Passage Three
A distressing childhood can lead to heart disease.
What about current stresses— Longer workouts, threats of layoffs, collapsing pension funds?
A study last year in the Lance examined more than 11,000 heart attack suffers from 52 countries.
It found that in the year before their heart attacks, patients had been under significantly more strains than some 30,000 healthy control subjects.
Those strains came from work, family, financial troubles, depression in other causes.
"Each of these factors individually was associated with increased risk," says Doctor Salim Yussef,
Professor of medicine and candidates McMaster University and senior investigator on the study.
Together, they accounted for 30% to overall heart attack risk.
But people respond differently to high-pressure work situations, whether it produces hard problems seems to depend on whether you have a sensitive control over life or live at the mercy of circumstances and superiors.
That was experiences of Johna Connell, a Rockford Illinois laboratory manager, who suffered his first heart attack in 1996 at the age of 56.
In the two years before, his mother and two of his children had suffered serious illnesses, and his job had been changed in a re-organization.
"My life seemed completely out of control," he says, "I had no idea where I would end up."
He ended up in hospital due to a block in his artery.
Two months later, he had a triple bypass surgery.
The second heart attack when he was 58, left his doctor shaking his head.
"There's nothing more we can do for you," doctors told him.
Questions 23 to 25 are based on the passage you have just heard.
Question 23. What does the passage mainly discuss?
Question 24. What do we learn about Johna Connell’s family?
Question 25. What did Johna Connell’s doctors tell him when he had a second heart attack?