单选题 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 every thing 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.

单选题 Economists are prone to ______.
A. emphasize the differences between economic growth and scarcity
B. ignore the human creative and productive power
C. see ecology from an economic perspective
D. use different approaches to economy and ecology

单选题 What does the author think of ecosystems?
A. They may deteriorate.
B. They may benefit from economy.
C. They are associated with productivity.
D. They are closely related to technology.

单选题 What does the passage say about the predictions made by Thomas Robert Malthus and Paul Ehrlich?
A. They proved to be useful.
B. They have not come true.
C. They proved to be accurate.
D. They have not drawn enough attention.

单选题 What happened in the 1960s and 1970s?
A. Food production increased in India.
B. Fertilizer began to be used in England.
C. Hybridized plants were grown in the US.
D. Land expansion occurred in Mexico.

单选题 The purpose of mentioning the search engine is to show ______.
A. the economic impact of information technology
B. the high speed of modern machines
C. popular interest in the Internet
D. technological progress