大学英语泛读

A great many people are anxious about having chidren. I hear about this frequently from young men and women passing through Hrvard-more than ever before in many three and a half decades here. And I hear about it in conversations with my peers, frustratsd by the slow accumulation of grandchildren.

Though population in south America and africa and the Indian subcontinent continue to grow at an alarming rate, the U.S.media direat their attention increasingly to labor shortages in industrial societies and to shrinking school populations in affluent American suburbs. Thinking people have heard, and are talking about the "birth dearth" as Ben Wattenberg named it in the title of a recent book. Day-care and parental benefits, which will presumably increase the birth-rate, earn approving mention in the platforms of both political parties and in glossy annual repots of large companies.

The concern about fertility also bubbles to the surface in artistic renderings of contemporary and future life - in light movies like Baby Boom and Three Men and a Baby,for example, about young women trying to reconcile careers and parenthood, and in serious novels,like Margaret Atwood's Tale, with its fantasy of a not-too-distant future in which the dwindling number of fertile women are made slaves to reproduction.

Low fertility，of course，is hardly a new worry.Some of its history，especially that in Europe since the middle of the nineteenth century，is well and compactly told by Michael Teitelbaum and Jay Winter in their book The Fear of Population Decline.Some French writers attributed the defeat of their nation in France-Prussian War in 1871 to the slow French rate of reproduction，as compare with that of fecund Germany.Fertility became a central issue in early-twentieth-century French politics.Besides being blamed for France’s i nability to field an army large enough to defeat the Germans and also have a functioning economy at home,low fertility was seen by various contemporary French commentators as the cause of “national degeneracy”,a disease of the French spirit.

Fiction echoed reality, as it does everwhere.In Emile Zola’s novel Fecondite,happiness and personal triumph came to a working-class couple with fifteen children and scores of grandchildren,rather than to various unappealing bourgeois,with their selfish but miserable lives,andtheir small families.Zola was one of the founding members of the National Alliance for the Growth of the French Population.

16:According to the author, political parties and large compenies in the U.S._____.

A. have given favorable consideration to day-care and parental benefits

B. pay little atttion to labor shortages in industrial societies

C. are concerned about the alarming effect of a population explosion

D. are worried about the steady fall in the rich population

17. In Handmaid's tale, Margaret Atwood showed her concern about_____.

A. the incredible rate of population growth

B. the miserable fate of fertile women

C. the low fertility in the mear future

D. the big drop in the slave population

18. Some French writers believed that defeat of france in France-Prussian War was due to ______.

A. France's failing economy at home during the wartime

B. France's inability to provide its army with enough soldiers

C. France's incompetence to national disease

D. France's fear of population decline as compared with Germany

19. Judging from the context, the word "fecund"(Line 5,Para.4) means_____.

A. well-wquipped

B. self-confident

C. reproductive

D. advanced

20. Which of the following is false according to the passage ?

A. Zola was an advocate of the growth of the Frence population.

B. population in South America and Africa are still on the rise.

C. Low fertility caught people's attention as early as the mid-19th century.

D. The author's generation shows little concern about the falling birthrate.