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A very important world problem, if not the most serious of all the great world problems which affect us at the moment, is the increasing number of people who actually inhabit this planet. The limited amount of land and land resources will soon be unable to support the huge population if it continues to grow at its present rate.In an early survey conducted in 1888, a billion and a half people inhabited the earth. Now, the population exceeds five billion and is growing fast—by the staggering figure of 90 million in 1988 alone. This means that the world must accommodate a new population roughly equal to that of the United States and Canada every three years! Even though the rate of growth has begun to slow down, most experts believe the population size will still pass eight billion during the next 50 years.So why is this huge Increase in population taking place It is really due to the spread of the knowledge and practice of what is becoming known as "Death Control". You have no doubt heard of the term "Birth Control"—" Death Control" is something rather different. It recognizes the work of the doctors and scientists who now keep alive people who, not very long ago, would have died of a variety of then incurable diseases. Through a wide variety of technological innovations that include farming methods and sanitation, as well as the control of these deadly diseases, we have found ways to reduce the rate at which we die—creating a population explosion. We used to think that reaching seventy years old was a remarkable achievement, but now eighty or even ninety is becoming recognized as the normal life-span for humans. In a sense, this represents a tremendous achievement for our species. Biologically this is the very definition of success and we have undoubtedly become the dominant animal on the planet. However, this Success is the very cause of the greatest threat to mankind.Man is constantly destroying the very resources which keep him alive. He is destroying the balance of nature which regulates climate and the atmosphere, produces and maintains healthy soils, provides food from the seas, etc. In short, by only considering our needs of today, we are ensuring there will be no tomorrow.An understanding of man’ s effect on the balance of nature is crucial to be able to find the appropriate remedial action. It is a very common belief that the problems of the population explosion are caused mainly by poor people living in poor countries who do not know enough to limit their reproduction. This is not true. The actual number of people in an area is not as important as the effect they have on nature. Developing countries do have an effect on their environment, but it is the populations of richer countries that have a far greater impact on the earth as a whole.The birth of a baby in, for example, Japan, imposes more than a hundred times the amount of stress on the world’ s resources as a baby in India. Most people in India do not grow up to. own cars or air-conditioners—nor do they eat the huge amount of meat and fish that the Japanese child does. Their life-styles do not require vast quantities of minerals and energy. Also, they are aware of the requirements of the land around them and try to put something back into nature to replace what they take out.For example, tropical forests are known to be essential to the balance of nature yet we are destroying them at an incredible rate. They are being cleared not to benefit the natives of that country, but to satisfy the needs of richer countries. Central American forests are being destroyed for pastureland to make pet food in the United States cheaper; in Papua New Guinea, forests are destroyed to supply cheaper cardboard packaging for Japanese electronic products; in Burma and Thailand, forests have been destroyed to produce more attractive furniture in Singapore and Japan. Therefore, a rich person living thousands of miles away may cause more tropical forest destruction than a poor person living in the forest itself.In short then, it is everybody’ s duty to safeguard the future of mankind—not only through population control, but by being more aware of the effect his actions have on nature. Nature is both fragile and powerful. It is very easily destroyed; on the other hand, it can so easily destroy its most aggressive enemy—man. Which of the following recommendations might be made by the author（）
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The communications explosion is on the scale of the rail, automobile or telephone revolution. Very soon you’ll be able to record your entire life (1) —anything a microphone or a camera can sense you’ Il be able to (2) . In particular, the number of images a person captures in a lifetime is set to rise exponentially. The thousand (3) a year I take of my children on a digital camera are all precious to me. (4) a generation’ s time, my children’ s children will have total image documentation of their entire lives—a (5) log of tremendous personal value.By then we’ll be wrestling with another question: how we control all the electronic (6) connected to the internet: trillions of PCs, laptops, cell phones and other gadgets. In Cambridge, we’re already working (7) millimetre-square computing and sensing devices that can be linked to the internet through the radio network. This sort of (8) will expand dramatically (9) microscopic communications devices become dirt-cheap and multiply. Just imagine (10) the paint on the wall could do if it had this sort of communications dust in it: change colour, play music, show movies or even speak to you.(11) costs raise other possibilities too. (12) launching space vehicles is about to become very much cheaper, the number of satellites is likely to go up exponentially. There’ s lots of (13) up there so we could have millions of them. And if you have millions of loworbit satellites, you can establish a (14) communications network that completely does away with towers and masts. If the satellites worked on the cellular principle so you got spatial reuse of frequencies, system (15) would be amazing. Speech is so (16) that I expect voice communication to become almost free eventually: you’ 11 pay just a monthly fixed (17) and be able to make as many calls as you want. By then people will also have fixed links with business (18) , friends and relatives. One day I (19) being able to keep in touch with my family in Poland on a fibreoptic audio-video (20) ; we’ll be able to have a little ceremony at supper-time, open the curtains and sit down "together" to eat. Read the following text. Choose the best word (s) for each numbered blank and mark A, B, C or D on ANSWER SHEET 1.6（）
Few insects have inspired as much fear and hatred as the diminutive fire ants, less than half an inch long but living in colonies of more than 250,000 others. Everyone in the southern United States gets to know fire ants sooner or later by painful experience. Fire ants live in large earthen mounds and are true social insects--that means they have a caste system ( division of labor), with a specialized caste that lays eggs (queen) and a worker caste of sterile females. There are several reasons that they are considered pests. About 60% of people living in areas where fire ants occur are stung every year. Of these, about 1% have some degree of allergic reaction ( called anaphylaxis) to the sting. Their large mounds are unsightly and can damage mowing equipment. Fire ants sometimes enter electrical and mechanical equipment and can short out switches or chew through insulation. Finally. as fire ants move into new areas, they reduce diversity of native ants and prey on larger animals such as ground-nesting birds and turtles.Even though fire ants are pests in many circumstances, they can actually be beneficial in others. There is evidence that their predatory activities can reduce the numbers of some other important pests. In cotton, for example, they prey on important pests that eat cotton plants such as bollworms and budworms. In Louisiana sugarcane, an insect called the sugarcane borer used to be a very important pest before fire ants arrived and began preying on it. Fire ants also prey on ticks and fleas.Whether fire ants are considered pest or not depend on where they are found, but one thing is sure—we had best get used to living with them. Eradication attempts in the 1960s and 1970s failed for a number of reasons, and scientists generally agree that complete elimination of fire ants from the United States is not possible. A new, long-term approach to reducing fire ant populations Involves classical biological control. When fire ants were accidentally brought to the United States, most of their parasites and diseases were not. Classical biological control involves identifying parasites and diseases specific to fire ants in South America, testing them to be sure that they don ’ t attack or infect native plants or animals and establishing them in the Introduced fire ant population In the United States. Since fire ants are about 5 to 7 times more abundant here than in South America, scientists hope to reduce their numbers using this approach. Whether fire ants are pests or not largely depends on their（）
The communications explosion is on the scale of the rail, automobile or telephone revolution. Very soon you’ll be able to record your entire life (1) —anything a microphone or a camera can sense you’ Il be able to (2) . In particular, the number of images a person captures in a lifetime is set to rise exponentially. The thousand (3) a year I take of my children on a digital camera are all precious to me. (4) a generation’ s time, my children’ s children will have total image documentation of their entire lives—a (5) log of tremendous personal value.By then we’ll be wrestling with another question: how we control all the electronic (6) connected to the internet: trillions of PCs, laptops, cell phones and other gadgets. In Cambridge, we’re already working (7) millimetre-square computing and sensing devices that can be linked to the internet through the radio network. This sort of (8) will expand dramatically (9) microscopic communications devices become dirt-cheap and multiply. Just imagine (10) the paint on the wall could do if it had this sort of communications dust in it: change colour, play music, show movies or even speak to you.(11) costs raise other possibilities too. (12) launching space vehicles is about to become very much cheaper, the number of satellites is likely to go up exponentially. There’ s lots of (13) up there so we could have millions of them. And if you have millions of loworbit satellites, you can establish a (14) communications network that completely does away with towers and masts. If the satellites worked on the cellular principle so you got spatial reuse of frequencies, system (15) would be amazing. Speech is so (16) that I expect voice communication to become almost free eventually: you’ 11 pay just a monthly fixed (17) and be able to make as many calls as you want. By then people will also have fixed links with business (18) , friends and relatives. One day I (19) being able to keep in touch with my family in Poland on a fibreoptic audio-video (20) ; we’ll be able to have a little ceremony at supper-time, open the curtains and sit down "together" to eat. Read the following text. Choose the best word (s) for each numbered blank and mark A, B, C or D on ANSWER SHEET 1.14（）
If you smoke, you’ d better hurry. From July 1st pubs all over England will, by law, be no-smoking areas. So will restaurants, offices and even company cars, if more than one person uses them. England’ s smokers are following a well-trodden path. The other three bits of the United Kingdom have already banned smoking in almost all enclosed public spaces, and there are anti-smoking laws of varying strictness over most of Western Europe. The smoker’ s journey from glamour through toleration to suspicion is finally reaching its end in pariah status.But behind this public-health success story lies a darker tale. Poorer people are much more likely to smoke than richer ones—a change from the 1950s, when professionals and laborers were equally keen. Today only 15% of men in the highest professional classes smoke, but 42% of unskined workers do. Despite punitive taxation—20 cigarettes cost around ￡ 5.00 ( $10.00), three-quarters of which is tax—55% of single mothers on benefits smoke. The figure for homeless men is even higher; for hard-drug users it is practically 100%. The message that smoking kills has been heard, it seems, but not by all.Having defeated the big killers of the past—want, exposure, poor sanitation—governments all over the developed world are turning their attention to diseases that stem mostly from how individuals choose to live their lives. But the same deafness afflicts the same people when they are strongly encouraged to give up other sorts of unhealthy behavior. The lower down they are on practically any pecking order--job prestige, income, education, background-the more likely people are to be fat and unfit, and to drink too much.That tempts governments to shout ever louder in an attempt to get the public to listenand nowhere do they do so more aggressively than in Britain. One reason is that pecking orders matter more than in most other rich countries: income distribution is very unequal and the unemployed, disaffected, ill-educated rump is comparatively large. Another reason is the frustration of a government addicted to targets, which often aim not only to improve something but to lessen inequality in the process. A third is that the National Health Service is free to patients, and paying for those who have arguably brought their ill-health on themselves grows alarmingly costly.Britain’s aggressiveness, however, may be pointless, even counter-productive. There is no reason to believe that those who ignore measured voices will listen to shouting. It irritates the majority who are already behaving responsibly, and it may also undermine all government pronouncements on health by convincing people that they have an ultra-cautious margin of error built in.Such hectoring may also be missing the root cause of the problem. According to Mr. Marmot, who cites research on groups as diverse as baboons in captivity, British civil servants and Oscar nominees, the higher rates of iii health among those in more modest walks of life can be attributed to what he calls the "status syndrome". People in privileged positions think they are worth the effort of behaving healthily, and find the will-power to do so. The implication is that it is easier to improve a person’ s health by weakening the connection between social position and health than by targeting behavior directly. Same public-health experts speak of social cohesion, support for families and better education for all. These are bigger undertakings than a bossy campaign; but more effective, and quieter. Which of the following is NOT a reason for Britain’s aggressiveness in the public-health campaign（）
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