【正文】 PART I Writing [30 MIN] write a short essay entitled My View on Cyber Language. 2不同的人有不同的看法 3我認(rèn)為 …… My View on Cyber Language PART II Reading Comprehension [Skimming and Scanning] [15 MIN ] The Global Food Crisis and Thomas Malthus Last year the skyrocketing cost of food was a wakeup call for the pla. Between 20xx and the summer of 20xx, the price of wheat and corn tripled, and the price of rice climbed fivefold, spurring food riots in nearly two dozen countries and pushing 75 million more people into poverty. But unlike previous shocks driven by shortterm food shortages, this price spike came in a year when the world39。s farmers reaped a record grain trop. This time, the high prices were a symptom of a larger problem tugging at the strands of our worldwide food web, one that39。s not going away anytime soon. Simply put: for most of the past decade, the world has been consuming more food than it has been producing. After years of drawing down stockpiles, in 20xx the world has seen global carryover stocks fall to 61 days of global consumption, the second lowest on record.” Agricultural productivity growth is only one to two percent a year, warned Joachim von Braun, director general of the International Food Polity Research Institute in Washington, ., at the height of the crisis. This is too low to meet population growth and increased demand:39。 Rebrospectian: Malthus39。Theory Ever since our ancestors gave up hunting and gathering for plowing and planting some 12,000 years ago, our numbers have marched corresponding with our agricultural productivity Each advancethe domestication of animals, irrigation, and wet rice productionled to a corresponding jump in human population. Every time food was stately supplied, population eventually leveled off. Early Arab and Chinese writers noted the relationship between population and food resources, but it wasn’t until the end of the 18th Century that a British scholar tried to explain the exact mechanism linking the twoand became perhaps the mast vilified(遭人辱罵的〕 social scientist in history. Thomas Robert Malthus, the namesake of such terms as Malthusian collapse and Malthusian curse, was a mildmannered mathematician, a clergymanand, his critics would say, the ultimate glasshalfempty kind of guy. When a few Enlightenment philosophers, giddy from the success of the French Revolution, began predicting tile continued improvement of the human condition, Malthus cut them off at the knees. Human population, he observed, increases at a geometric rate, doubling about every 25 years if unchecked, while agricultural production increases arithmeticallymuch more slowly. Therein lay a biological trap that humanity could never escape. The power of population is indefinitely greater than the power in the earth to produce subsistence for man, he wrote in his Essay an the Principle of Population in 1798. This implies a strong and constantly operating check on population from the difficulty subsistence. Malthus thought such checks could be voluntary, such as birth control, abstinence, or delayed marriageor involuntary, through the disaster of war, famine, and disease. He advocated against food relief for all but the poorest people, since he felt such aid encouraged more children to be horn into misery. That tough love earned him a bad name in English literature from none other than Charles Dickens. When Ebenezer Scrooge is asked to give help for the poor in A Christmas Carol, the heartless banker tells the dogooders that the poor should head for the workhouses or prisons. And if they39。d rather die than go there, they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population. Rereading Malthus39。 Essay On a brisk fall day that has put color into the cheeks of the most diehard Londoners, I visit the British Library and check out the first edition of the book that still generates such heated debate. Malthus39。s Essay on the Principle of Population looks like an eighthgrade science primer. From its strong, clear prose es the voice of a humble parish priest who hoped, as much as anything, to be proved wrong. People who say Malthus is wrong usually haven39。t read him, says Tim Dyson, a professor of population studies at the London School of Economics. He was not taking a view any different than what Adam Smith took in the first volume of The Wealth of Nations. No one in their right mind doubts the idea that populations have to live within their resource base. And that the capacity of society to increase resources from that base is ultimately limited. Though his essays emphasized positive checks on population from famine, disease, and war, his preventative checks have been more important. A growing workforce, Malthus explained, depresses wages, which tends to make people delay marriage until they can better support a family. Delaying marriage reduces fertility rates, creating an equally check on populations. It has now been shown that this is the basic mechanism that regulated population growth in western Europe for some 300 years before the industrial revolutiona pretty good record for any social scientist, says Dyson. Yet when Britain recently issued a new 20pound note, it put Adam Smith an the back, not TR. Malthus. He doesn39。t fit the trend of the moment. We don39。t