听力音频
听力原文

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 the 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.

(23)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 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 buildingsbecause 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. (25)It is the means to intervene more wisely, and more effectively in the real world, 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.

未听先知

预览三道题各选项,由 Population, species, overpopulation等词可以初步推测,讲座内容与人 问题有关;再结合选项中的 hunger、 Extinction、 deterioration、, essential、 wellbeing, attention等词可以进一步 推测,讲座内容涉及人口问题所引发的其他问题。

详解详析

23. What is one of the problems the speaker mentions in his talk?

B)。

【详解】 讲座中提到,讲话者会讲一下人口的过去、现在以及将来,并接着指出现在有十亿人口长期处于饥饿状态,也就是说,他们从早上睁开双眼到晚上闭上眼睛睡觉始终处于饥饿状态。因此答案为B)。


24. What does the speaker say about pregnancies?

B)。

【详解】 讲座中提到,全球范围内,大约有半数怀孕是意外怀孕。因此答案为B)。


25. How does the speaker view the study of populations?

A)。

【详解】 讲座末尾讲话者提到,人口统计学是更加睿智、更加有效地对现实世界进行干预,从而改善人类以及地球上所有物种的生活状态的方法。因此,它对地球上所有物种的幸福都至关重要,答案为A)。