There are now nearly 7. 6 billion people on Earth. By the 2050s, there will be 10 billion.
英语试题 05-07
There are now nearly 7. 6 billion people on Earth. By the 2050s, there will be 10 billion. How will we eat? What will we drink? Where will we live?
The answers seem simple. We'll eat food. Farmers produce enough calories to sustain （维持）around 9 billion folks. We'll drink water—we've got loads. And we'll live. If the whole world were packed as crowded as one giant New Jersey, we could squeeze in about 30 billion. But this wouldn't be easy, and imagining the reality of acquiring these resources quickly grows ridiculous.
Turning the world into one giant New Jersey would require the large-scale destruction of existing ecosystems by squeeze in billions more and all other species would have to go. Then there's water： just 3 percent of Earth's water is fresh water, and only a third of that is easy to get. Nearly 70 percent of all available fresh water is used for agriculture. However, agricul ture also presents a geographic challenge. Right now, the average diet eats up 1.5 acres annu ally. If we farmed all of Earth's 37 billion acres—including every mountain and desert—we’d make enough food for 25 billion people. But there wouldn’t be any room left for us to live here, and we'd run out of groundwater long before turning the Himalayas into a cornfield.
Marco Springmann, a researcher with Oxford's Future of Food program, finds “this pop ulation question kind of funny”. Springmann argues that a more meaningful problem is how we might live sustainably. In a 2019 study, Springmann and colleagues described a planet friendly diet rich in whole grains and nuts that's almost meat-free. If everyone adopted it, he says, we could double the population without increasing food-related emissions. The question isn't how many people we'll have, but how many carbon footprints we'll make.
There is little doubt that Earth will host 10 billion souls by mid-century and a turning point could arrive. Rising temperatures will change what we can grow, cause mass migration away from the tropics, and dry up water. And though we'll survive without good farmlands,
how livable our lives will be remains a coal-black question mark.
32. What percentage of fresh water on Earth is easy to get?
A. About 1%. B. About 1. 5%.
C. About 2. 1%. D. About 3. 3%.
33. What is paragraph 3 mainly about?
A. The efforts humans are making.
B. The challenges humans will face.
C. The imagination of future agriculture.
D. The factors causing population growth.
34. What does Springmann focus on?
A. Making people live longer.
B Cutting down on food waste.
C. Slowing the population growth.
D. Reducing food-related carbon emissions.
35. What is the best title for the text?
A. How to live more sustainably?
B. How many people can the planet hold?
C. What will the life be like-in the future?
D. What can humans do to handle global warming?
答案
The answers seem simple. We'll eat food. Farmers produce enough calories to sustain （维持）around 9 billion folks. We'll drink water—we've got loads. And we'll live. If the whole world were packed as crowded as one giant New Jersey, we could squeeze in about 30 billion. But this wouldn't be easy, and imagining the reality of acquiring these resources quickly grows ridiculous.
Turning the world into one giant New Jersey would require the large-scale destruction of existing ecosystems by squeeze in billions more and all other species would have to go. Then there's water： just 3 percent of Earth's water is fresh water, and only a third of that is easy to get. Nearly 70 percent of all available fresh water is used for agriculture. However, agricul ture also presents a geographic challenge. Right now, the average diet eats up 1.5 acres annu ally. If we farmed all of Earth's 37 billion acres—including every mountain and desert—we’d make enough food for 25 billion people. But there wouldn’t be any room left for us to live here, and we'd run out of groundwater long before turning the Himalayas into a cornfield.
Marco Springmann, a researcher with Oxford's Future of Food program, finds “this pop ulation question kind of funny”. Springmann argues that a more meaningful problem is how we might live sustainably. In a 2019 study, Springmann and colleagues described a planet friendly diet rich in whole grains and nuts that's almost meat-free. If everyone adopted it, he says, we could double the population without increasing food-related emissions. The question isn't how many people we'll have, but how many carbon footprints we'll make.
There is little doubt that Earth will host 10 billion souls by mid-century and a turning point could arrive. Rising temperatures will change what we can grow, cause mass migration away from the tropics, and dry up water. And though we'll survive without good farmlands,
how livable our lives will be remains a coal-black question mark.
32. What percentage of fresh water on Earth is easy to get?
A. About 1%. B. About 1. 5%.
C. About 2. 1%. D. About 3. 3%.
33. What is paragraph 3 mainly about?
A. The efforts humans are making.
B. The challenges humans will face.
C. The imagination of future agriculture.
D. The factors causing population growth.
34. What does Springmann focus on?
A. Making people live longer.
B Cutting down on food waste.
C. Slowing the population growth.
D. Reducing food-related carbon emissions.
35. What is the best title for the text?
A. How to live more sustainably?
B. How many people can the planet hold?
C. What will the life be like-in the future?
D. What can humans do to handle global warming?
答案
苏19057182-3号