急20分: Please answer me in English

When we talk about world population growth statistics, we get into very large numbers with many confusing zeroes at the end. While lots of 0's may bring back fond memories of our days of test scores and playing hooky from school, they do nothing to help us understand a factual sentence like: "The earth's population is projected to rise from 6,400,000,000 in 2004 to 8,900,000,000 in 2050."

That means we will likely increase world population by 2.5 billion people in the next half-century, but how do we put such a large number in context to make it easier to grasp? Does population growth just mean a few more people at the next block party, or will the teeming masses start falling off the edge of whatever cliff they're closest to?

In this article, we'll try to make sense of world population growth statistics, and then we'll discuss why this increase in global population is significant.


For simplicity's sake, we'll assume the population increase between now and 2050 will be linear. (Experts predicts that population growth will be faster in the early part of the period than in the later part, but for our purposes, working with an average increase will be fine.) Remember, we're talking about the NET population growth—the number of new people born minus the number who die.

If we convert the total population growth of 2.5 billion for the first half of the 21st century to an annual rate of growth, we can expect 54 million additional people per year to occupy the planet. That large a number still seems pretty hard to relate to, though, so if we take it down to a per-day figure—which would be 149,000 net additional people per day—it's

more understandable because we can compare it to figures we're familiar with. For instance, 149,000 is two or three football stadiums worth of people (depending on the stadium capacity). Maybe that doesn't seem like so many people at first, but remember how shocked we were when we were told about the death toll from the December 2004 Asian tsunami—several hundred thousand people died. Yet today we're adding that many new people to the planet's population every two days.

We should:

continue to strive to reduce suffering by combating disease and poverty around the world;
continue to improve resource efficiency and pollution control so that standards of living can rise without negative impact; and
keep human population to numbers that are sustainable.
On the population front, that means:

making sure people around the world have access to family planning services;
empowering women in developing countries economically, socially, and legally in a manner that results in them having an equal say (with their husbands) in reproductive decisions;
modifying school curricula to include information on population levels and implications for the future;
reforming tax laws in a way that encourages couples to have no more than two children. (They would still be able to have as many kids as they want, but the tax code would no longer subsidize more than two.)
People are a good thing, but population growth without limit is not. The US and all developed countries should reinvigorate their international efforts to slow population growth. The future of the world depends on it!

Birth controling is a very good solution.But in some country,this is not allowed.So there is another way.Perhaps it is not useful,but the problem can not be neglected.Let the people realize how serious that they must to do something to make the problem up.