OG9 阅读 Q48

Choice A is the best answer. In the last paragraph of Passage 2, the author expresses reservations regarding teixobactin. One of these reservations is that the drug "now faces the long haul of clinical trials" before teixobactin can be made available for consumers. These clinical trials will be used to discover "what dose you can safely give the patient . . . if it cures infections, and . . . to compare its efficacy to that of 'standard of care treatment,'" and are "going to take five years and £500 million." Thus, the author uses the phrase "five years and £500 million" primarily to emphasize the scale of the effort needed to make teixobactin available for consumer use.
Choices B, C, and D are incorrect because the author of Passage 2 uses the phrase "five years and £500 million" as a reference to the time and financial commitment that will be required to make teixobactin available to the public. That being the case, the phrase doesn't imply criticism of the level of funding that the government has committed to teixobactin development (choice B), address the amount of time and money that has already been spent researching teixobactin (choice C), or compare the amount of money spent developing teixobactin with the amount spent developing other antibiotics (choice D).