Questions 52 to 56 are based on the following passage.
There is nothing like the suggestion of a cancer risk to scare a parent, especially one of the overeducated, ecoconscious type. So you can imagine the reaction when a recent USA Today investigation of air quality around the nations schools singled out those in the smugly（自鸣得意的）green village of Berkeley, Calif., as being among the worst in the country. The citys public high school, as well as a number of daycare centers, preschools, elementary and middle schools, fell in the lowest 10%. Industrial pollution in our town had supposedly turned students into living science experiments breathing in a laboratorys worth of heavy metals like manganese, chromium and nickel each day. This in a city that requires school cafeterias to serve organic meals. Great, I thought, organic lunch, toxic campus.
Since December, when the report came out, the mayor, neighborhood activists（活跃分子）and various parentteacher associations have engaged in a fierce battle over its validity: over the guilt of the steelcasting factory on the western edge of town, over union jobs versus childrens health and over what, if anything, ought to be done. With all sides presenting their own experts armed with conflicting scientific studies, whom should parents believe? Is there truly a threat here, we asked one another as we dropped off our kids, and if so, how great is it? And how does it compare with the other, seemingly perpetual health scares we confront, like panic over lead in synthetic athletic fields? Rather than just another weird episode in the town that brought you protesting environmentalists, this latest drama is a trial for how todays parents perceive risk, how we try to keep our kids safe—whether its possible to keep them safe—in what feels like an increasingly threatening world. It raises the question of what, in our time, “safe” could even mean.
“Theres no way around the uncertainty,” says Kimberly Thompson, president of Kid Risk, a nonprofit group that studies childrens health. “That means your choices can matter, but it also means you arent going to know if they do.” A 2004 report in the journal Pediatrics explained that nervous parents have more to fear from fire, car accidents and drowning than from toxic chemical exposure. To which I say: Well, obviously. But such concrete hazards are beside the point. Its the dangers parents cant—and may never—quantify that occur all of sudden. Thats why Ive rid my cupboard of microwave food packed in bags coated with a potential cancercausing substance, but although Ive lived blocks from a major fault line(地质断层) for more than 12 years, I still havent bolted our bookcases to the living room wall.
【題組】53. What response did USA Todays report draw?
(A) A heated debate. (B) Popular support.
(C) Widespread panic. (D) Strong criticism.
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