2018医学考博英语阅读理解文章精析：社会地位与身心健康

　　Science and technology

　　科学技术

　　Social status and health

　　社会地位与健康

　　Misery index

　　贫困指数

　　Low social status is bad for your health. Biologists are starting to understand why

　　社会地位低不利于健康，生物学家揭秘

　　ONCE upon a time the overstressed executive bellowing orders into a telephone, cancelling meetings, staying late at the office and dying of a heart attack was a stereotype of modernity. That was before the Whitehall studies, a series of investigations of British civil servants begun in the 1960s. These studies found that the truth is precisely the opposite.

　　曾今，人们对现代化的一个根深蒂固的印象是，领导们在巨大压力的折磨之下，对着电话狂吼，下达命令，取消会议，待在办公室到很晚，最后死于心脏病。可是，自 1960 年代开始的英国白厅对英国政治家们展开的一系列调查之后，这种印象开始改变，因为调查发现事实却完全不是那么回事。

　　Those at the top of the pecking order actually have the least stressful and most healthy lives. Cardiac arrest—and, indeed, early death from any cause—is the prerogative of underlings.

　　实际上处于社会高层的人们承受的压力最小，生活最健康。心跳骤停——而且，确实是，不管是出于什么原因的早死——那都是做下属的才有的事。

　　Such results have since been confirmed many times, both in human societies and in other primate species with strong social hierarchies. But whereas the pattern is well-understood, the biological mechanisms underlying it are not.

　　在人类社会，还有等级严格的其他的灵长类物种中，都已多次验证这种结果的正确性。但是，虽然这种模式很容易理解，潜在的生物学机制却并不这么认为。

　　A study just published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, however, sheds some light on the matter. In it, a group of researchers led by Jenny Tung and Yoav Gilad at the University of Chicago looked at the effects of status on rhesus macaques.

　　杂志《国家科学院》最新出版的专题里，对此现象有相关阐述。专题里，詹妮东和要吉拉德领导的研究小组在芝加哥大学，研究地位之于恒河猴的影响。

　　Experience has shown that these monkeys display the simian equivalent of the Whitehall studies' findings. The high risk of disease among those at the bottom of the heap in both cases suggests that biochemical responses to low status affect a creature's immune system. Those responses must, in turn, depend on changes in the way the creatures' genes are expressed.

　　实验经过表明，这些猴子所表现出来的是英国白厅研究发现的猴子版本。社会地位低的患病风险高，这既适用于人类界也同样适用于猴子。这暗示了社会地位低的物种的生物化学反应影响其免疫系统。反过来，这种生物化学反应又取决于物种生物基因的变化方式。

　　To investigate this phenomenon means manipulating social hierarchies, but that would be hard(and probably unethical) if it were done to human beings. You can, however, do it to monkeys, and the researchers did.

　　若要调查这种现象，那就意味着需要控制社会等级，在人类身上进行，很困难。但是，你可以在猴子身上做实验，而且研究人员也是这么做的。