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  3. The "demographic winter" is coming. So warns a new documentary of the same name. What is the demographic winter? The phrase, acc

The "demographic winter" is coming. So warns a new documentary of the same name. What is the demographic winter? The phrase, acc

admin2015-09-30  53
问题     The "demographic winter" is coming. So warns a new documentary of the same name. What is the demographic winter? The phrase, according to the film’s promotional materials, "denotes the worldwide decline in birthrates, and what that portends".
    I doubt that the "demographic winter" portends economic collapse or social deterioration, but let us set that aside, and instead ask why people are choosing to have fewer children? After all, voluntary childlessness seems to violate the Darwinian premise that our genes dispose us, like all other creatures, to try to reproduce.
    Demographic Winter asserts that "every aspect of modernity works against family life and in favor of singleness and small families or voluntary childlessness". And surely they are right. Modern societies offer people many other satisfactions and choices outside of the family. In particular women find that their time becomes more highly valued in occupations outside the home. There are no iron laws of demography)but one that comes pretty close is that the more educated women are, the fewer children they tend to have. The most profound event of the 20th century may have been the sexual revolution’s drive toward gender equality, enabled by modern contraception. Unlike other creatures, people can have the fun of sex without the side effect of parenthood.
    So, modernity essentially transforms children from capital goods that produce family income into consumption items to be enjoyed for their own sakes, more akin to sculptures, paintings, or theatre. But that’s just the problem—according to happiness researchers, people don’t really enjoy rearing children.
    "Economists have modeled the impact of many variables on people’s overall happiness and have consistently found that children have only a small impact. A small negative impact," reports Harvard psychologist and happiness researcher Daniel Gilbert. "Indeed, looking after the kids appears to be only slightly more pleasant than doing housework," asserts Gilbert in his best selling, Stumbling on Happiness.
    Gilbert suggests that people claim their kids are their chief source of happiness largely because it’s what they are expected to say. In addition, Gilbert observes that the more people pay for an item, the more highly they tend to value it and children are expensive, even if you don’t throw in piano lessons, soccer camps, and college tuitions. Gilbert further notes that the more children people have, the less happy they tend to be. Since that is the case, it is not surprising that people are choosing to have fewer children.
According to the text, the "demographic winter" means ______,
选项 A、the inevitable collapse of economy
B、the deterioration of human society
C、the violation of Darwinian theory
D、the decline of world population
答案D
解析 根据第一段最后一句“The phrase…denotes the worldwide decline in birthrates…”，D应为答案。
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