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选修七 Unit 3 高考提能练 阅读理解·组块专练——练速度 (限时：35分钟) Ⅰ.阅读理解 A (2016·太原市第二学段测评)Companies can save millions in healthcare costs simply by encouraging their employees to exercise a little bit.Researchers report that obese employees have higher healthcare costs, but they can lower those expenses by exercising just a couple of times a week — without even losing any weight. Feifei Wang and his colleagues at the University of Michigan studied 23,500 workers at General Motors.They estimated that getting the most obese workers to exercise would have saved about $790,000 a year, or about 1.5 percent of healthcare costs for the whole group.Companywide, the potential savings could reach $7.1 million per year, according to their report published in Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine. Of the whole group of workers, about 30 percent were of normal weight, 45 percent were overweight, and 25 percent were obese. Annual healthcare costs averaged $2,200 for normal weight, $2,400 for the overweight, and $2,700 for obese employees. But among workers who did no exercise, healthcare costs went up by at least $100 a year, and were $3,000 a year for obese employees who were sedentary (久坐的)． But adding two or more days of light exercise — at least 20 minutes of exercise or work hard enough to increase heart rate and breathing — lowered costs by on average $500 per employee a year, the researchers found. “This indicates that physical activity behavior could lessen at least some of the negative effects of excess body fat, and in consequence, help lower the increasing healthcare costs，” Wang and his colleagues wrote. | 
