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  3. As everyone knows, there are far too many people in the word. Or at least, there soon will be too many people, because the rate

As everyone knows, there are far too many people in the word. Or at least, there soon will be too many people, because the rate

admin2019-05-26  69
问题     As everyone knows, there are far too many people in the word. Or at least, there soon will be too many people, because the rate of population increase is running out of control. We are, as they say, breeding like rabbits, and rabbits are widely recognized as destructive animals. People are possibly the most serious of all pollutants. We hear this so often, from such distinguished persons, that it must be true. So we accept it.
    The arithmetic tells its own story and never better than in the words of Paul Ehrlich, whose Population Bomb drew the matter to our attention many years ago. " Let’ s examine what might happen on the absurd assumption that the population continued to double every 37 years into the indefinite future. If growth continued at that rate for about 900 years, there would be some 60,000,000, 000,000,000 people on the face of the earth. Sixty million billion people. This is about 100 persons for each square yard of the Earth’ s surface, land and sea. " Images were generated in which the entire visible universe consisted of a solid mass of human bodies.
    It is not really the fault of us western Europeans, Australians and North Americans. It is not in our countries that the increase is taking place. Growth is concentrated in the less industrialized countries, among the poor. The people of Whom we have, or will have, too many are poor, many of them are very poor indeed, and there seems to be little that can be done about it, beyond urging them to behave more responsibly and criticizing those who oppose the widespread provision of contraceptive devices. The choice we face in our arithmetic of poor people is between reducing one or other of the two apparent variables: the people or their poverty. In fact it is not that simple, for reducing poverty would surely encourage people to breed faster, so eliminating what we had helped them to gain at no small cost to ourselves. No matter how you look at it, the future seems pretty grim.
    Obviously, such a rate of growth cannot be sustained. The question centers not on whether it will end, but how, and most commentators, following the line of reasoning popularized by Paul Ehrlich, suppose the end will be disastrous. Our numbers will be reduced; sword, fire, famine and pestilence will sweep the world on an unprecedented scale.
Paul Ehrlich, who was the first to use " population bomb" ______.
选项 A、did not believe in the story told by the arithmetic
B、believed that population bomb would never explode
C、did not believe population growth rate would sustain
D、generated a gloomy prediction about world population growth
答案D
解析 第二段Paul Ehrlich指出人口如按这个速率增长，900年后人口将达到60 million bil-lion，并且地球上平均每平方米有100个人，由此可见“population bomb”带来的后果很严重，故选D。
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