英语口语高级训练(lesson9)b

3. Population Increase Has Wiped out the Material Benefits People Have Achieved
　　Matthew：   Sarah, is there a need to control population only in countries like India, Africa, Brazil. . . those countries   that we.call the underdeveloped countries, or is there a case for limiting population in Europe, for instance？
　　Sarah：   The reason one would have to limit population is because you're running out of food and you're running out of resources. The people in Europe and America consume a far greater proportion of the world's resources and the world's food than they do in India. So…… um…… population is directly related to……
　　um…… consumption¹ and your general impact on the environment. If as an individual your impact is far greater than anybody else's, um…… then that is the factor that's important, rather than how many people there are, or how many people can the world support. Now it's……obviously in that sense, it's possible to increase population if everybody's willing to um……use less material or eat less food, but it isn't if everybody's continually wanting more and more and more, and this is…… seems to he the trend at the moment. . . higher and higher consumption. . . with at the same time a greatly expanding population.And the problem in …… um…… areas which are poor and which have expanding populations is that they try and develop and try and……er……
　　get……er……more material benefits, but as soon as they do this, the population increase has.wiped out any benefits that they may have um…… achieved. Matthew：   But do you feel that this battle with a……a rapidly expandint population can be won？
　　Sarah：   The most sensible thing is to realize that you   can't go on expanding human populations for ever and countries and individuals must decide to have a policy which would limit population.
　　4. An African Woman Says： “……the Men Never Talk about It.”“To us, children are the most important thing in life. When we marry, it is not above all to get a husband or wife, but to have children. I had my thirteenth birth only a few months ago, and most of my adult life I have had to care for a baby as well as do all my other work in the house and in the fields. For a long time I have wanted no more children, but I keep having them as long as I am with my husband.
　　A nurse comes to visit our village regularly. She holds meetings for all the men and women together, to explain about family planning. Now these are wellknown facts to us, but still nobody in our village practises birth control. When. we sit together with the nurse, everybody seems to agree that this is the right thing to do when a family had grown big enough to give the parents security in their old age, and there are enough hands to attend to all the daily work. But when we go home, the men never talk about it My husband and I attend every meeting, but in our home we have never talked about birth control. I desperately² want to stop having more children, but this can only be done if my husband suggests it.“
　　5. Free Birth Control Techniques Should Be Available Everywhere
　　Matthew：   Peter, what sections of the population do you think free birth control techniques should be available to？
　　Peter：   They should be…… available to all sections of the community er……
　　things are getting to such a pitch that I personally think that……er……not only should birth control methods be available to all sections of the community, but indeed should be compulsory³. There should be some kind of law which says that a family should not have more than three children,.a complete maximum of three children, if they have three children then they must be obliged by law, almost, to use birth control, if not have er…… various kinds of operation which…… um…… make conception⁴ impossible. Matthew：   But surely this is very er…… explosive in social terms？
　　Peter：   It's very……it's a very totalitarian notion⁵, but. the alternative……if we look around us in the world outside is millions of people starving to death in places like India, and people suffering from malnutrition⁶ in. . . in other parts of the underdeveloped wor…… world and indeed even in parts of the dev……so called developed world.
　　6. It's a World Probl'em The rapid rise in world population is not creating problems only for the developing countries. The whole world faces the problem that raw materials are being used up at an increasing rate and food production cannot keep up with the population increase. People in the rich countries rnake the heaviest demands on the world's resources, its food, fuel and land, and cause the most pollution. A baby born in the United States will use in his lifetime 30 times more of the world's resources than a baby born in India. Unless all the countries of the world take united action to deal with the population explosion there will be more and more people fighting for a share of less and less land, food and fuel, and the future will bring poverty, misery⁷ and war to us all.
　　7. What Has Caused the Population Explosion？
　　The main reason is not so much a rise in birth rates as a fall in death rates as a result of improvements in public health services and medical care. Many more babies now survive infancy⁸, grow up and become parents, and many more adults are living into old age so that populations are being added to at both ends. In Europe and America the death rate began to fall during the Industrial Revolution. In the developing countries of Africa, Asia and Latin America the fall in death rate did not begin till much later and the birth rate has only recently begun to fall.
　　8. “The Rich Get Richer and the Poor Get Babies……”This sudden increase in tl~e population of the developing countries has come at a difficult time. Even if their population had not grown so fast they would have been facing a desperate struggle to bring the standard of living of their people up to the point at which there was enough food, housing, education, medical care and employment for everyone to have a reasonable life. The poor countries are having to run faster and faster in their economic activity in order to stay in the same place, and the gap in wealth between rich and poor countries grows wider every year
　　The most pressing problem created by the rapid increase in population is a shortage⁹ of food. More mouths have to be fed every year, and yet a high proportion of the existing population are not getting enough of the right kind of food. Over the past two years the total amount of food has decreased, and of course the total amount of food per person has decreased even more sharply¹⁰.
　　More and more of the babies born in developing countries have been surviving infancy and now nearly half the people living in those countries are under the age of 15.The adults have to work harder than ever to provide for the needs of the children, who cannot contribute to the economy until they are older. There is a shortage of schools and teachers, and there are not enough hospitals, doctors and nurses. Farming land is becoming scarce, so country people are moving to the towns and cities in the hope of finding a better standard of living. But the cities have not been able to provide housing, and the newcomers live in crowded slums¹¹. Finally, there are too few jobs and unemployment leads to further poverty.