1 . The world’s population reached five billion on the day I was born. That was in Indonesia back in 1987, and my parents was shocked that there were so many people on the planet.
The human population has never been bigger, but in some ways the planet seems to begetting unbelievably smaller. In the past, travellers from Europe to Indonesia spent months at sea. Now you just have to sit on a plane for a few hours. When you arrived in another country a hundred years ago, you saw unfamiliar styles of clothing and buildings and discovered a completely different culture. In many places today, clothing and new buildings are very similar, and people enjoy the same things.
Even the languages that we use are becoming more global. There are around seven thousand languages in use today.
A.But the number is decreasing fast. |
B.Although we are on different continents, we are starting to live the same lives. |
C.The planet might be a lot more peaceful if that were the case. |
D.However, since then the population has continued to increase at an alarming rate. |
E.A number as big as seven billion is hard to imagine. |
F.With only one language left, there will be no culture difference in the world. |
2 . COVID-19 shutdowns forced people out of work and pushed tens of millions into poverty worldwide. Governments tried hard to provide aid. It was easy in a small country, but difficult for a country with large population and vast rural areas.
Researchers have been finding ways to identify areas of wealth and poverty in satellite images. Through some satellite data and aerial images of one town or another, you can sort of tell whether it’s wealthy or not. Wealthier homes tend to have metal roofs while poor homes tend to have thatched roofs. Wealthier neighborhoods have paved roads and bigger plots of lands, more spaced out.
The researchers use the system to identify about 60,000 people to receive benefits. The advantage of the satellite imagery and phone data approach is that it’s extremely fast and very convenient.
A.It was opposite in a big country. |
B.How do they locate the neediest people? |
C.So there’s a lot of information in the images. |
D.Most importantly, it’s very cheap to carry out. |
E.Worse still, it’s not so economical as a house-to-house survey. |
F.However, in general, poorer people will just have feature phones. |
G.What the researchers did next was to target the neediest people in those regions. |