0% found this document useful (0 votes)
22 views4 pages

CER

Uploaded by

ramazonxamirov
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
Available Formats
Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
0% found this document useful (0 votes)
22 views4 pages

CER

Uploaded by

ramazonxamirov
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
Available Formats
Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
You are on page 1/ 4

READING PASSAGE 2

You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 14-26, which are based on Reading passage
2 on page 9 and 13.

Questions 14-19

Reading passage 2 has six paragraphs, A-F.

Choose correct heading for each paragraph from the list of headings below.

Write the correct number, i-vii, in boxes 14-19 on your answer sheet.

List of Headings

i Echoes of caution.

ii An obvious example.

iii The hidden cost of plenty.

iv How iron becomes harmful.

v Unseen cost of care.

vi The need to strike a balance.

vii Much of what could cause heart illness

14 Paragraph A

15 Paragraph B

16 Paragraph C

17 Paragraph D

18 Paragraph E

19 Paragraph F
CEREAL KILLER

You could be consuming far too much iron. Liz Bestic investigates

A. Next time you are in a supermarket, take a closer look at the bread you buy or your cereal
packet – you might be surprised to see how many of these staples are fortified with iron.
In fact, cereal products make up a whopping 45 per cent of our average daily iron intake.
That may seem like a good thing, if it wards off iron deficiency and anaemia. But evidence
is emerging that decades of fortifying food with iron and regularly popping supplements
could be leading people to ingest more iron than they need. While the effects of this
overload are still up for debate, some scientists believe that it could be damaging our
health – and the prevalence of diseases like diabetes and heart disease could be a symptom
of this excess.

B. What’s more, too much iron seems to be a source of cancer-causing free radicals. 'Iron
overload degrades the chemical structure of DNA, predisposing us to everything from heart
disease and stroke to diabetes and obesity,' says Leo Zacharski at Dartmouth-
Hitchcock Medical Center in Lebanon, New Hampshire. 'It’s a far stronger risk factor
than smoking for all sorts of clinical disorders. The primary use of iron in the body is in
haemoglobin proteins, the part of red blood cells which carry oxygen to tissues. If you don’t
have enough iron in your body, because there’s not enough in your diet or you are not
absorbing enough from your food, you might have shortness of breath, fatigue, and
cognitive and immune problems. The most severe form of iron deficiency anaemia,
affects 2 billion people worldwide, especially those in developing countries. It is also
common among pregnant women.

C. The issue came to the fore in Europe and the US during the second world war when
rationing left large swathes of the population malnourished. The response of governments
was to increase the iron content in staples like flour and cereals, to make sure people got
enough in their diets. The policy was widely extended to infant formula, and since the
1970s, pregnant women in the US have also been prescribed iron supplements. Today,
many of us buy these over the counter. Forty per cent of Americans take supplements
which contain iron, often unaware that many of these contain more than twice the amount
of iron recommended for an entire day.

D. At that time, though, not everyone was convinced of the benefits of boosting the amount
of iron in the diet. Iron deficiency anaemia is now rare in the West, but might we be getting
too much of a good thing? More than 30 years ago, Jerome Sullivan, then a researcher at
the University of South Florida in Tampa, was puzzled by the fact that women don’t tend
to suffer from heart attacks until after the menopause, during their late 40s or early 50s,
whereas rates in men rise during their 30s. Today, concerns are growing that
population wide fortification policies have been overzealous, supporting what some
physicians argued at the time. 'In the US it was not the medical doctors who pressed for
supplementation, but nutritionists,' says Andrew Ghio, a medical officer at the US
Environmental Protection Agency in Washington DC. 'The physicians suggested using iron
in a select group of patients who are iron deficient and that there was no need to provide
iron on a population-wide basis.' They might have been on to something.
E. One of today’s main proponents of the iron hypothesis is Douglas Kell at the University of
Manchester, UK. He reviewed more than 2000 scientific papers examining iron and disease
and concluded that iron overload contributes to a host of today’s most common illnesses
(BMC Medical Genomics, DOI: 10.1186/1755-8794-2-2). Why might this be? It could
be because even though iron is essential to life, it is also toxic. To make it less harmful,
most of the iron we absorb from food gets bound to proteins, mostly those involved in
the transport of oxygen, such as haemoglobin. Excess iron gets stored in a protein called
ferritin, which is especially abundant in the liver, spleen and bone marro w. Kell suggests
that the problems arise when this system goes wrong. As long as the iron remains locked
up with these proteins, there’s no problem, but if it is released then iron begins to behave
very badly indeed. This 'free iron' is dangerous because it reacts with the everyday
products of cell metabolism to produce highly reactive molecules known as free radicals.
These can wreak havoc in the body, damaging parts of the cell they come into contact with,
including DNA.

F. Some of the strongest evidence for the damaging effects of free iron comes from people
with a genetic disorder called haemochromatosis. They absorb too much iron from their
food, because the condition disrupts the signalling of a hormone called hepcidin. The
hormone usually stops the gut absorbing excess iron and makes sure that when immune
cells known as macrophages digest old red blood cells, the iron stays locked inside the
macrophages and out of harm’s way. In people with haemochromatosis, macrophages and
cells that line the gut dump iron into the circulation. And between 30 and 60 per cent of
them develop type 2 diabetes.

Questions 20-23

Do the following statements agree with the views of the writer in Reading passage 2?

In boxes 20-23 on your answer sheet, write

YES if the statement agrees with the views of the writer


NO if the statement contradicts the views of the writer
NOT GIVEN if it is impossible to say what the writer thinks about this

20. Jerome Sullivan discovered that iron deficiency is the primary cause of heart attacks
in men during their 30s.

21. Concerns about excessive iron fortification were raised more than 30 years ago by
some US nutritionists.

22. Iron deficiency anemia is not a widespread health issue in Western countries any
more.

23. According to Ghio, doctors were suggested to prescribe iron to a limited group of
people who had iron deficiency at that time.
Questions 24-26

Complete the sentence below.

Choose NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS from the passage for each answer.

Write your answers in boxes 24-26 on your answer sheet.

24 When one's diet is low in iron or they have trouble ....... it, this can lead to various
physical and mental issues.

25 Fortification was started as a measure to tackle iron deficiency after the Second World
War; it was applied even to .…. as mothers gave sufficient levels of it in their body.

26 In fact, almost half the population in the Americas should reduce their intake of iron
by ……as much

You might also like

pFad - Phonifier reborn

Pfad - The Proxy pFad of © 2024 Garber Painting. All rights reserved.

Note: This service is not intended for secure transactions such as banking, social media, email, or purchasing. Use at your own risk. We assume no liability whatsoever for broken pages.


Alternative Proxies:

Alternative Proxy

pFad Proxy

pFad v3 Proxy

pFad v4 Proxy