This enormous increase of population will create immense problems. By A. D. 2000, unless something desperate happens, there will be as many as 7,000,000,000 people on the surface of this earth! So this is a problem which you are going to see in your lifetime.
Why is this enormous increase in population taking place? It is really due to the spread of the knowledge and the practice of what is coming to be called Death Control. You have heard of Birth Control? Death Control is something rather different. Death Control recognizes the work of the doctors and the nurses and the hospitals and the health services in keeping alive people who, a few years ago, would have died of some of the incredibly serious killing diseases, as they used to be. Squalid conditions, which we can remedy by an improved standard of living, caused a lot of disease and dirt. Medical examinations at school catch
diseases early and ensure healthier school children. Scientists are at work stamping out malaria and other more deadly diseases. If you are seriously ill there is an ambulance to take you to a modern hospital. Medical care helps to keep people alive longer. We used to think seventy was a good age; now eighty, ninety, it may be, are coming to be recognized as a normal age for human beings. People are living longer because of the Death Control, and fewer children are dying, so the population of the world is shooting up.
Imagine the position if you and I and everyone else living on earth shared the surface between us. How much should we have each? It would be just over twelve acres the sort of size of a small holding. But not all that is useful land which is going to produce food. We can cut out one-fifth of it, for example, as being too cold. That is land which is covered with ice and snow Antarctica and Greenland and the great frozen areas of northern Canada. Then we can cut out another fifth as being too dry the great deserts of the world like the Sahara and the heart of Australia and other areas where there is no known water supply to feed crops and so to produce food. Then we can cut out another fifth as being too mountainous or with too great an elevation above sea level. Then we can cut out another tenth as land which has insufficient soil, probably just rock at the surface. Now, out of the twelve acres only about four are left as suitable for producing food. But not all that is used. It includes land with enough soil and enough rainfall or water, and enough heat which, at present, we are not using, such as, for example, the great Amazon forests and the Congo forest and the grasslands of Africa. How much are we actually using? Only a little over one acre is what is required to support one human being on an average at the present time.
【四六级阅读的每日一练:第29篇】相关文章:
最新
2016-10-18
2016-10-11
2016-10-11
2016-10-08
2016-09-30
2016-09-30