Naturally_Speaking_L_N_Shevyrdyaeva (Л.Н. Шевырдяева - Naturally Speaking & Listening), страница 14

● heavy drinkers

● pregnant women

● diabetics

● patients with CHD

● people with family history of alcoholism

● young people

● obese people

● women older than 50

Exercise 7. You are going to interview your fellow-students. Make up 10 questions about the key facts discussed in the article.

Exercise 8. Summarize all the information discussed in this unit and speak on the effects of alcohol on human organism.

Unit 13. Sex and Gender

A woman is only a woman, but a good cigar is a smoke.

Rudyard Kipling

Exercise 1. What do you know about the sexes?

1. What are the physiological differences between individuals of male and female gender? What organs and organ systems differ between males and females?

2. What mechanisms and when determine the sex of the future individual?

3. What are the functions of reproductive hormones (sex hormones)?

4. What are the secondary sexual characteristics?

5. Why do women generally live longer than men?

6. Do men and women really have different patterns of mental activity and emotions? Are they genetically or socially programmed?

Exercise 2. Read the text to check some of your answers in Exercise 1.

Why is life expectancy² longer for women than it is for men?

Bertrand Desjardins, a researcher in the demography department of the University of Montreal, explains.

Men dying sooner than women makes sense biologically: because 105 males are born for every 100 females, it would assure that there are about the same number of men and women at reproductive ages. But even though women showed a longer life expectancy in almost every human society in the last decade of the 20th century, the size of the advantage varied greatly. For example, in the U.S. life expectancy was 73.4 years for males and 80.1 years for females, a difference of 6.7 years, whereas in France it was 7.8 years and in the U.K., 5.3 years. The discrepancy was much greater in some countries, with the difference in Russia reaching more than 12 years, but in others, such as India (0.6 year) or Bangladesh (0.1 year), it was much less.

The diversity in worldwide longevity alone indicates that the difference in mortality between the sexes is not purely biological and that there are intervening social factors. The current range of situations actually reflects different stages of a three-part historical evolution. Women most probably have a biological advantage that allows them to live longer, but in the past--and in several places, still today--the status and life conditions of women nullified this benefit. Today, given the general progress in female life conditions, women have not only regained their biological advantage, but have gone much beyond it, both because they tend to engage in fewer behaviors that are bad for health than men do and because they better profit from current advances in health care and living conditions.

The biological advantage that women have is taken as a certainty, because the mortality of males is higher than that of females from the very outset of life: during the first year of life, in the absence of any outside influence which could differentiate mortality between the sexes, male mortality is 25 to 30 percent greater than is female mortality. The genetic advantage of females is evident. When a mutation of one of the genes of the X chromosome occurs, females have a second X to compensate, whereas all genes of the unique X chromosome of males express themselves, even if they are deleterious. More generally, the genetic difference between the sexes is associated with a better resistance to biological aging. Furthermore, female hormones and the role of women in reproduction have been linked to greater longevity. Estrogen, for example, facilitates the elimination of bad cholesterol and thus may offer some protection against heart disease; testosterone, on the other hand, has been linked to violence and risk taking. Finally, the female body has to make reserves to accommodate the needs of pregnancy and breast feeding; this ability has been associated with a greater ability to cope with overeating and eliminating excess food.

Even though many biological and genetic factors have been identified, their overall effect is impossible to measure, especially given the influence of social factors on mortality. The extraordinary economic and social progress, that has occurred since the 18th century, has been accompanied by a dramatic reduction of the social differences between men and women and of the burden of motherhood, which had previously negated women's biological advantage. But the recent mortality trends have gone much farther than the mere recovery of an original advantage, creating instead a new advantage of greater magnitude for women. Observations indicate that the growing excess male mortality in industrial countries could be explained by the rise of so-called "man-made diseases," which are more typically male. These include exposure to the hazards of the workplace in an industrial context, alcoholism, smoking and road accidents, which have indeed increased considerably throughout the 20th century.

But if these diseases are the only explanation for longer female life expectancy, why has the gap continued to grow even though male and female behavior and life conditions have been converging in recent years? Part of the paradox can certainly be explained by the fact that this convergence is not absolute: male smokers tend to smoke more cigarettes than female smokers do, and men drive more recklessly than female drivers do, for instance.

French demographer Jacques Vallin has long been monitoring longevity in general and sex differences in mortality in particular. He adds to the above an interesting explanation of women's current mortality advantage that could explain the more recent trends: the dramatic increase in excess male mortality emerged as an equally dramatic progress in the general health conditions of our societies was taking place. He thus argues that beyond the negative behavioral or environmental factors that affect men more than they do women, there could be very well be a more fundamental difference in lifestyles that allows women to better benefit from the general progress in health. For example, although women now participate massively in the work force, their roles remain different and their professional activities are, on average, less prejudicial to their health. In addition, women often relate to their bodies, their health and their lives in general in a much different way than men do. To caricature, women seek beauty, men seek strength and power; thus, a woman's body must remain young and healthy as long as possible, whereas a man's body must be submitted to risks and challenges from an early age. The result is that women, much more than men, are attentive to their bodies and their needs and often carry on deeper dialogs more easily with their doctors. Hence, women, being more inclined to take care of their bodies and to prolong their lives, may be better able to glean greater profit from modern medical and social advances by practicing activities that are healthier and better protect their bodies. In this context, women's biological advantage now appears relatively minor in the total mortality differences between the sexes.

Exercise 3. Are the following statements true or false, according to the text?

1. Equal numbers of boys and girls are born every year.

2. Different economies demonstrate great diversity in average life expectancy.

3. There are no social factors accounting for the difference in male and female longevity.

4. Y-chromosome gives men biological advantage and better survival chances.

5. Historically men have enjoyed a better social position than women.

6. Men are exposed to a greater number of risk factors than women.

7. Women make better use of medical services and modern progress in science.

Exercise 4. Sex Differences in the Brain.

Men and women display patterns of behavioral and cognitive differences that reflect varying hormonal influences on brain development. Before reading the next text guess if the following statements generally refer more to men or to women:

1. Men/Women, on average, have stronger verbal skills (especially in writing).

2. Men/Women generally are better at mentally manipulating objects.

3. Men/Women have better memory for events, words, objects, faces and activities.

4. Men/Women are better at performing certain quantitative tasks that rely on visual representations.

5. Men/Women can better recognize emotions and show higher levels of empathy.

Exercise 5. Read the following article to check some of your answers in Exercise 4.

Girl Brain, Boy Brain?

The two are not the same, but new work shows just how wrong it is to assume that all gender differences are “hardwired”

By Lise Eliot   

As MRI scanning grows ever more sophisticated, neuroscientists keep refining their search for male-female brain differences that will answer the age-old question, “Why can’t a woman think like a man?” (and vice-versa). Social cognition is one realm in which the search for brain sex differences should be especially fruitful. Females of all ages outperform males on tests requiring the recognition of emotion or relationships among other people. Sex differences in empathy emerge in infancy and persist throughout development, though the gap between adult women and men is larger than between girls and boys. The early appearance of any sex difference suggests it is innately programmed—selected for through evolution and fixed into our behavioral development through either prenatal hormone exposure or early gene expression differences. On the other hand, sex differences that grow larger through childhood are likely shaped by social learning, a consequence of the very different lifestyle, culture and training that boys and girls experience in every human society.

At first glance, studies of the brain seem to offer a way out of this age-old nature/nurture dilemma. Any difference in the structure or activation of male and female brains is indisputably biological. However, the assumption that such differences are also innate or “hardwired” is invalid, given all we’ve learned about the plasticity, or malleability of the brain. Simply put, experiences change our brains.

Recent research by Peg Nopoulos, Jessica Wood and colleagues at the University of Iowa illustrates just how difficult it is to untangle nature and nurture, even at the level of brain structure. A first study, published in March 2008 found that one subdivision of the ventral prefrontal cortex - an area involved in social cognition and interpersonal judgment, known as the straight gyrus (SG), - is proportionally larger in women, compared to men. (Men’s brains are about 10 percent larger than women’s, overall, so any comparison of specific brain regions must be scaled in proportion to this difference.) Wood and colleagues found the SG to be about 10 percent larger in the thirty women they studied, compared to thirty men. What’s more, they found that the size of the SG correlated with a widely-used test of social cognition, so that individuals (both male and female) who scored higher in interpersonal awareness also tended to have larger SGs.

In their article, Wood and colleagues speculate about the evolutionary basis for this sex difference. Perhaps, since women are the primary child-rearers, their brains have become programmed to develop a larger SG, to prepare them to be sensitive nurturers. Prenatal sex hormones are known to alter behavior and certain brain structures in other mammals. Perhaps such hormones—or sex-specific genes—may enhance the development of females’ SG (or dampen the development of males’) leading to inborn differences in social cognition.

The best way to test this hypothesis is to look at children. If the sex difference in the SG is present early in life, this strengthens the idea that it is innately programmed. Wood and Nopoulos therefore conducted a second study with colleague Vesna Murko, in which they measured the same frontal lobe areas in children between 7 and 17 years of age. But here the results were most unexpected: they found that the SG is actually larger in boys! What’s more, the same test of interpersonal awareness showed that skill in this area correlated with smaller SG, not larger, as in adults. The authors acknowledge that their findings are “complex,” and argue that the reversal between childhood and adulthood reflects the later maturation of boys’ brains, compared to girls. (Adolescents’ brains undergo a substantial “pruning” or reduction in gray matter volume during adolescence, which happens about two years earlier in girls, compared to boys.)