Passage Four

Who says your job leaves you no time to hit the gym? A detailed new study of U. S. physical activity patterns shows that men who work full-time whether their jobs are active or sedentary end up getting more exercise than healthy working –age men without a job.

The new study comes from researchers at the National Institutes of Health (NIH), As part of the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey in 2003, some, 1, 800 working-age adults

were asked questions about their lifestyle and work habits, and, most importantly, they then agreed to wear an accelerometer—a device to measure their physical activity — over the course of several days.

Those data from the accelerometers provide a rare opportunity to nail down how much activity the typical American actually does.

They show that men or women who work in active jobs do more physical activity on weekdays than men or women working in sedentary jobs. That’s perhaps not surprising, but the NIH researchers suggest that it still matters because of an ongoing shift in the economy toward sedentary work.

The more surprising finding is the one that compares full-time workers to people who don’t work. The study shows that men with full-time jobs do more physical activity than healthy men without jobs. (“Healthy man, ” in this case, were those men who said their primary reason for being out of work was something other than health or disability.) In fact, even sedentary fulltime workers performed more weekday physical activity overall than the healthy non-workers

The results looked very different for women. Women in sedentary jobs did less physical activity on weekdays than their healthy non-working peers.

So what drives the gender (性别)difference? The study looks at the patterns, and unfortunately can’t provide too much detail about their causes. There could be many possible answers, including, perhaps, different abilities to pay for leisure time activities, or different attitudes about work and physical activity. It could also be that more non-working women than men are choosing to be at home running around full-time after the kids.

But the NIH researchers do find evidence, they write, to suggest that, whatever causes the difference, healthy non-working women “are replacing work with active pursuits whereas ” for some reason —“[non-working ]men generally are not.”

46. A sedentary job ( Para. 1 ) is one that involves ________.

A. staying seated a lot

B. intensive concentration

C. moving about a lot

D. superb skills

47. What is the function of the accelerometers in the study?

A. They record people’s physical activities.

B. They measure people’s workload.

C. They distinguish gender differences.

D. They push people to be more active.

48. What is a possible reason for non-working women to be physically active?

A. They are well-educated.

B. Their kids keep them busy.

C. They are open-minded.

D. Their husbands influence them.

49. The study tries to identify________.

A. the ongoing economy trend

B. evidence for gender differences

C. the American physical activity patterns

D. the relation between work and leisure

50. Who are the least physically active according to the study?

A. Men with sedentary jobs. B. Men with active jobs.

C. Healthy women with no jobs. D. Healthy men with no jobs.