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  3. "The world’s environment is surprisingly healthy. Discuss." If that were ail examination topic, most students would tear it apar

"The world’s environment is surprisingly healthy. Discuss." If that were ail examination topic, most students would tear it apar

admin2010-02-20  58
问题     "The world’s environment is surprisingly healthy. Discuss." If that were ail examination topic, most students would tear it apart, offering a long list of complaints: from local smog (烟雾) to global climate change, from the felling (砍伐) of forests to the extinction of species. The list would largely be accurate, the concern legitimate. Yet the students who should be given the highest marks would actually be those who agreed with the statement. The surprise is how good things are, not how bad.
    After all, the world’s population has more than tripled during this century, and world output has risen hugely, so you would expect the earth itself to have been affected. Indeed, if people lived, consumed and produced things in the same way as they did in 1900 (or 1950, or indeed 1980), the world by now would be a pretty disgusting place: smelly, dirty, toxic and dangerous.
    But they don’t. The reasons why they don’t, and why the environment has not been ruined, have to do with prices, technological innovation, social change and government regulation in response to popular pressure. That is why today’s environmental problems in the poor countries ought, in principle, to be solvable.
    Raw materials have not run out, and show no sign of doing so. Logically, one day they must: the planet is a finite place. Yet it is also very big, and man is very ingenious (有发明天才的). What has happened is that every time a material seems to be running short, the price has risen and, in response, people have looked for new sources of supply, tried to find ways to use less of the material, or looked for a new substitute. For this reason prices for energy and for minerals have fallen in real terms during the century. The same is true for food. Prices fluctuate, in response to harvests, natural disasters and political instability; and when they rise, it takes some time before new sources of supply become available. But they always do, assisted by new farming and crop technology. The longterm trend has been downwards.
    It is where prices and markets do not operate properly that this benign (良性的) trend begins to stumble, and the genuine problems arise. Markets cannot always keep the environment healthy. If no one owns the resource concerned, no one has an interest in conserving it or festering it: fish is the best example of this.
The huge increase in world production and population ______.
选项 A、has made the world a worse place to live in
B、has had a positive influence on the environment
C、has not significantly affected the environment
D、has made the world a dangerous place to live in
答案C
解析 细节判断题。文章第一段最后一句“The surprise is how good things are, not how bad.”似乎是说“人口的急剧增长与生产的扩大对环境带来厂正面影响”，但是，从下文的叙述方式来看，作者所欲说明的应该是“对世界环境的影响不大”。文章只是说the environment has not been ruined, raw materials have not run out, environmental problems ought to be solvable。从否定形式的使用可以判断，作者所强调的显然不是正面影响。
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