ALCOHOLAnother poison of many young people is alcohol. Remember, alcohol is a drug. It can make you sick, and you can become addicted to it. It’s a very common form of drug abuse among teenagers. Don’t let anyone at a party pressure you into drinking if you don’t want to, especially if you’re legally under age. Alcohol is a drug. In fact it is a mild poison. It is absorbed quickly into the bloodstream, within 4 or 10 minutes of being drunk. Absorption is slower if there’s food in the stomach. Once inside the body it passes through the bloodstream to the liver, where poisons are digested. But the liver can only process 28 grams of pure alcohol each hour. This is a small amount – just over half a glass of beer. Anything else you drink is pumped round the body while it waits its turn to enter the liver. When alcohol reaches your brain, you may immediately feel more relaxed and light-hearted. You may feel you can do crazy things. But after two or three drinks, your actions are clumsy and your speech is slurred. If you over-drink, you might suffer from double vision and loss of balance, even fall unconscious, hangover.
4. Read the text and note down the examples, showing the effect of drugs on a human being.
DRUGS
In facts, all medicines are drugs. You take drugs for your headache or your asthma. But you need to remember that not all drugs are medicines. Alcohol is a drug, and nicotine is a drug. There are many drugs that do you no good at all. There’s nothing wrong with medicinal drugs if they’re used properly. The trouble is, some people use them wrongly and make themselves ill. Most of the drugs are illegal, but some are ordinary medical substances that people use in the wrong way. People take drugs because they think they make them feel better. Young people are often introduced to drug taking by their friends. Many users take drugs to escape from a life that may seem too hard to bear. Drugs may seem the only answer, but they are no answer at all. They simply make the problem worse. Depending on the type and strength of the drug, all drug-abusers are in danger of developing side effects. Drugs can bring on confusion and frightening hallucinations and cause unbalanced emotions or more serious mental disorders.
5. Read the text and discuss the questions:
1) What does the AIDS virus attack? 2) Does AIDS kill people? 3) Have people found a cure for AIDS? 4) How can the virus be passed on? 5) How can one avoid being infected?
AIDS AIDS is sickness that attacks the body’s natural system against disease. AIDS itself doesn’t kill, but because the body’s defense system is damaged, the patient has a reduced ability to fight off many other diseases, including flu or the common cold. So far there is no cure for AIDS. We know that AIDS is caused by a virus which invades healthy cells, including the white blood cells that are part of our defense system. The virus takes control of the healthy cells genetic material and forces the cell to make a copy of the virus. The cell then dies and the multiplied virus moves on to invade and kill other healthy cells. The AIDS virus can be passed on sexually or by sharing needles used to inject drugs. It also can be passed in blood products or from a pregnant woman with AIDS to her baby. Many stories about the spread of AIDS are false. One cannot get AIDS by working with someone who’s got it, or by going to the same school, or by touching objects belonging to or touched by an infected person. Nobody caring for an AIDS patient has developed AIDS and, since there is no cure for it at present, be as helpful and understanding as possible to those suffering from this terrible disease.
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