第十二篇
                       Walk a Quarter-Mile or Die
      If you can walk a quarter-mile, odds are you have at least six years of life left in you1, scientists say. And the faster you can do it, the longer you might live.
While2 walking is no guarantee of ____1____ or longevity, a new study found that the ____2____ of elderly people to do the quarter-mile3 was an “important determinant4” in ____3____ or not they’d be alive six years later and how much illness and disability they would ____4____. 
      “The ability to complete this walk was a ____5____ predictor of health outcomes,” said study leader Anne Newman of the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine. “In fact, we found that the people who could not complete the walk were at an extremely high risk of ____6____ disability and death.”
      Newman and colleagues ____7____ nearly 2,700 white and African-American men and women aged 70 to 79 to complete in non-running ____8____. All the participants were screened and determined to be in relatively good health, and they had all said they had previously walked that far with on problem5. However, only 86 percent of them ____9____. 
      The scientists then monitored the health and mortality of all participants for the ____10____ six years. “There was a big gap in health outcomes ____11____ people who could complete the longer walk and people who could not, with the latter6 being at an extremely high risk of ____12____ disabled or dying,” Newman said. “What was really surprising is that these people were not ____13____ how vulnerable they actually were.”
      Finishing times were found to be ____14____, too. Those who completed the walk but were among the slowest 25 percent faced three times greater risk of death than the ____15____folks.
 
1.       A) energy         B) health        C) wealth        D) luck

2.       A) ability         B) willingness    C) fondness      D) need

3.       A) how           B) if            C) whether      D) when

4.       A) predict         B) tell           C) cure         D) endure
 
5.       A) powerful       B) strange        C) happy        D) weak
 
6.       A) rare           B) earlier         C) later         D) frequent
 
7.       A) helped         B) recruited       C) ordered      D) forced
 
8.       A) activities       B) actions         C) races        D) events
 
9.       A) exercised       B) participated     C) agreed       D) finished
 
10.   A) other          B) next            C) more        D) past
 
11.   A) between        B) within          C) among       D) behind
 
12.   A) looking        B) becoming        C) appearing    D) seeming
 
13.   A) happy about     B) confident about   C) true of       D) aware of
 
14.   A) predictable      B) accidental        C) crucial      D) unimportant
 
15.   A) smarter         B) younger         C) cleverer      D) speedier