Section C
Almost every activity in life requires communication. When you make a speech at school, 【11】______your food at a restaurant, or tell a joke, you are communicating. Learning to speak and express your thoughts【12】______is the basic requirement of good communication. But there is【13】______to speaking-one that's often neglected. That's "listening" If you don't listen, how will you know what to say when your workmate needs help or your friend is upset? So, try to remember that good communicators listener twice【14】______as they speak. Maybe that's why God gave us two ears and just one【15】______.
【11】
A. order
B. elder
C. older
D. orderly
If the weather isn't too cold, people sit out front. If it is hot, the open air is the only air-conditioning they get. At least, the street lights still burn. Indoors, few people can afford to keep lights burning after supper.
As for the winter—well, it is inconvenient to be cold, with most of what furnace fuel is allowed hoarded for the dawn. But sweaters are popular indoor wear. Showers are not an everyday luxury.
It is sore in the suburbs, which were born with the auto, lived with the auto, and are dying with the auto. Suburbanites from associations that assign turns to the procurement and distribution of food. Rushcarts creak from house to house along the posh suburban roads, and every bad snowstorm is a disaster. It isn't easy to hoard enough food to last till the roads are open.
What energy is left must be conserved for agriculture. The great car factories make trucks and farm machinery almost exclusively. The American population isn't going up much any more, but the food supply must be kept high even though the prices and difficulty of distribution force each American to eat less. Food is needed for export to pay for some trickles of oil and for other resources.
The rest of the world is not as lucky as we are. They're starving out there because earth's population has continued to rise. The population on earth is 5.5 billion—up by 1.5 billion since 1997—and outside the United States and Europe, not more than one in five has enough to eat at any given time. There is a high infant mortality rate.
It's more than just starvation, though. There are those who manage to survive on barely enough to keep the body working, and that proves to be not enough for the brain. It is estimated that nearly two billion people in the world are permanently brain damaged by undernutrition, and the number is growing.
At least, the big armies are gone. Only the United States and the Soviet Union can maintain a few tanks, planes, and ships—which they dare not move for fear of biting into limited fuel reserves.
Machines must be replaced by human muscle and beasts of burden. People are working longer hours, and with lighting restricted, television only three hours a night, new books few and printed in small editions—what is there to do with leisure? Work, sleep, and eating are the great trinity of 1997, and only the first two are guaranteed.
What is the passage about?
A. It is a history of life in 1907.
B. It is the description of life after a war.
C. It is an imaginary account of life in 1997.
D. It is a scientific study of life in 1997.