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  3. If life expectancy were a marathon, the United States is fading from the pack. Although everyone is living longer, the inhabitan

If life expectancy were a marathon, the United States is fading from the pack. Although everyone is living longer, the inhabitan

admin2010-08-21  39
问题     If life expectancy were a marathon, the United States is fading from the pack. Although everyone is living longer, the inhabitants of other industrialized nations have made more dramatic strides in life expectancy than Americans have, which consequently leads to the result that Americans, who are once on par with Italy and New Zealand in the middle of the pack now rank below Spain and Greece near the end.
    On the face of it, this shouldn’t be happening.
    Healthier nations are usually wealthier nations. The United States ranks only after Luxembourg and Norway of the 30 richest nations belonging to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), but it now ranks 22nd in life expectancy.
    The problem could be anything but inadequate healthcare spending. The US spends $1 of every $7 of its gross domestic product on healthcare, more than any other OECD nation that typically devotes less than $1 in $10 of GDP to the sector. Per person, that works out to an extra $1,800 compared with the Swiss or $ 2,300 compared with the Canadians, even though both those groups live longer than Americans.
    So what’s at work? One factor could be diet. Physicians maintain that overweight, which has become a major problem for the Americans, often shrinks a person’s life span. On the positive side, US alcohol and tobacco consumption is more moderate than the OECD average. Another factor holding back longevity (长寿) falls into poverty. The quarter to a third of Americans with low incomes often have less money than the same low-income groups in several other rich countries. A third factor comes from inequality, which exacerbates (恶化) the problem. The most prosperous 10 percent of Americans receive 17 times as much income as those in the bottom 10 percent. In countries with high life expectancies among those at 65 — such as Japan, Sweden, and Norway — the top 10 percent makes only five times as much income.
    The US also struggles with inequality in healthcare. While most rich nations have universal coverage, 45 million in the US didn’t have health insurance last year, according to census statistics — a rise of 5.2 million since 2000. Millions more have insurance only part of the year. Many of those without health insurance tend to postpone medical care for chronic problems, though in emergencies they may seek for hospital facilities.
    Thus, a better predicator of life expectancy than GDP may be the average GDP for the bottom 40 percent of the population. Here the US falls in the middle of the pack of rich countries, rather than at the top.
We can learn from the passage that the health spending in any other OECD is ______ than that in America.
选项
答案much less
解析 本题问“美国用于卫生保健部分的资金和其他任何一个OECD成员国相比怎么样”。本题相关部分在第四段，提到“The US spends $1 of every $7 of its gross domestic product on healthcare, more than any other OECD nation that typically devotes less than $1 in $10 of GDP to the sector.”(美国将国内生产总值的1/7都用于卫生保健，远多于其他OECD成员国，它们用于卫生保健部分的资金一般只占不到国内生产总值的1/10)。在提问中有“than that”，也就是说空白处要用比较级。因此，答案为much less。
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