Language Lab, Science Faculty, University of Nice - Sophia Antipolis

Please read the following article and answer the questions.

Louis Pasteur said, "Wine is the most healthful and most hygienic of beverages," and Plato remarked, "No thing more excellent nor more valuable than wine was ever granted mankind by God." Modern scientific research supports this perception.
Some twenty years ago, in an ecological epidemiology study, it was shown that there was a population-based association between a reduction in deaths from heart disease and increased wine consumption. More recently, two researchers at INSERM in Lyon brought the issue to public attention with a similar study. They used WHO data to show that there is a high correlation between animal fat consumption and coronary heart disease (CHD) mortality. A few French cities, however, had very high fat consumption, yet low CHD mortality rates - thus the "French paradox". When they included wine consumption as a factor that affected CHD mortality, the researchers got a better correlation, with wine being a negative correlate. Other researchers at the University of California, San Diego, subsequently investigated comparable data and came to a similar conclusion: wine was one of the few dietary factors that correlated with reduced CHD mortality.
A Danish study indicates drinking wine at nearly twice the generally accepted moderate levels prolongs life and is healthier than beer or hard liquor consumption or abstinence. The first study to compare wine, beer and hard liquor, the Copenhagen Heart Study determined that drinking three to five glasses of wine daily can cut in half the risk of mortality from all causes.
The one-to-two glasses per day suggested as beneficial by other studies is likely to be due firstly to under-reporting of alcohol consumption, and secondly to the better health of wine drinkers, which thus lowers overall risk. Those who consumed one to two glasses daily had a twenty percent decrease in mortality risk. Wine drinking showed the same relation to risk of death from heart disease as to risk of death from all causes. "This study differs from other large-scale studies in that it did not find life-prolonging benefits from drinking other forms of alcohol and did not find health benefits beginning to diminish at above three glasses of wine per day," said E. Holmgren, director of research and education at the Wine Institute.
The findings were reported last week in The British Medical Journal by a research team led by Dr. M. Gronbaek of the Danish Epidemiology Science Center in Copenhagen, funded by the Danish National Board of Health.
The experiment involved 13,285 men and women (30 to 79) that were studied from '76 to '88. The researchers monitored gender, age, education, income, smoking and weight and eliminated former alcoholics from the study. The results strongly suggest that, in addition to the common effect of ethanol, wine possesses other distinct beneficial elements (antioxidants, tannins and other phelonic compounds) which may be responsible for the protective effect against heart disease and some cancers. Lastly, a major U.S. study has determined that the reduced risk of heart attacks among post-menopausal women who drink alcohol moderately may be due to increased estrogen levels. The researchers found that women who drank three to six glasses of wine, beer or standard-size mixed alcoholic drinks a week showed higher estrogen levels according to a study published in the current issue of the Journal of Alcoholism. One researcher said the explanation may lie in alcohol's ability to stimulate the body into changing androgen into estradiol, the same form of estrogen doctors prescribe to women after menopause to control bone loss and prevent heart disease.