeled obesity an "epidemic" in 2000, reports on its fearful consequences have come thick and fast.
    Will public-health warnings, combined with media pressure, persuade people to get thinner, just as they finally put them off tobacco? Possibly. In the rich world, sales of healthier foods are booming and new figures suggest that over the past year Americans got very slightly thinner for the first time in recorded history. But even if Americans are losing a few ounces, it will be many years before the country solves the health problems caused by half a century’s dining to excess. And, everywhere else in the world, people are still piling on the pounds. That’s why there is now a consensus among doctors that governments should do something to stop them.
What does the author mean by "people are still piling on the pounds"?
选项 A、People are accumulating wealth.
B、People are getting thinner.
C、People are losing ounces.
D、People are gaining weight.
答案D
解析 语义理解题。做此类题型时要注意联系上下文。分析文章最后两句话可知，people are still piling on the pounds是医生一致认为政府应该采取措施来制止这种情况的原因。既然要“制止”，肯定不是好事，故排除[A]；[B]“人们变瘦”和[C]“人们的体重减轻”(lose ounces的意思可从第五段第三句话和第四句话判断出)表达的是同一个意思，故都排除，答案选[D]。pile on the pounds的意思是“体重增加”。
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