OVERPOPULATION
Pre-listening task
I. Make sure that you understand the meaning of the following words.
census (n), to be missing, lack (n), to expect (v), doom (n), dismal (adj), starving, to predict (v), to encourage (v)
Match the words with their definitions.
____________________ to say about what will happen in the future (foresee)
____________________ to think that sth will happen
____________________ the official procedure for counting all the people in a country
____________________ not be present
____________________ dark, sad and depressing
____________________ help sth happen or increase
____________________ not having sth
____________________ a bad event, usually death that will happen and cannot be avoided
____________________ dying from lack of food
II. Match the terms with their definitions.
fertility or replacement rate, life expectancy, density of population, standard of living, trend (to, towards), pattern
______________________ a level of quality of life in a country
______________________ a number of people per square kilometer
______________________ a number of children per a woman, if the population is constant
______________________ how long an average person is expected to live
______________________ a series of actions or events that show how things normally happen
______________________ a gradual change or development that produces a particular result
Listen to the article OVERPOPULATION
Comprehension check
1. The population of the UK in 2001
a) was impossible to count
b) was less than the government expected
c) was one million
2. Malthus, the author of “The principle of population” in 1798 thought that the number of people:
a)would go very fast, much faster than the amount of food
b) would stay the same because there would always be people dying of hunger
c) would rise slowly together with the increase in food production
3. J.G. Ballard in his story “Billenium” written in 1961 was worried about:
a) falling fertility rate
b) lack of food
c) lack of space in giant overcrowded megapolices
4. The number of people in the world depends on:
a) the numbers of babies born
b) how long people live
c) the combination of both factors
5. People born in 2050 will probably
a) live to be very old, live in villages and have few children
b) live to be very old, live in cities and have few children
c) live to be very old, live in cities and have lots of children
6. One UN forecast now foresees in 2100 a world population of
a) about 5 billion b) about 20 billion c) about 6.5 billion
Vocabulary activity
Listen to the text again and fill in the gaps.
Overpopulation
By John Kuti
I come from the ______ of England, in the most densely-populated corner of a small ______, which, you might think, is full of people. (The UK as a whole has 2.4 people per hectare.) I have never gone ______. The only time when I wish there were less ______ is on rush-hour trains. However, one of the most ___________ findings of the census of 2001 was that a million people were missing. Or at least there were a million people ____ than the authorities expected. Should we be happy that we have more _____ and fewer mouths to feed? I don’t know.
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As I start writing this article the world _________ (according to the Office of Population Research at Princeton University – see the link) ______ at 6,315,850,431.
Doom, version 1:
In 1798 Robert Malthus wrote an essay which got _________ the name of the dismal _______. It was called “The Principle of Population”. He said that it was __________ for the number of people to increase, and even _____, it was impossible for the standard of living to rise. The argument went like this:
1. population _________ increases geometrically: 2, 4, 8, 16…
2. food production _________ arithmetically 2, 4, 6, 8…
3. so, population will be controlled by lack of ____, the same as it is for _______. Some people will always be starving.
A lot of people disliked Malthus’ point of ____. Often, because it seemed to go against the idea of ________, which was so important for other social theories of the time. Anyway, the __________ of the next two centuries shows that something must be wrong with the theory. In the 19th century world population rose ____ 1 __ 1.7 billion. In the 20th, it increased to about 6 billion.
Doom, version 2
In 1961, J.G. Ballard wrote a story called Billenium. It’s about a world where the population has gone on increasing at 3% a year _______ a figure of at least 20 billion, although the true number is kept ______. To make space for _______ food, everyone lives in giant cities where the _________ are divided into little cubicles. A ______ person can have 4 square metres and a married ______ six. Everyone has enough to eat, but life is certainly very ___________. People spend _____________ waiting in queues for the bathroom or anywhere else they want to go.
Reality
The real situation is not as bad as these alarming ___________. A very surprising and dramatic ______ is happening in the world, but it is not what Malthus or Ballard predicted. To understand the __________, we need first to think about the two ways the number of people can go up.
The Fertility Rate
The most obvious way __________ population is for more babies to be born. If the population is exactly ________, the average woman has 2.1 children. This number is called the "replacement rate". These rates are going down very ____. The peak was in the period 1965-75 at 4.9, now the ____ for the world as a whole is 2.8. However, there is still a big difference _______ the developed countries, where the rate is 1.6 and poor countries where it is 3. To quote some ________ examples, in Italy the figure is 1.2 and in Zambia 5.6
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Life expectancy
The other ______ why there are more people now is that we live longer. This figure also shows a dramatic change. The people born in 1950 could expect, on average, to live 45 years. Now the world life __________ at birth is 65, and the United Nations ________ this will increase to 76 in the next 50 years.
Predictions of doom
Malthus and Ballard were still _____ about some things. The dismal picture painted by Malthus is still ____ in poor countries where 18 million people starve every year, and more than a billion people don't have a supply of clean _____________. Ballard is right about the _____ towards city life. By the year 2006, the United Nations predicts that more than 50% of people will live in cities.
City life in the developed world
At least in the rich countries, the move into cities seems to be connected with falling __________ rates. It is more expensive to have a child in the city, and children are less useful as workers. Women _______ a better education and are able to work – so they have more to lose by becoming mothers. City life seems to encourage individualism – people become more ____________ getting an education and a career. They marry later in life and divorce more often, so producing smaller families.
At the moment, it seems quite possible that the same pattern will be ________ everywhere. One UN forecast now foresees a world population of about 5 billion in ____. But, the more time you spend looking at predictions _______ you realise that the human race is a surprising phenomenon. It looks like we will have a clearer idea of what will happen in ten or twenty years’ time when the present generation of parents _____ beyond child-bearing age.
Now there are 6,318,042,422 people.
Give Russian equivalents of the following words and expressions:
Rush-hour trains, one’s point of view, go on increasing; the true number is kept secret, alarming predictions, the most obvious way (to do sth), a supply of clean drinking water
Find in the text English equivalents of the following Russian words and expressions:
Густонаселенный уголок, миллиона людей не досчитались, уровень жизни, что-то неверно в этой теории, опыт двух последующих десятилетий, ожидая в очередях, в среднем, быть связанным с падением рождаемости, у них есть что терять, предсказывать (предвидеть), выйти из детородного возраста
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DESCRIBING TRENDS
| Adjective | Noun | Verb | Adverb | |
| slight gradual steady sharp dramatic substantial | fall decrease rise increase growth | fall drop go down decrease rise go up increase | slightly gradually steadily sharply dramatically substantially |
Sort these verbs and nouns according to the trends they describe:
To fall, to drop, to remain stable / constant, surge (n), explosion (n), to even out, to shoot, to tumble, build up (n), to plummet, to soar, boom (n), to leap, to rise, to decrease, to reduce, to plunge, to leap, to be on the increase, to rocket / skyrocket, to pick up
UP DOWN NEITHER
Which of these words mean:
_______________________ to fall straight down very quickly from a high position
________________________to be increasing steadily
________________________ a gradual increase in the amount or level
_________________________ a very sharp increase
_________________________ to increase quickly and to a very high level
Put thefollowing words in a correct form to complete the sentences. Use one word for each pair of sentences: