A very important world problem is the rapidly increasing pressure of population on land and on land resources.
It is not so much the actual population of the world but its rate of increase which is important. It works out to be about 1.6 per cent per annum net increase. In terms of numbers this means something like forty to fifty-five million additional people every year. Canada has a population of twenty million--rather less than six months. climb in world population. Take Australia. There are ten million people in Australia. So, it takes the world less than three months to add to itself a population which peoples that vast country. Let us take our own crowded country--England and Wales: forty-five to fifty million people--just about a year.s supply.
By this time tomorrow, and every day, there will be added to the earth about 120,000 extra people, just about the population of the city of York.
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. Death Control is something rather different from Birth Control. 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 our 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 this 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.
36. The world.s population is increasing because _______.
A) the number of babies born every year is about 16 percent of the
total population
B) the birth rate is about 1.6 percent higher than the death rate
C) the birth rate is going up by 1.6 percent per annum
D) the death rate is going down by about 1.6 percent every year
37. The author mentions the different populations of Canada, Australia,
and England and Wales in order to _______.
A) show how small these countries are
B) show how quickly those countries are populated
C) emphasize the low rate of increase of world population
D) emphasize the high rate of increase of world population
38. According to the passage which of the following is not the cause for
death?
A) Poor living condition. B) Fatal diseases like malaria.
C) Poor medical service. D) Less food to feed people.
39. By "Death Control" the author means _______.
A) a rather different kind of Birth Control
B) control of the world.s population
C) the prevention or cure of diseases
D) the spread of knowledge in the world
40. From the passage we can conclude _______.
A) the problem of land is not very serious
B) the problem of land can be solved by removing Death Control
C) the problem of land should be solved by reducing the population
D) there is still potential to tap in the use of land

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