单选题
It remains to be seen whether the reserves of raw
materials in the year 2000 will be sufficient to supply a world economy which
will have grown by five hundred percent. Southeast Asia alone will have an
energy consumption five times greater than that of Western Europe in 1970.
Incidentally, if the underdeveloped countries started using up petrol at the
same rate as the industrialized areas, then world reserves would be exhausted by
1990. All this only goes to show just how important it is to
set up a plan to conserve and divide up fairly natural resources on a worldwide
scale. This is a matter of life and death because world
population is expanding at an incredible rate. By the middle of the next century
population will expand every year by as much as it did in the first 1,500 years
after Christ. In the southern, poor parts of the globe, the figures are enough
to make your hair stand on end. Even supposing that steps are taken to stabilize
world population in the next fifty years, the number of inhabitants per square
kilometer will increase by from 4 in the United States to 140 in South East
Asia. What can we do about it? In the first hypothesis we do
nothing. By the year 2000, the southern parts of the world would then have a
population greater than the total world population today.
Alternately we could start acting right now to bring birth rate under control
within fifteen years so that population levels off. Even then the population in
the southern areas would not stop growing for seventy-five years. And the
population would level off at something like twice today's figure.
Finally, we could wait ten to twenty years before taking action. If we
wait ten years the population of the southern area would stabilize at 3,000
million. Even today the number of potential workers increases by 350,000 people
per week. By the end of the century this figure will reach 750,000; in other
words, it will be necessary to find work for 40 million people per year--not to
speak of food. What this means in practical terms we can
scarcely imagine. But clearly if we do nothing, nature will solve the problem
for us. But at what cost!
单选题
The sentence "the figures are enough to make your hair stand on end"
(Paragraph 3) probably means ______.
A. the figures are too surprised to believe
B. the figures seem to be so high that we think them to be
unacceptable
C. the figures are so big that we may be surprised at them
单选题
At the end of the passage the author implies that ______.
A. naturally, the population problem would be solved
B. nature will punish us in the end if we do nothing
C. we can wait until nature solves the problem for us
D. we can't imagine how much we'll have to pay to solve the world population
problem
【正确答案】
B
【答案解析】这是一道推论题。题干中的信号词为the end of the passage，也就是文章的最后一段。文章最后一段指出：确切地说，这意味着什么我们无法想象：但是很显然，如果我们什么也不做， 自然将为我们解决这个问题；但那将是怎样的代价啊!由此可知，作者认为，如果自然为我们解决人口问题，那么我们付出的代价肯定很大。B说“如果我们什么也不做， 自然最终将惩罚我们”，这与文章的意思相符。A明显与文章的意思不符；C与文章第六段的意思不符。D是文章最后一段明确表达的意思，不必推论就可知结果，所以也不对。
单选题
The phrase "level off" (Paragraph 5) probably refers to ______.