Directions: In this section, you will read several passages.
Each passage is followed by several questions based on its content. You are to
choose ONE best answer, (A) , (B) , (C) or (D) , to each question. Answer all
the questions following each passage on the basis of what is stated or implied
in that passage and write the letter of the answer you have chosen in the
corresponding space in your ANSWER BOOKLET.
Questions 1～5
About three hundred years ago,
there were approximately half a billion people in the world. In the two
centuries that followed the population doubled, and, by 1850, there were more
than a billion people in the world. It took only 75 years for the figure to
double once more. Each day the population of the world increases by about
150,000.
In former centuries the population grew slowly.
Famines, wars, and epidemics, such as the plague and cholera, killed many
people. Today, although the birth rate has not changed significantly, the death
rate has been lowered considerably by various kinds of progress.
Machinery has made it possible to produce more and more food in vast
areas, such as the plains of America and Russia. Crops have been increased
almost everywhere and people are growing more and more food. Improvement in
communications and transportation has made it possible to send more food from
the place where it is produced to other places where it is needed. This has
helped reduce the number of famines. Progress in medicine and hygiene has made
it possible for people to live longer. People in Europe and North America live,
on the average, twice as long as they did a hundred years ago. In other
countries, too, people generally live much longer than they once did. Babies,
especially, have a far better chance of growing up because of increased
protection against infant diseases. However, all countries do not benefit to
same degree from this progress in medicine and hygiene.
Half
the world’s people live in Asia, but most of them are concentrated in the
coastal regions and on the islands. The same type of populace concentration is
true of other continents, although they are often far less populated. There are
still vast regions of the world where very few people live: the central regions
of the larger continents, mountainous areas, deserts, the far north, and
tropical jungles.
During the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries, migrations have taken place within certain countries: the cities with
their industries have attracted people away from the country. The
possibility of earning a fixed salary in a factory or office was more attractive
than the possibility of staying on the farm and having one’s work destroyed by
frost, storms, or droughts. Furthermore, the development of agricultural
machinery made it possible for fewer people to do the same amount of
work.
Thus, at the same time that the industrial revolution
made it possible to produce goods more cheaply and more quickly in factories, an
agricultural revolution also took place. Instead of leaving fields empty every
third year, farmers began to plant clover or some other crop that would enrich
the soil. Instead of using only animal fertilizer, farmers began to use chemical
fertilizers to keep the soil rich. These methods have enabled French farmers,
for example, to get five times as much wheat as was obtained from the same land
two centuries ago.According to the passage, today population has increased rapidly
because ______.
