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  3. Less than two months into her breast cancer treatment, Alexandra Jn-Charles was called into a new room at SUNY Downstate Medical

Less than two months into her breast cancer treatment, Alexandra Jn-Charles was called into a new room at SUNY Downstate Medical

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问题     Less than two months into her breast cancer treatment, Alexandra Jn-Charles was called into a new room at SUNY Downstate Medical Center, where two treating physicians, the chief medical officer and an attorney representing the hospital told her that mistakes had been made.
    The skin lesions (病变) on her chest, they said, had been caused not by her illness but by the machine that was supposed to cure her. The 32-year-old had received nearly 30 radiotherapy sessions, but at this point it didn’t really make sense to count them, because a programming error had caused each installment to deliver at least three times the prescribed amount of radiation.
    Jn-Charles, who died two and a half years after this meeting in 2005, would eventually come to exemplify the emergence of accidental over-radiation in U.S. hospitals. The worst off have reported skin damage, inexplicable hair loss and ribs (肋骨) buckling beneath their chests — debilitating injuries suffered while undergoing screening or treatment for something that would otherwise kill them. A steep price for survival.
    These tragedies go to the core of an issue as pressing as it is uncomfortable to think about: Have advances in technology, improved treatment methods and more comprehensive screening protocols led to systematic, excessive irradiation of patients?
    The answer, according to a growing number of health experts, is yes. For example, the CT scan, which has become commonplace in response to rising cancer rates, is itself thought to increase the likelihood that a person develops cancer. The scans deliver several hundred times more radiation than an X-ray — even when guidelines and dosages are followed precisely. "What we do as physicians arguably harms people," James Ehrlich, a clinical associate professor at the University of Colorado and an adviser for Premier Micronutrient Corp., told Newsweek.
    A jarring example of that came in 2010, when Walt Bogdanich published an extensive review in The New York Times that listed numerous patients whose lives had been destroyed by mistakes in hospital imaging and radiotherapy. Shortly after the article series went to press, the Food and Drug Administration began to ramp up its efforts to limit excessive exposure, eventually launching its Initiative to Reduce Unnecessary Radiation Exposure from Medical Imaging.
    Along with organizations like the American College of Radiology, the FDA now supports a number of so-called dose registries that allow facilities to compare radiation dose indexes to regional and national values. To date, hundreds of facilities across the U.S. have enrolled.
    But the FDA’s regulatory authority is generally focused on equipment manufacturers, and compliance on the state level is never guaranteed. And even compliant facilities run the risk of over-radiating patients: A 2012 paper by the Institute of Medicine found that medical imaging is one of the leading environmental causes of breast cancer.
What does the word "ramp up" (Line 4, Para. 6) mean?
选项 A、Heat up.
B、Draw out.
C、Intensify.
D、Put up.
答案C
解析 第6段第1句提到，有大量病人的生命受到医院影像和放射治疗失误的伤害。第6段第2句中又提到，食品和药物管理局最终出台了《减少来自医学影像的不必要放射之倡议》。因此此处应该是说，食品和药物管理局开始“加大”他们在限制过度放射方面的努力，故ramp up意为“加强，加大，增加”，C)为答案。A)Heat up(加热，升温)、B)Draw out(取出)和D)Put up(举起)都不符合文意。
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