難関大向け｜英語長文問題122（医療）733語＋和訳・解答解説

When people speak of progress in medicine, longer life is often treated as one of its clearest achievements. Vaccines, antibiotics, safer surgery, improved diagnosis, and better treatment for chronic disease have all helped many people survive illnesses that once shortened life. From this perspective, medical technology appears to have expanded the boundaries of human possibility. Yet the connection between medical progress and a longer life is less simple than it first seems. If technology enables people to live longer, the important question is not merely how many years are added, but what kind of life those added years make possible.

One reason this question matters is that medical technology often changes the timing of illness rather than eliminating it. A person who survives a serious disease at sixty may live for many more years, but those years may involve repeated treatment, reduced physical strength, or dependence on others. This does not mean that the treatment has failed. On the contrary, survival may be deeply valuable. However, the success of medicine cannot be measured only by whether death is delayed. A longer life may be a major benefit when additional years allow a person to remain active, maintain relationships, or pursue meaningful goals; it may be a more complicated achievement when those years are dominated by medical care itself.

This distinction becomes clearer when we consider how technology reshapes the meaning of an ordinary life course. In earlier periods, certain conditions were accepted as unavoidable limits of aging. Today, devices, medicines, and surgical procedures can sometimes restore functions that were once thought permanently lost. As a result, aging is increasingly treated not simply as a natural process but as a series of problems that can be managed. This shift has advantages, because people need not accept suffering merely because it is common. At the same time, it can create a new expectation: if a treatment exists, people may feel that they ought to use it. The availability of medical options can therefore expand freedom while also making decisions more difficult. A choice that appears purely medical may involve questions about personal identity, family responsibility, and the amount of risk or discomfort a person is willing to accept.

The problem is not only personal. When more people live into advanced age, families, hospitals, and communities must decide how to support lives that medicine has helped prolong. A new treatment may be highly effective for an individual patient, yet widespread use can require large amounts of money, professional labor, and long-term care. This does not make the treatment undesirable, but it shows why medical progress cannot be judged in isolation from the systems around it. A society that develops powerful technologies without also improving rehabilitation, nursing care, housing, and social support may extend life without fully supporting the people whose lives have been extended. Moreover, the effects may appear gradually. A treatment that saves one patient today may seem like a private success, while thousands of similar successes can eventually alter the age structure of an entire population and create needs that no hospital can address alone.

There is also a danger in assuming that every increase in average lifespan reflects equal progress. Medical advances may exist before they are easily available to everyone. People who can reach specialized hospitals, understand complex medical information, or afford continuing care may benefit sooner and more fully than others. In that case, technology can raise the general level of health while also widening differences between groups. The central issue, then, is not whether innovation should continue, but how its benefits are distributed and how decisions about its use are made. Technology may increase the number of possible medical choices, but possibility alone does not guarantee fairness or wisdom.

For this reason, the deepest achievement of medical technology may not be simply that it adds years to life. Its value depends on whether those years can be lived with a reasonable degree of independence, connection, and purpose, and whether the benefits of innovation can be shared without placing impossible burdens on individuals or society. This does not require rejecting treatments that prolong life, nor does it mean that quality of life can be measured by a single standard. Rather, it suggests that progress in medicine should be understood as a broader task: not only extending biological survival, but creating the conditions in which longer lives can remain humanly meaningful.

Q1. What concern does the fifth paragraph raise about medical innovation?

1. Medical advances may improve overall health while deepening existing social inequalities.
2. New treatments become socially beneficial once their clinical effectiveness is established.
3. Unequal access matters mainly because innovation develops too slowly for patients.
4. Fair medical systems require reducing the number of available treatment choices.

Q2. What does the third paragraph suggest about expanding medical possibilities?

1. Greater medical choice can increase freedom while complicating personal decisions.
2. Treating aging medically mainly allows people to avoid difficult family obligations.
3. Modern treatments have largely replaced aging with manageable temporary conditions.
4. People usually reject available treatments when risks remain personally uncertain.

Q3. Which statement is NOT supported by the passage?

1. Surviving illness longer does not necessarily mean living those years independently.
2. Longer lives should be evaluated by more than added years alone.
3. Expanding treatment options generally reduces pressure on patients making decisions.
4. Individual medical successes can eventually create broader needs for society.