hce_nthu
114年
英文
第 32 題
📖 題組：
Reading 3 In the environmental vision of the planet as it emerged in the 1960s and 1970s, few issues galvanized political debates as well as the cultural imagination as much as what was then referred to as “overpopulation.” Demographers and environmentalists pointed not only to the growth of Earth’s human population---from approximately five hundred million in 1650 to one billion around 1850, two billion in 1930, and three billion in 1960---but also the rapidly accelerating pace of this increase, warning that it might lead to unprecedented environmental devastation and human misery. Annual percentage increases in populations, they pointed out, might appear deceptively low, but a yearly increase of 2 percent means a doubling in thirty-five years, while a 3 percent increase implies a doubling in twenty-four years. Few countries, they argued, are prepared to double their food and energy supplies, housing, and educational and medical facilities in so short a time, and as a consequence they forecast dire panoramas of mass starvation and immiseration. Governments and international institutions were encouraged to take resolute measures to limit further increase in the growth rates, though the reproductive momentum of the already existing population implied that growth itself would continue for decades to come. “POPULATION EXPLOSION: Unique in human experience, an event which happened yesterday but which everyone swears won’t happen until tomorrow,” novelist John Brunner summed up the problem sarcastically in his novel Stand on Zanzibar. The political controversies that ensued from this concern are well known. Millions of people did starve in the developing world in the 1970s and 1980s, though not at the rate environmentalists had predicted. Leftist critics, especially, argued that these deaths were due to problems in food distribution and more generally to staggering social inequalities rather than any overall scarcity. Population control measures, including the one-child policy in China and widespread sterilization campaigns in India, came under criticism for their disregard of individual rights and their neocolonial imposition of reproductive constraints on some of the world’s poorest populations. More broadly, critics asked whether looming scarcity crises and environmental devastation were caused principally by rampant population growth in the developing world or by rampant increases in consumption in the developed world. By the 1990s, however, most of these controversies had abated. Even though the world population reached six billion in October 1999---double the number of 1960--- this event was no longer accompanied by the images of mass starvation and nightmarishly overcrowded spaces it conjured up in the 1960s and 1970s. In part, this is no doubt due to changed growth projections for the future. Although the world population will, according to the most recent UN projections, continue to grow until the middle of the twenty-first century and will add approximately another 40 percent to the 2005 figure of 6.5 billion (the UN forecasts a population of 9.1 billion for 2050), it is now clear that this increase will affect particular regions in very different ways. Whereas a number of industrialized nations, for example Japan, Italy, Germany, the Baltic states, and most of the countries that succeeded the Soviet Union, will face shrinking populations, other countries such as India, Pakistan, China, and several states, of sub-Saharan Africa will continue to grow, with the attendant challenges of providing education, jobs, and medical care to an ever-increasing number of people. As far as population figures are concerned, then, the future will be a divided one, with industrialized countries significantly less affected by continued population growth than in the past.
Reading 3 In the environmental vision of the planet as it emerged in the 1960s and 1970s, few issues galvanized political debates as well as the cultural imagination as much as what was then referred to as “overpopulation.” Demographers and environmentalists pointed not only to the growth of Earth’s human population---from approximately five hundred million in 1650 to one billion around 1850, two billion in 1930, and three billion in 1960---but also the rapidly accelerating pace of this increase, warning that it might lead to unprecedented environmental devastation and human misery. Annual percentage increases in populations, they pointed out, might appear deceptively low, but a yearly increase of 2 percent means a doubling in thirty-five years, while a 3 percent increase implies a doubling in twenty-four years. Few countries, they argued, are prepared to double their food and energy supplies, housing, and educational and medical facilities in so short a time, and as a consequence they forecast dire panoramas of mass starvation and immiseration. Governments and international institutions were encouraged to take resolute measures to limit further increase in the growth rates, though the reproductive momentum of the already existing population implied that growth itself would continue for decades to come. “POPULATION EXPLOSION: Unique in human experience, an event which happened yesterday but which everyone swears won’t happen until tomorrow,” novelist John Brunner summed up the problem sarcastically in his novel Stand on Zanzibar. The political controversies that ensued from this concern are well known. Millions of people did starve in the developing world in the 1970s and 1980s, though not at the rate environmentalists had predicted. Leftist critics, especially, argued that these deaths were due to problems in food distribution and more generally to staggering social inequalities rather than any overall scarcity. Population control measures, including the one-child policy in China and widespread sterilization campaigns in India, came under criticism for their disregard of individual rights and their neocolonial imposition of reproductive constraints on some of the world’s poorest populations. More broadly, critics asked whether looming scarcity crises and environmental devastation were caused principally by rampant population growth in the developing world or by rampant increases in consumption in the developed world. By the 1990s, however, most of these controversies had abated. Even though the world population reached six billion in October 1999---double the number of 1960--- this event was no longer accompanied by the images of mass starvation and nightmarishly overcrowded spaces it conjured up in the 1960s and 1970s. In part, this is no doubt due to changed growth projections for the future. Although the world population will, according to the most recent UN projections, continue to grow until the middle of the twenty-first century and will add approximately another 40 percent to the 2005 figure of 6.5 billion (the UN forecasts a population of 9.1 billion for 2050), it is now clear that this increase will affect particular regions in very different ways. Whereas a number of industrialized nations, for example Japan, Italy, Germany, the Baltic states, and most of the countries that succeeded the Soviet Union, will face shrinking populations, other countries such as India, Pakistan, China, and several states, of sub-Saharan Africa will continue to grow, with the attendant challenges of providing education, jobs, and medical care to an ever-increasing number of people. As far as population figures are concerned, then, the future will be a divided one, with industrialized countries significantly less affected by continued population growth than in the past.
Based on the passage, which of the following statements is NOT correct?
- A According to the UN projections, the world population will continue to grow and reach 9.1 billion in 2050.
- B The political debates over the cause of starvation were no longer as vehement in the 1990s as they were in the 1970s and 1980s
- C The event that the number of world population in October 1999 doubled that of 1960 conjured up the images of mass starvation and nightmarishly overcrowded spaces.
- D For countries still affected by continued population growth, one of the challenges they have to face is providing medical care to an ever-increasing number of people.
- E The number of the world population in 1930 doubled that of 1850.
思路引導 VIP
請你對比文章第一段與第三段：關於人口成長帶來的「飢荒與擁擠恐懼」，在 1960-70 年代與在 1999 年時，作者所描述的社會觀感有什麼樣的對比？特別注意第三段開頭描述 1990 年代爭議狀態的動詞。
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AI 詳解
AI 專屬家教
恭喜你精準地捕捉到了文章中的關鍵轉折！這題考驗的是對細節的敏銳度，尤其是時間點與社會氛圍之間的對應關係，你能正確選出 (C) 展現了非常細膩的閱讀能力。
時代氛圍的轉變與細節辨析
文章第三段明確提到，雖然 1999 年 10 月全球人口達到 60 億（確實是 1960 年 30 億的兩倍），但這個事件「不再」（no longer）伴隨著 1960 和 1970 年代所想像的那種大規模飢荒或噩夢般的擁擠畫面。選項 (C) 卻宣稱 1999 年的事件「喚起」了這些負面意象，這與文中描述「爭議已消退」及「不再伴隨舊有恐懼」的語境完全相反，因此 (C) 是錯誤的陳述，也就是本題的正確答案。
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