Unit 2 Overview 泛读第四册课件.doc

Unit 2 Overview In this unit you will :? Learn a new view regarding the world population changes Take a test on fast reading Read an article about the growing population Read another report on the population situation in 2001 The Population Surprise ? by Max Singer 　 ?????? Will the worlds population keep increasing as commonly believed? What are the factors that account for its change? Please read the following article and make out its viewpoints.? 　 ??? Fifty years from now the worlds population will be declining, with no end in sight. Unless peoples values change greatly, several centuries from now there could be fewer people living in the entire world than in the United States today. The big surprise of the past twenty years is that in not one country did fertility stop falling when it reached the replacement rate － 2.1 children per woman. In Italy, for example, the rate has fallen to 1.2. In Western Europe as a whole and in Japan it is down to 1.5. The evidence now indicates that within fifty years or so world population will peak at about eight billion before starting a fairly rapid decline. ??? Because in the past two centuries world population has increased from one billion to nearly six billion, many people still fear that it will keep “exploding” until there are too many people for the earth to support. But that is like fearing that your baby will grow to 1 000 pounds because its weight doubles three times in its first seven years. World population was growing by two percent a year in the 1960s; the rate is now down to one percent a year, and if the patterns of the past century dont change radically, it will head into negative numbers. This view is coming to be widely accepted among population experts, even as the public continues to focus on the threat of uncontrolled population growth. ??? As long ago as September of 1974 Scientific American published a special issue on population that described what demographers had begun calling the “demographic