【摘要】2013英语四六级在即，精品学习网小编在此为大家编辑了“2013英语六级阅读练习：孤独与健康”，供大家参考，希望对四六级考生有所帮助。祝大家取得理想的成绩!
The reason loneliness could be bad for your health
孤独会对你的健康不利的原因
SCIENCE has many uses, but it doesn't often produce handy pick-up lines. Recent work on thegenetics of disease, however, suggest a way of opening a conversation with that solitaryattractive stranger in a bar: loneliness can make you ill.
科学有很多用处，但是它通常不会给你顺口的搭讪理由。然而，近来对疾病遗传学的研究却给了我们一个在酒吧里跟某个孤单的吸引你的陌生人搭讪的理由：孤独会让你生病。
Lonely people, it seems, are at greater risk than the gregarious of developing illnesses associated with chronic inflammation, such as heart disease and certain cancers. According to a paper published last year in the Public Library of Science, Medicine, the effect on mortality of loneliness is comparable with that of smoking and drinking. It examined, and combined the results of, 148 previous studies that followed some 300,000 individuals for an average period of 7.5 years each, and controlled for factors such as age and pre-existing illness. It concluded that, over such a period, a gregarious person has a 50% better chance of surviving than a lonely one.
孤独的人跟爱交际的人相比，似乎患跟慢性炎症相关的疾病——如心脏病和某些癌症——的风险更大。据去年发表在《科学公共图书馆——医学》杂志上的一篇论文称，孤独对死亡率的影响跟抽烟和酗酒相当。文章仔细检查了148个先前的研究(这些研究跟踪观察了大约30万人，每人平均跟踪观察7年半)，并综合其结果，还控制了诸如年龄和已患疾病此类因素，最后下结论：超过这样一段时间，一个爱交际的人比一个孤独的人的生存率高50%。
Steven Cole of the University of California, Los Angeles, thinks he may know why this is so. He told the AAAS meeting in Washington, DC, about his work studying the expression of genes in lonely people. Dr Cole harvested samples of white blood cells from both lonely and gregariouspeople. He then analysed the activity of their genes, as measured by the production of asubstance called messenger RNA. This molecule carries instructions from the genes telling acel which proteins to make. The level of messenger RNA from most genes was the same in both types of people. There were several dozen genes, however, that were less active in the lonely, and several dozen others that were more active. Moreover, both the less active and the more active gene types came from a small number of functional groups.