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考研英语阅读理解有一部分是截取自报刊文章，因此考生在复习备考的过程中要注意提高报刊文章的阅读能力，把握时事阅读。下面新东方在线小编分享历年真题同源的30篇报刊文章，附有注释和解析，希望考生认真阅读，提高对此类文章的阅读能力和增加相关词汇量。
考研英语阅读真题同源报刊文章30篇（15）
Declining populations：Incredible shrinking
countries
During the second half of the 20th century, the global population explosion
was the big demographic bogey. Robert McNamara, president of the World Bank in
the 1970s, compared the threat of unmanageable population pressures with the
danger of nuclear war. Now that worry has evaporated, and this century is
spooking itself with the opposite fear: the onset of demographic decline.
The shrinkage of Russia and eastern Europe is familiar, though not perhaps
the scale of it: Russia’s population is expected to fall by 22% between 2005 and
2050, Ukraine’s by a staggering 43%. Now the phenomenon is creeping into the
rich world: Japan has started to shrink and others, such as Italy and Germany,
will soon follow. Even China’s population will be declining by the early 2030s,
according to the UN, which projects that by 2050 populations will be lower than
they are today in 50 countries.
Demographic decline worries people because it is believed to go hand in
hand with economic decline. At the extremes it may well be the result of
economic factors: pessimism may depress the birth rate and push up rates of
suicide and alcoholism. But, in the main, demographic decline is the consequence
of the low fertility that generally goes with growing prosperity. In Japan, for
instance, birth rates fell below the replacement rate of 2.1 children per woman
in the mid1970s and have been particularly low in the past 15 years.
But if demographic decline is not generally a consequence of economic
decline, surely it must be a cause? In a crude sense, yes. As populations
shrink, GDP growth will slow. Some economies may even start to shrink, too. The
result will be a loss of economic influence.
Governments hate the idea of a shrinking population because the absolute
size of GDP matters for greatpower status. The bigger the economy, the bigger
the military, the greater the geopolitical clout: annual GDP estimates were
first introduced in America in the 1940s as part of its war effort. Companies
worry, too: they do not like the idea of their domestic markets shrinking.
People should not mind, though. What matters for economic welfare is GDP per
person.
The crucial question is therefore what the effect of demographic decline is
on the growth of GDP per person. The bad news is that this looks likely to slow
because workingage populations will decline more rapidly than overall
populations. Yet this need not happen. Productivity growth may keep up growth in
GDP per person: as labour becomes scarcer, and pressure to introduce new
technologies to boost workers’ efficiency increases, so the productivity of
labour may rise faster. Anyway, retirement ages can be lifted to increase the
supply of labour even when the population is declining.
People love to worry-maybe it’s a symptom of ageing populations-but the
gloom surrounding population declines misses the main point. The new
demographics that are causing populations to age and to shrink are something to
celebrate. Humanity was once caught in the trap of high fertility and high
mortality. Now it has escaped into the freedom of low fertility and low
mortality. Women’s control over the number of children they have is an
unqualified good-as is the average person’s enjoyment, in rich countries, of ten
more years of life than they had in 1960. Politicians may fear the decline of
their nations’ economic prowess, but people should celebrate the new
demographics as heralding a golden age.
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发表于 2017-8-6 15:51:11
