点击文件名下载附件
cet46zhenti39.html
六级讲座3
Why should you consider taking a course in demography in college?You will
be growing up in the generation where the baby-boomers are going into retirement
and dying. You will face problems in the aging of the population that have never
been faced before. You will hear more and more about migration between
countries, and between rural areas and cities. You need to understand as a
citizen and as a taxpayer and as a voter what’s really behind the arguments. I
want to tell you about the past, present and future of the human population, so
let’s start with a few problems. Right now, a billion people are chronically
hungry that means they wake up hungry; they are hungry all day and they go to
sleep hungry. A billion people are living in slums, not the same billion people,
but there is some overlap. Living in slums means they don’t have infrastructure
to take the garbage away. They don’t have secure water supplies to drink. Nearly
a billion people are illiterate. Try to imagine your life being illiterate. You
can’t read the labels on the bottles in the supermarket, if you can get to a
supermarket. Two thirds of those people who are illiterate are women and about
200 to 250 million women don’t have access to birth control they want, so that
they can control their own fertility. This is not a problem in developing
countries, about half of all pregnancies globally are unintended. So those are
examples of population problems. Demography gives you the tools to understand
and to address these problems. It’s not only the study of human population, but
the populations of non-human species, including viruses, like influenza, the
bacteria in your gut, plants that you eat, animals that you enjoy, all that
provide you with meat. Demography also includes the study of non-living objects
like light bulbs and taxi cabs and buildings because these are also populations.
It studies these populations in the past, present and future using quantitative
data and mathematical models as tools of analysis. I see demography as a central
subject related to economics. It is the means to intervene more wisely and more
effectively in the real world to improve the well-being not only of yourself,
important as that maybe, but of people around you and of other species with whom
we share the planet.
Questions 23 to 25 are based on the passage you have just heard.
23. What is one of the problems the speaker mentions in his talk?
24. What does the speaker say about pregnancies?
25. How does the speaker view the study of the populations?
发表于 2017-6-17 20:40:46
