英语六级阅读真题2009.12.docx

Passage One Questions 52 to 56 are based on the following passage.There is nothing like the suggestion of a cancer risk to scare a parent, especially one of theover-educated, eco-conscious type. So you can imagine the reaction when a recent USA Todayinvestigation of air quality around the nation’s schools singled out those in the smugly（自鸣得意的）green village of Berkeley, Calif., as being among the worst in the country. The city’s public high school,as well as a number of daycare centers, preschools, elementary and middle schools, fell in the lowest10%. Industrial pollution in our town had supposedly turned students into living science experimentsbreathing in a laboratory’s worth of heavy metals like manganese, chromium and nickel each day. Thisin a city that requires school cafeterias to serve organic meals. Great, I thought, organic lunch, toxiccampus.Since December, when the report came out, the mayor, neighborhood activists（活跃分子）andvarious parent-teacher associations have engaged in a fierce battle over its validity: over the guilt of thesteel-casting factory on the western edge of town, over union jobs versus children’s health and overwhat, if anything, ought to be done. With all sides presenting their own experts armed with conflictingscientific studies, whom should parents believe? Is there truly a threat here, we asked one another as wedropped off our kids, and if so, how great is it? And how does it compare with the other, seeminglyperpetual health scares we confront, like panic over lead in synthetic athletic fields? Rather than justanother weird episode in the town that brought you protesting environmentalists, this latest drama is atrial for how today’s parents perceive risk, how we try to keep our kids safe—whether it’s possible tokeep them safe—in what feels like an increasingly threatening world. It raises the question of what, inour time, “safe” could even mean.“There’s no way around the uncertainty,” says Kimberly Thompson, president of Kid Risk, anonp