Passage 5

When the Chinese began to develop their public health services in 1949, they decided that their main aim would be to prevent disease from occurring. One part of their public health programme was to teach the people simple health rules such as the importance of drinking pure water and of getting rid of household rubbish.

Chairman Mao’s war on flies, mosquitoes and rats may have been regarded by the rest of the world as a joke, but the fact is that it is difficult to find a housefly in China these days. As a result, it is now possible to control the spread of some of the diseases which twentyfive years ago they carried from house to house and from village to village.

Unlike the rest of the world, China now seems to have enough doctors. Neither the city nor the village hospitals seem to be overcrowded. The explanation is that medical care in China is provided by the ‘barefoot doctors’. Consequently, only the difficult cases find their way to the local hospitals and even fewer are passed on to the specialist hospitals for treatment.

The barefoot doctors seem to have caught the imagination of people in the west. But they are not doctors, nor do they generally go barefoot. They are simply health workers at the lowest level of the medical organisation.

1. In China most of the health services is provided by
(a) medical agencies
(b) barefoot doctors
(c) private medical practitioners
(d) doctors in hospitals
(e) None of these

2. The last para refers to the
(a) health workers
(b) doctors’ plight
(c) medical organisation
(d) doctors’ profession
(e) None of these

3. Barefoot doctors are
(a) doctors without hospitals
(b) lowest-level health workers
(c) doctors working in villages
(d) doctors who wear no footwear
(e) None of these

4. The main objective of the public health programme in China was to
(a) provide medicines to people
(b) remove rubbish
(c) teach people health rules
(d) stop people getting diseases
(e) None of these

5. The public health programme in China has been successful mainly because
(a) adequate hospitals were available.
(b) people cared for good health.
(c) the flies, the mosquitoes and the rats were eliminated.
(d) medicines for fatal diseases have been discovered.
(e) None of these

Go Back To Main Page