题目内容
Prolonging Human Life
Prolonging human life has increased the size of the human population．Many people alive today would have died of childhood diseases if they had been born 100 years ago．Because more people live longer, there are more people around at any given time．In fact, it is a decrease in death rates, not an increase in birthrates that has led to the population explosion.
Prolonging human life has also increased the dependency load．In all societies, people who are disabled or too young or too old to work are dependent on the rest of society to provide for them．In hunting and gathering cultures, old people who failed to follow the others were left behind to die．In times of famine, infants might be allowed to die because they couldn't survive if their parents starved, whereas if the parents survived they could have another child．In most contemporary societies, people feel a moral obligation to keep people alive whether they can work or not．We have a great many people today who live past the age at which they want to work or are able to work; we also have rules that require people to retire at a certain age．Unless these people were able to save money for their retirement, somebody else must support them．In the United States many retired
people live on social security checks that are so little that they must live in near poverty.Older people have more illness than young or middle-aged people; unless they have wealth or private or government insurance, they must often "go on welfare" if they have a serious illness.
When older people become senile or too weak and ill to care for themselves, they create grave problems for their families．In the past and in some traditional cultures, they would be cared for at home until they died．Today, with most members of a household working or in school, .there; is often no one at home who can :care for a sick or weak person．To, meet this need, a great many nursing homes and convalescent hospitals (康复医院) have been built．These are often profit-making organizations, although some are sponsored by religious and other nonprofit groups．While a few of these institutions are good,most of them are simply "dumping grounds" for the dying in which "care" is given by poorly paid, overworked, and under skilled personnel.
第 36 题 The writer believes that the population explosion results from____.
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We can use our more mature style. of thinking thanks to_____
In about 15 years' time from now, robots
Electronic Mail
During the past few years, scientists all over the world have suddenly found them- selves productively engaged in task they once spent their lives avoiding--writing, any kind of writing, but particularly letter writing．Encouraged by electronic mail's surprisingly high speed, convenience and economy, people who never before touched the stuff are regularly, skillfully, even cheerfully tapping out a great deal of correspondence.
Electronic networks, woven into the fabric of scientific communication these days, are the route to colleagues in distant countries, shared data, bulletin boards and electronic journals．Anyone with a personal computer, a modem and the software to link computers over telephone lines can sign on．An estimated five million scientists have done so with more joining every day, most of them communicating through a bundle of interconnected domestic and foreign routes known collectively as the Internet, or net.
E-mail is starling to edge out the fax, the telephone, overnight mail, and of course, land mail．It shrinks time and distance between scientific collaborators, in part because it is conveniently asynchronous (异步的). (Writers can type while their colleagues across time zones sleep; their message will be waiting．) If it is not yet speeding discoveries, it is certainly accelerating communication.
Jeremy Bernstein, the physicist and science writer, once called E-mail the physicist's umbilical cord (脐带)．Lately other people, too, have been discovering its connective virtues．Physicists are using it; college students are using it; everybody is using it; and as a sign that it has come of age, the New Yorker has celebrated its liberating presence with a cartoon- an appreciative dog seated at a keyboard, saying happily, "On the Internet, no- body knows you're a dog．"
第 31 题 The reasons given below about the popularity of E-mail can he found in the passage EXCEPT
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