英语4阅读理解.doc

Passage One Questions 57 to 61 are based on the following passage. Most people with allergies consider them a nuisance at best while more serious cases can be life-threatening, the scientists now claim that they have an upside. Hay fever and eczema(湿疹) could be your body’s defense against cancer. Allergy symptoms, like sneezing or a runny nose, get rid of foreign particles in the air, which may be capable of causing cancer, the researchers say. They may also act as a warning that alerts us to know when there are damaging substances in the air that should be avoided. In fact, lead researchers Paul Sherman, from Cornell University in New York, and his team warned that taking drugs to suppress allergies could be a bad idea. Experts have long suspected that allergies may be linked to cancer, but until now the evidence has been unconvincing. Some studies found that cancer patients were less likely to have allergies, while other trials found the opposite. In the latest study, Sherman and his team examined the results of almost 650 studies performed over the past five decades. Overall, cancer patients had fewer allergies than people free of cancer, they reported. They association was the strongest for people with cancers that come into contact with materials outside the body, such as skin cancer and cancer of throat. Likewise, only allergies with symptoms linked to the outside of the body, such as eczema, hay fever and animal and food allergies, were less common in people with cancer. Some cancers, like breast cancer, which are isolated from the external environment, showed much weaker associations, the scientists reported. Given the concerning results, Sherman and his team call for studies to test whether turning off the body’s allergy reactions with some medicines will actually do more harm than good. They told The Quarterly Review of Biology, “We hope that our work will stimulate reconsideration of the prevailing view that allergies are merely disorders of the