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  3. Our trouble lies in a simple confusion, one to which economists have been prone since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution

Our trouble lies in a simple confusion, one to which economists have been prone since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution

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问题    Our trouble lies in a simple confusion, one to which economists have been prone since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. Growth and ecology operate by different rules. Economists tend to assume that every problem of scarcity can be solved by substitution, by replacing tuna with tilapia, without factoring in the long-term environmental implications of either. But whereas economies might expand, ecosystems do not. They change — pine gives way to oak, coyotes arrive in New England — and they reproduce themselves, but they do not increase in extent or abundance year after year. Most economists think of scarcity as a labor problem, imagining that only energy and technology place limits on production. To harvest more wood, build a better chain saw; to pump more oil, drill more wells; to get more food, invent pest-resistant plants.
   That logic thrived on new frontiers and more intensive production, and it held off the prophets of scarcity — from Thomas Robert Malthus to Paul Ehrlich — whose predictions of famine and shortage have not come to pass. The Agricultural Revolution that began in seventeenth-century England radically increased the amount of food that could be grown on an acre of land, and the same happened in the 1960s and 1970s, when fertilizer and hybridized seeds arrived in India and Mexico. But the picture looks entirely different when we change the scale. Industrial society is roughly 250 years old; make the last ten thousand years equal to twenty-four hours, and we have been producing consumer goods and CO2 for only the last thirty-six minutes. Do the same for the past 1 million years of human evolution, and everything from the steam engine to the search engine fits into the past twenty-one seconds. If we are not careful, hunting and gathering will look like a far more successful strategy of survival than economic growth. The latter has changed so much about the earth and human societies in so little time that it makes more sense to be cautious than triumphant.
   Although food scarcity, when it occurs, is a localized problem, other kinds of scarcity are already here. Groundwater is alarmingly low in regions all over the world, but the most immediate threat to growth is surely petroleum.
The purpose of mentioning the search engine is to show______.
选项 A、the high speed of modern machines
B、technological progress
C、popular interest in the Internet
D、the economic impact of information technology
答案B
解析 本题是推理题，考查考生对第二段中倒数第三句的理解：如果将人类进化的这一百万年看作24小时的话，那么从蒸汽机到搜索引擎的这段发展也就仅仅为21秒。
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