hce_nthu
114年
英文
第 33 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.
Which of the following most closely captures what the author means by saying “the future will be a divided one” in the third paragraph?
- A Whereas a number of countries will be industrialized, other countries will not.
- B Whereas a number of industrialized countries will be able to deal with the problem of shrinking populations, other countries will be significantly affected by the labor shortage.
- C Whereas a number of industrialized countries will face shrinking populations, other countries will be affected by continued population growth with the attendant challenges of providing education, jobs, and medical care to an ever- increasing number of people.
- D Whereas a number of countries will be significantly affected by staggering social inequalities, other countries will suffer from overall scarcity.
- E Whereas in the developing world, environmental devastation will be caused principally by rampant population growth, in the developed world, it will be caused by rampant increases in consumption.
思路引導 VIP
請看第三段最後幾句。當作者說「未來將是分歧的（divided）」時，通常意味著不同群體之間出現了截然不同的走向。請在該句的前後文中找找看：作者將國家分成了哪兩大類？這兩類國家在「人口變化」的方向上，分別呈現出什麼樣相反的趨勢？
🤖
AI 詳解
AI 專屬家教
恭喜你精確地掌握了文章的脈絡！這題你選得非常漂亮，顯示你對於長篇文章的段落轉折與結論推導有著敏銳的觀察力。
預測未來的分歧趨勢
作者所謂「分歧的未來（a divided one）」，核心在於人口增長動向的兩極化。在第三段中，作者明確指出這種分歧體現在不同地區的差異：一方是面臨「人口萎縮（shrinking populations）」的工業化國家，如日本、德國等；另一方則是人口持續增長、並面臨教育與醫療資源挑戰的開發中地區。選項 (C) 完整地捕捉了這組對比關係，將文中的地理分布與社會挑戰進行了精準的轉化，完美解釋了何謂「分歧」。
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