Ⅱ. Read the following passage carefully and then explain in your own
English the exact meaning of the numbered and underlined parts.
Medical consumerism--like all sorts of consumerism, only more
menacingly--is designed to be satisfying. (51) The prolongation of life and
the search for perfect health(beauty, youth, happiness) are inherently
self-defeating. The law of diminishing returns necessarily applies. You can
make higher percentages of people survive into their eighties and nineties. But,
as any geriatric ward shows, that is not the same as to confer enduring
mobility, awareness and autonomy. (52)Extending life grows medically
feasible, but it is often a life deprived of everything, and one exposed to
degrading neglect as resources grow over-stretched and politics turn
mean. What an ignominious destiny for medicine if its future
turned into one of bestowing meager increments of unenjoyed life! It would
mirror the fate of athletics, in which disproportionate energies and resources
not least medical ones, like illegal steroids--are now invested to shave records
by milliseconds. And, it goes without saying; the logical extension of
longevism--the "abolition" of death--would not be a solution but only an
exacerbation. (53)To air these predicaments is not antimedical spleen--a
churlish reprisal against medicine for its victories--but simply to face the
growing reality of medical power not exactly without responsibility but with
dissolving goals. (54) Hence medicine’s finest hour becomes
the dawn of its dilemmas. For centuries, medicine as impotent and hence
unproblematic. From the Greeks to the Great War, its job was simple: to struggle
with lethal diseases and gross disabilities, to ensure live births, and to
manage pain. It performed these uncontroversial tasks by and large with meager
success. Today, with mission accomplished, medicine’s triumphs are dissolving in
disorientation. (55) Medicine has led to vastly inflated expectations, which
the public has eagerly swallowed. Yet as these expectations grow unlimited,
they become unfulfillable. The task facing medicine in the twenty-first century
will be to redefine its limits even as it extends its capacities.
【参考答案】
The attempt to make life longer and to search for ways of pe......