Recording Three
Why should you consider taking a course in demography in college? You’ll be growing up in a 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 tax payer 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. [23] 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 215 million women don’t have access to birth control they want, so that they can control their own fertility. This is not only a problem in developing countries. [24] 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 or 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, [25] to improve the wellbeing, not only of yourself—important as that may be—but of people around you and of other species with whom we share the planet.
23. What is one of the problems the speaker mentions in his talk?
【试题答案】C
【试题解析】题目问说话者在他的讲话中提到的问题之一是什么？录音中段提到，说话人首先要向听众介绍几个人口问题，这些问题分别是：长期饥饿、贫困、文盲、妇女节育和意外怀孕的问题。四个选项中，只有C选项“长期饥饿”正确。A选项“人口爆炸”；B选项“稀有物种的灭绝”和D选项“环境恶化”录音中均没有信息涉及，因此可排除。
24. What does the speaker say about pregnancies?
【试题答案】A
【试题解析】题目问关于怀孕，说话者说了什么？录音中提及，全球意外怀孕的比率将近一半。A选项“其中大约有一半是无意中怀孕的”是录音原文原词的复现，因此正确。B选项“造成了人口过剩”；C选项“生育已得到了控制”和D选项“大部分在孕期中都容易流产”在录音中均没有信息提及，因此可排除。
25. How does the speaker view the study of populations?
【试题答案】D
【试题解析】题目问说话者如何看待人口研究？讲话人在最后表明，他认为人口统计学是 经济学的一个中心议题；是在现实世界中更明智、更有效的干预手段；能改善人类的福祉，这不仅关乎我们自身，也关乎我们周围的人，以及与我们共享这个星球的其他物种。D选项“这对地球上所有物种的福祉至关重要”与原文表述相符，因此正确。A选项“它开始吸引研究生的注意”；B选项“许多发展中国家都忽视了它”和C选项“它正在成为跨学科研究的主题”，录音中均没有信息提及，因此可排除。
