高中英语阅读理解试题
NEW DELHI-Just a few years ago. Mala was a typical middle-class Indian housewife. She cooked,cleaned and looked after her two small children.
Last year, her life took a tragic turn. Her husband died of AIDS; she was found out HIV-positive（爱滋病病毒检验呈阳性反应） and her mother-in-law took her children away from her, saying they would get the disease. “When friends dropped for a visit, she would introduce me, saying, ‘She is my son’s widow. She has AIDS,’”said Mala. AIDS is now described as “explosive(炸药)“ around the world. A study of a hospital in the port city of Durban in South Africa, where the world’s biggest and Africa’s first AIDS conference opened last Sunday, found that almost half the beds in medical wards(病房) were occupied by AIDS patients.
South Africa has one of the world’s fastest growing HIV infections(传染), with 1,700 people infected daily, adding to the 4.3 million, or 10 percent of its population, living with HIV. Until now, Asia has been more successful in holding the AIDS virus(病毒) than Africa, where the disease has killed about 12 million people .
AIDS is now threatening to surround many of Asia’s poverty-stricken countries.Countries in Asia, such as Cambodia, and Thailand, have HIV infection speeds over 1 percent. But the low speeds hide huge numbers of affected people,because of the population base.
In India, for example, 3.7 million are infected, more than in any other country except South Africa. In China, an estimated 500,000 people, mainly drug users, live with HIV/AIDS. Gordon Alexander, a senio advisor for UN AIDS in India, estimates (估计) that the number hit by AIDS in Asia will climb about eight million over the next five years from about six million.
In many Asian countries, the battle against HIV is a social and cultural one against public discussion of sexual health put a nationwide