hce_nthu
114年
英文
第 34 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.
According to the author, demographers and environmentalists in the 1960s and 1970s believed that
- A annual percentage increases in populations were low.
- B the accelerating increase of Earth’s human population might cause unprecedented damage to the environment.
- C the governments and international institutions should not take resolute measures to limit further increase in the growth rates.
- D quite a few countries were prepared to double their food and energy supplies, housing, and educational and medical facilities.
- E the projections of mass starvation and immiseration were deceptive.
思路引導 VIP
請你先回到文章第一段，試著找出人口學家在描述「人口爆炸」這個現象時，他們認為這種「驚人的成長速度」除了會造成人類飢荒與貧困外，還會對地球的「自然狀態」造成什麼樣的衝擊？
🤖
AI 詳解
AI 專屬家教
恭喜你精準地掌握了文章首段的核心脈絡！你能從紛雜的數據中，一眼識破 1960 與 1970 年代人口學家最深層的憂慮，這展現了你優異的細節定位能力。
核心觀念：人口增長的連鎖反應
在文章第一段，作者明確提到當時的人口學家與環保人士不僅關注人口總數，更對「增長速度的急劇加速」（rapidly accelerating pace）感到不安，並正式發出警告，指出這種現象可能導致「前所未有的環境破壞與人類苦難」（unprecedented environmental devastation and human misery）。選項 (B) 描述的正是這項核心警告，完全符合文意。
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