新东方在线雅思网特为大家准备了雅思阅读练习题：一些小孩受到非人对待，供大家学习参考。雅思阅读备考阶段，同学们需要通过适量的练习题来检测自己的备考效果。希望以下内容能够对大家的雅思备考有所帮助!

　　[Time]Often it's the one teens inflict onthemselves. Why are so many American kids secretlyself-mutilating?

　　Vanessa's arms no longer show the damage sheonce did to them. That's saying something, giventhat the damage was considerable. The collegefreshman, 19, started with just a few scratches froma sharp piece of plastic. Later came the razor bladesand then the kitchen knives. After a time, she tookto wearing bracelets to cover her injuries; when that wasn't enough, she began cutting lessconspicuous parts of her body. "I was very creative," she says, with a smile.

　　Vanessa needn't be so clever anymore. In the past 18 months, she has cut herself onlyonce. She was pleased and surprised to find that she didn't enjoy it a bit.

　　For most people—and especially most parents—the idea that anyone would tolerate thesting of a razor blade or the cut of a knife, much less enjoy it, is unthinkable. But maybethey are just not paying attention. Vanessa is not a member of some remote fringe of theemotionally disabled but part of a growing population of boys and girls for whom cutting,burning or otherwise self-injuring is becoming a common—if mystifying--way of managingemotional pain.

　　Nobody knows how many cutters are at large, but psychologists have been conductingsurveys and gathering data from clinics, hospitals and private practices, and they are shockedby what they are finding. According to one study in the Journal of Abnormal Psychology, from14% to 39% of adolescents engage in self-mutilative behavior. That range is suspiciouslybroad, and other estimates have put the figure at just 6% or below. But with more than 70million American kids out there, that's still an awful lot of routine—and secret—self-mutilation. "Every clinician says it's increasing," reports psychologist Michael Hollander, a director at TwoBrattle Center in Cambridge, Mass., an outpatient clinic that treats cutters. "I've been practicingfor 30 years, and I think it's gone up dramatically."

　　The good news is that even as the population of cutters grows, so does the legion ofprofessionals working on new ways to unravel and treat the problem. The first step is tounderstand why kids do this to themselves.