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  3. Our trouble lies in a simple confusion, one to which economists have been prone since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution

Our trouble lies in a simple confusion, one to which economists have been prone since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution

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问题     Our trouble lies in a simple confusion, one to which economists have been prone since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. Growth and ecology operate by different rules. Economists tend to assume that every problem of scarcity can be solved by substitution, by replacing tuna with tilapia, without factoring in the long-term environmental implications of either. But whereas economies might expand, ecosystems do not. They change—pine gives way to oak, coyotes arrive in New England—and they reproduce themselves, but they do not increase in extent or abundance year after year. Most economists think of scarcity as a labor problem, imagining that only energy and technology place limits on production. To harvest more wood, build a better chain saw; to pump more oil, drill more wells; to get more food, invent pest-resistant plants.
    That logic thrived on new frontiers and more intensive production, and it held off the prophets of scarcity—from Thomas Robert Malthus to Paul Ehrlich—whose predictions of famine and shortage have not come to pass. The Agricultural Revolution that began in seventeenth-century England radically increased the amount of food that could be grown on an acre of land, and the same happened in the 1960s and 1970s when fertilizer and hybridized seeds arrived in India and Mexico. But the picture looks entirely different when we change the scale. Industrial society is roughly 250 years old; make the last ten thousand years e-qual to twenty-four hours, and we have been producing consumer goods and CO2 for only the last thirty-six minutes. Do the same for the past 1 million years of human evolution, and every thing from the steam engine to the search engine fits into the past twenty-one seconds. If we are not careful, hunting and gathering will look like a far more successful strategy of survival than economic growth. The latter has changed so much about the earth and human societies in so little time that it makes more sense to be cautious than triumphant.
    Although food scarcity, when it occurs, is a localized problem, other kinds of scarcity are already here. Groundwater is alarmingly low in regions all over the world, but the most immediate threat to growth is surely petroleum.
The last sentence of the second paragraph implies that______.
选项 A、economic growth has reduced the biodiversity worldwide
B、economic growth has changed the ecosystem rapidly
C、people should be proud of their position in nature
D、people and nature should coexist in harmony
答案B
解析 题目问：第二段的最后一句是在暗示什么。第二段最后一句中的“the latter”指的就是经济发展，即经济发展在这么短的时间内大大地改变了地球和人类社会。再结合前面提到的经济学家认为所有的短缺问题都可以依靠替代品来解决，但却没有将环境这个长远的问题考虑在内；为了砍伐更多的木材，制造出更好的链锯；为了开采更多的石油，钻出更多的油井；假设过去的1万年等于24小时仅仅在过去的36分钟里，我们一直在生产消费品和释放二氧化碳。据此可以推知，经济的发展很快改变了生态系统，因此B项为正确答案。
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