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Direction: There is one passage in this section. Read the passage and write a summary of it within 150 words.
Those who distrust pills will take satisfaction in recent news from America’s National Institute of Health. On January 18th the NIH announced the results of two studies of the effects of taking vitamin A and beta-carotene (which the body turns into vitamin A) pills, both widely believed to protect people against lung cancer. For pills taker, the news was bad.
In neither study did the pills live up to people’s expectations. In the mixed-sex testing, in fact, those who were given dummy pills that looked like the vitamin pills go on rather better — developing 28% fewer lung cancers — than those who took the real thing. Besides that, the death rate of the real vitamin takers was 17% higher from all causes and 26% higher from heart and blood-vessel diseases than that of the control group. All those showed no strong influence either way from taking vitamin pills.
Taken together, the two studies suggest that non-smokers have nothing to gain from adding vitamin A or beta-carotene pills to their diets. For smokers and people at high risk for other reasons their use may be dangerous. Much the same conclusion emerged from an earlier study published in 1994, of nearly 30,000 male smokers in Finland. Here, the men who took beta-carotene pills daily for between five and eight years developed 18% more lung cancers and had a death rate 8% higher than the controls.
With all this bad news, the cautious might be tempted to keep away from peaches, pumpkins, carrots and other natural sources of beta-carotene, as well as from pills. But they should not do so, in the opinion of Richard Klausner, director of the NIH’s National Cancer Institute.
Population studies, he noted, have linked high dietary intake of beta-carotene in vegetables and fruit to a reduced risk of cancer, and in particular lung cancer. That, after all, is what got people excited about the stuff in the first place. But food rich in beta-carotene would seem to have additional, as-yet-unknown elements that help discourage the abnormal cell growth characteristic of cancer. The absence of these extra elements is likely to explain the failure of the beta-carotene and vitamin A pills to provide the same protection.
【正确答案】：The NIH announced that studies showed the effects of taking vitamin A and beta-carotene pills didn’t live up to people’s expectations. The studies found that pill takers were more easily caught by lung caners and that the death rate of the takers is higher than that of the non-takers. The two studies also suggest that non-smokers have nothing to gain from adding vitamin A or beta-carotene pills to their diets, while for smokers and people at high risk for other reasons their use may be dangerous. An early study confirmed those findings.
However, people don’t need to keep away from vegetables and fruit which contain vitamin A. actually, population studies have linked high dietary intake of beta-carotene in vegetables and fruit to reduce risk of cancer and in particular lung cancer. Researchers speculate that it might be some extra elements in vegetables and fruit that help to take effect.