《星火12月四级模拟卷1》由会员分享，可在线阅读，更多相关《星火12月四级模拟卷1（10页珍藏版）》请在金锄头文库上搜索。
1、PARTI Writing 30 MIN write a short essay entitled My View on Cyber Language. 1.网络语言越来越流行 2不同的人有不同的看法3我认为My View on Cyber LanguagePART II Reading Comprehension Skimming and Scanning 15 MIN The Global Food Crisis and Thomas Malthus Last year the skyrocketing cost of food was a wake-up call for the pla
2、net. Between 2005 and the summer of 2008, the price of wheat and corn tripled, and the price of rice climbed fivefold, spurring food riots in nearly two dozen countries and pushing 75 million more people into poverty. But unlike previous shocks driven by short-term food shortages, this price spike c
3、ame in a year when the worlds farmers reaped a record grain trop. This time, the high prices were a symptom of a larger problem tugging at the strands of our worldwide food web, one thats not going away anytime soon. Simply put: for most of the past decade, the world has been consuming more food tha
4、n it has been producing. After years of drawing down stockpiles, in 2007 the world has seen global carryover stocks fall to 61 days of global consumption, the second lowest on record.” Agricultural productivity growth is only one to two percent a year, warned Joachim von Braun, director general of t
5、he International Food Polity Research Institute in Washington, D.C., at the height of the crisis. This is too low to meet population growth and increased demand:Rebrospectian: MalthusTheory Ever since our ancestors gave up hunting and gathering for plowing and planting some 12,000 years ago, our num
6、bers have marched corresponding with our agricultural productivity Each advance-the domestication of animals, irrigation, and wet rice production-led to a corresponding jump in human population. Every time food was stately supplied, population eventually leveled off. Early Arab and Chinese writers n
7、oted the relationship between population and food resources, but it wasnt until the end of the 18th Century that a British scholar tried to explain the exact mechanism linking the two-and became perhaps the mast vilified(遭人辱骂的social scientist in history.Thomas Robert Malthus, the namesake of such te
8、rms as Malthusian collapse and Malthusian curse, was a mild-mannered mathematician, a clergyman-and, his critics would say, the ultimate glass-half-empty kind of guy. When a few Enlightenment philosophers, giddy from the success of the French Revolution, began predicting tile continued improvement o
9、f the human condition, Malthus cut them off at the knees. Human population, he observed, increases at a geometric rate, doubling about every 25 years if unchecked, while agricultural production increases arithmetically-much more slowly. Therein lay a biological trap that humanity could never escape.
10、The power of population is indefinitely greater than the power in the earth to produce subsistence for man, he wrote in his Essay an the Principle of Population in 1798. This implies a strong and constantly operating check on population from the difficulty subsistence. Malthus thought such checks co
11、uld be voluntary, such as birth control, abstinence, or delayed marriage-or involuntary, through the disaster of war, famine, and disease. He advocated against food relief for all but the poorest people, since he felt such aid encouraged more children to be horn into misery. That tough love earned h
12、im a bad name in English literature from none other than Charles Dickens. When Ebenezer Scrooge is asked to give help for the poor in A Christmas Carol, the heartless banker tells the do-gooders that the poor should head for the workhouses or prisons. And if theyd rather die than go there, they had
13、better do it, and decrease the surplus population.Rereading Malthus Essay On a brisk fall day that has put color into the cheeks of the most die-hard Londoners, I visit the British Library and check out the first edition of the book that still generates such heated debate. Malthuss Essay on the Prin
14、ciple of Population looks like an eighth-grade science primer. From its strong, clear prose comes the voice of a humble parish priest who hoped, as much as anything, to be proved wrong. People who say Malthus is wrong usually havent read him, says Tim Dyson, a professor of population studies at the
15、London School of Economics. He was not taking a view any different than what Adam Smith took in the first volume of The Wealth of Nations. No one in their right mind doubts the idea that populations have to live within their resource base. And that the capacity of society to increase resources from
16、that base is ultimately limited.Though his essays emphasized positive checks on population from famine, disease, and war, his preventative checks have been more important. A growing workforce, Malthus explained, depresses wages, which tends to make people delay marriage until they can better support a family. Delaying marriage reduces fertility rates, creating an equally check on populations.
