2017年10月07日新SAT亚太地区写作原文

Lighten up, Sir David. Our wildlife is safe.

1080 words

Editorial

Newspaper article

Published

NI Syndication Limited, 2013 Sept 12

Appears In

The Times (London, England), 2013 Sept 12, p.27 (ISSN: 0140-0460)

Published

NI Syndication Limited, 2013 Sept 12

FALLING POPULATION, MORE WILDERNESS IN 2100

Published on: Sunday, 15 September, 2013

Sir David Attenborough's pessimism is misplaced

My recent column in the Times addresses the demographic transition and land-sparing:

写作原文

1 Publicising his imminent new series about the evolution of animals, Sir David Attenborough said in an interview this week that he thought a reduction in human population during this century is impossible and “we’re lucky to be living when we are, because things are going to get worse”. People will look back in another 100 years “at a world that was less crowded, full of natural wonders, and healthier”.

2 His is a common view and one I used to share. He longs for people to enjoy the open spaces and abundant herds of game that he has been fortunate enough to see. To that end he thinks it vital that there should be fewer of us.

3 Ever so politely, I would now passionately disagree with the two premises of his argument. It’s actually quite likely, rather than impossible, that population will be falling by the end of this century and it is also quite likely that the people alive then will have lots more wilderness to explore and wildlife to admire than today.

4 The rate at which world population grows has roughly halved from more than 2 per cent a year in the 1960s to roughly 1 per cent a year now. Even the total number of people added to the annual population has been dropping for nearly 30 years. If those declines continue, they will hit zero in about 2070 — not much more than 50 years from now. In recent decades the birth rate has fallen in every part of the world. Fertility in Bangladesh has fallen from nearly 7 children per woman in the 1960s to just over 2 today; Kenya from 8 to 4.5; Brazil 5.7 to 1.8; Iran 6.8 to 1.9; Ireland 3.9 to 2.

5 It is still conventional wisdom that the only way to get population growth down is to be nasty to people, albeit with noble motives. You must coerce, bribe, shame or educate them into having fewer babies against their preferences. One country — China — did indeed bring down its birth rate with coercive measures in the shape of a one-child policy. Another — India — tried to introduce coerced sterilisation in the 1960s in return for food aid from America, but was defeated by popular protest and democracy, factors unknown in China.

6 Yet everywhere else voluntary birth control proved a more effective weapon than coercion, and the birth rate came down just as fast. This was because nice things happened: economic growth, female emancipation and, above all, the conquest of child mortality. So long as women have some access to the means of birth control, then one of the best predictors of a falling birth rate is a falling child mortality rate. Once children stop dying in infancy, people plan smaller families. Once they think their kids will survive, they start investing in them, rather than in having more kids.

7 You can see this in the statistics. There is no country on Earth with a child mortality rate below 10 per 1,000 births that has a fertility higher than 3 children per woman; whereas all countries except one (Swaziland) that have a child mortality rate above 100 also have a fertility rate above 4.5. Keep kids alive and you bring down population growth.

8 Which is why the recent plummeting of child mortality in Africa is such good news for Sir David and others with his concerns. Thanks to rapid economic growth, better governance and much improved public health, especially against malaria, most African countries are now experiencing child-mortality falls of 5 per cent or more a year, a rate that is far more rapid than it was in the 1990s. These falls will surely soon be followed, as night follows day, by an even faster fall in birth rates.

9 Europe, Asia and Latin America have already gone through this transition and most countries are producing babies at or below replacement rate of 2.2 per woman, at which population stabilises (without immigration). Africa, for so long written off as a special (basket) case, is following suit almost exactly.

10 For this reason alone, I suspect the world population will stop growing and begin to shrink even earlier than 2070 and almost certainly within this century. But even if it does not, there is good reason to reassure Sir David that our great grandchildren will have more wildlife to look at than he has had. An ingenious study by scientists at Rockefeller University in New York has recently calculated that even with population continuing to grow, and even with people eating more food and especially more meat, we have almost certainly already passed “peak farmland”, because of the rate at which fertilisers are improving yields. (Or we would have done if not for biofuels projects.) We will feed nine or ten billion people in 2070 from a considerably smaller acreage than we need to feed seven billion today.

11 Land sparing is already occurring on a grand scale. Forest cover is increasing in many parts of the world, from Scotland to Bangladesh. Wildlife populations are booming in Europe (deer, bears, boar, otters), in the polar regions (walrus, seals, penguins, whales) and North America (turkeys, coyotes, bison, geese) and this is happening fastest in the richest countries. According to one recent report, animal populations grew by 6 per cent in Europe, North America and Northern Asia between 1970 and 2012, while shrinking in tropical regions. There is almost a perfect correlation between the severity of conservation problems and poverty, because the richer people get, the less they try to live off the land and compete with nature — the less they seek bushmeat and charcoal from the forest.

12 Once again, Africa may spring a pleasant surprise. Over the past four decades agricultural yields in Africa hardly budged while they doubled or quadrupled in most of Asia. That is almost entirely down to a dearth of fertiliser and it is beginning to change. If African yields were to rise, the acreage devoted to farmland globally would start to fall even faster, releasing more and more land for “re-wilding”. The great herds and flocks that so delight Sir David would reassemble in more and more places. The happy conclusion is that making people better off and making nature better off are not in opposition; they go hand in hand.

下面是2017年10月07日考回部分，整体感觉：这次试题的整体感觉和2017年5月亚洲一样。阅读偏难，语法简单，数学中规中矩。所以对于高二首考的同学来说，肯定有点难度。对于高三党来说，历史的对比文章估计很熟悉，毕竟对历史的句子和题材/人物都有一定了解。

阅读

1. Passage 1的小说节选自Barbara的Flight Behaviors。 故事里面母子两位主要人物去郊区看蝴蝶。但是儿子眼睛看不见，文章主要讲解母亲的一些内心思考。文章故事情节不多，侧重人物内心reflection。出题的选项也不容易找到。

2. 社会科学：有关经济类话题，提到了凯恩斯经济学和布雷顿森林体系(Bretton Woods system)。这篇文章如果是没有接触过经济学的同学看起来估计比较吃力点。毕竟里面专业术语比较多，比如通货膨胀，利率调整等等。

文章叙述了布雷顿森林体系的提出和很多学者对其的评价。但是最后作者提出其实真正有用和主导地位的还是美元经济。

3. 树木可以聚集金子gold。这篇自然科学算是5篇文中比较简单的了。每个段落主旨清晰，出题也很容易找到。主要讲的是某种植物可以吸收环境中的gold，然后聚集到各个部位-twigs， leaves。

4. 历史对比文章-篇来自Frederick Douglass-Oration in memory of Abraham Lincoln。第二篇来自于Booker T. Washington。 篇文章主要观点是林肯虽然废奴，但是其实都是为了自己的利益;而第二篇观点则是林肯废奴其实对于美国各个阶层和人群都是非常有好处的。里面的出的词汇题interest 在我们考前的历史熟词僻义中汇总过(正确选项为concern，不能选profit，注意抽象和具体的区别即可)。

P1文章节选

5. 第五篇文章为地质类文章，和今年5月的考试风格几乎一致。虽然是自然科学，但是文章的专业术语过多，段落碎片化严重。所以信息不是很容易寻找。特别还出了一道Least explain/support 题目，算是需要整体理解全文的逻辑了。

语法

整体来说，考点都是上课老师会提到的，具体的词汇辨析题这边有整理。其他的主要考查到简洁concise原则, 标点符号，逻辑修辞，代词等等常规考点。

1. 网络新闻对于记者的技能要求：里面出的词汇题为traditional, sites track还是很简单的。

2. 动物的play的方式：词汇题competitve

3. 总统候选人的debate和演讲作用评价： 主要结合图表题进行总统辩论和演讲的作用分析，其实用处不大。里面的词汇题主要考查文本和单词的正式，所以teeny，petite都过于口语化，选择minuscule。另外考了固定搭配 place an emphasis on …

4. 当代艺术的欣赏和爆发：讲解的是一对兄弟推出在当时看来很radical的绘画，然后向大家讲解当代艺术的欣赏。最后一题词汇题非常难，考查thrill, hysteria, thrill, mayhem等等这些词。

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