Section B
Directions: In this section, you are going to read a passage with ten statements
attached to it. Each statement contains information given in one of the
paragraphs. Identify the paragraph from which the information is derived.
You may choose a paragraph more than once. Each paragraph is marked with a
letter. Answer the questions by marking the corresponding letter on Answer
Sheet 2.
Finding the Right Home—and Contentment, Too
A. When your elderly relative needs to enter some sort of long-term care
facility—a moment few parents or children approach without fear—what you would
like is to have everything made clear.
B. Does assisted living really mark a great improvement over a nursing
home, or has the industry simply hired better interior designers? Are nursing
homes as bad as people fear, or is that an out-moded stereotype (固定看法)?
Can doing one's homework really steer families to the best places? It is
genuinely hard to know.
C. I am about to make things more complicated by suggesting that what
kind of facility an older person lives in may matter less than we have assumed.
And that the characteristics adult children look for when they begin the search
are not necessarily the things that make a difference to the people who are
going to move in. I am not talking about the quality of care, let me hastily
add. Nobody flourishes in a gloomy environment with irresponsible staff and
a poor safety record. But an accumulating body of research indicates that
some distinctions between one type of elder care and another have little real
bearing on how well residents do.
D. The most recent of these studies, published in The Journal of Applied
Gerontology, surveyed 150 Connecticut residents of assisted living, nursing
homes and smaller residential care homes (known in some states as board and
care homes or adult care homes). Researchers from the University of Connecticut
Health Center asked the residents a large number of questions about their
quality of life, emotional well-being and social interaction, as well as about
the quality of the facilities.
E. "We thought we would see differences based on the housing types," said
the lead author of the study, Julie Robison, an associate professor of medicine
at the university. A reasonable assumption—don't families struggle to avoid
nursing homes and suffer real guilt if they can't?
F. In the initial results, assisted living residents did paint the most
positive picture. They were less likely to report symptoms of depression than
those in the other facilities, for instance, and less likely to be bored or
lonely. They scored higher on social interaction.
G. But when the researchers plugged in a number of other variables, such
differences disappeared. It is not the housing type, they found, that creates
differences in residents' responses. "It is the characteristics of the
specific environment they are in, combined with their own personal
characteristics—how healthy they feel they are, their age and marital status,"
Dr. Robison explained. Whether residents felt involved in the decision to
move and how long they had lived there also proved significant.
H. An elderly person who describes herself as in poor health, therefore,
might be no less depressed in assisted living (even if her children preferred
it) than in a nursing home. A person who had input into where he would move
and has had time to adapt to it might do as well in a nursing home as in a
small residential care home, other factors being equal. It is an interaction
between the person and the place, not the sort of place in itself, that leads
to better or worse experiences. "You can't just say, Let's put this person
in a residential care home instead of a nursing home—she will be much better
off," Dr. Robison said. What matters, she added, "is a combination of what
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