Unit 2 Poems Ⅰ 阅读理解 (2018·成都高中毕业班诊断) Flaubert had it that “one way of tolerating existence is to lose oneself in literature as in an unending party”. It turns out that reading doesn’t only help us to tolerate existence, but actually lengthens it. A recent study by Yale University researchers, published online in the journal Social Science & Medicine, concluded that “book readers experienced a 20 percent reduction in the risk of death over the 12 years of followup compared to nonreaders”． The data was obtained from the study sponsored by the National Institute on Aging. The study looked at 3，635 subjects, all older than 50, whom the researchers divided into three groups：those who didn’t read books, those who read up to hours a week and those who read more than hours a week. The findings were remarkable：on average, book readers survived almost two years longer than those who didn’t crack open a book. The more the subjects read, the longer they lived, but as little as 30 minutes a day was still beneficial in terms of survival. Accounting for factors such as education level, income and health status, the study found that those who read more than hours weekly were 23 percent less likely to die during that 12year period. Those who read up to hours—an average of a half hour a
