Directions：In this part，you will have 15 minutes to go over the passage quickly and answer the questions an Answer Sheet 1. For question 1—7 choose the best answer from the four choices marked /A)，B)，C)and D). For questions 8—10 complete the sentences with the information given in the passage.
What Will the World Be Like in Fifty Years?
This week some top scientists, including Nobel Prize winners, gave their vision of how the world will look in 2056, from gas-powered cars to extraordinary health advances, John Ingham reports on what the world’s finest minds believe our futures will be.
For those of us lucky enough to live that long, 2056 will be a world of almost perpetual youth, where obesity is a remote memory and robots become our companions.
We will be rubbing shoulders with aliens and colonizing outer space. Better still, our descendants might at last live in a world at peace with itself.
The prediction is that we will have found a source of inexhaustible, safe, green energy, and that science will have killed off religion. If they are right we will have removed two of the main causes of war-our dependence on oil and religious prejudice.
Will we really, as today’s scientists claim, be able to live for ever or at least cheat the ageing process so that the average person lives to 150?
Of course, all these predictions come with a scientific health warning. Harvard professor Steven Pinker says: “This is an invitation to look foolish, as with the predictions of domed cities and nuclear-powered vacuum cleaners that were made 50 year ago.”
Living longer
Anthony Atala, director of the Wake Forest Institute in North Carolina, believes failing organs will be repaired by injecting cells into the body. They will naturally go straight to the injury and help heal it. A system of injections without needles could also slow the ageing process by using the same process to “tune” cells.
Bruce Lahn, professor of human genetics at the University of Chicago, anticipates the ability to produce “unlimited supplies” of transplantable human organs without the need for human donors. These organs would be grown in animals such as pigs. When a patient needed a new organ, such as a kidney, the surgeon would contact a commercial organ producer, give him the patient’s immunological profile and would then be sent a kidney with the correct tissue type.
These organs would be entirely composed of human cells, grown by introducing them into animal hosts, and allowing them to develop into an organ in place of the animal’s own. But Prof. Lahn believes that farmed brains would be “off limits”. He says: “Very few people would want to have their brains replaced by someone else’s and we probably don’t want to put a human brain in an animal body.”
Richard Miller, a professor at the University of Michigan, thinks scientist could develop “authentic anti-ageing drugs” by working out how cells in larger animals such as whales and human resist many forms of injuries. He says: “It is now routine, in laboratory mammals, to extend lifespan by about 40%. Turning on the same protective systems in people should, by 2056, create the first class of 100-year-olds who are as vigorous and productive as today’s people in their 60s”
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