Section 5 (Reading)
Read the passage and choose the correct options.
Does a healthy world equal a healthy population?
If you had to guess, how large would you say that the world's population is today? At the time of writing, the world's population is around 7.7 billion. And in 1970? It was 3.6 billion. So it's taken only 50 years for the world population to double from 3.6 billion. And while it is still growing, the pace of that growth is slowing. Why? In a word: health.
To understand the start of the explosion, where (or when) should we begin? The year 1800, when we reached our first billion, is actually a good starting point, because that coincides with possibly the largest revolution in human history, the Industrial Revolution. With the increased migration from rural areas to cities and a general improvement in health during this time, the population of England, for example, doubled during the Industrial Revolution. One of the biggest factors in this was the development of the smallpox vaccine in 1796. As a disease, smallpox had been one of the biggest killers in history.
Another revolution happened around 130 years later. In 1928, Alexander Fleming returned to work from a two-week vacation to discover that an experiment he had left in his laboratory had become contaminated. But that contamination had the ability to kill bacteria. Fleming had accidentally discovered penicillin and therefore antibiotics. Thanks to Fleming, every year at least 150 million people in the USA alone have the chance to be treated with antibiotics.
Fast forward to our 1970 milestone, and people had better diets and better health, and major operations such as organ transplant surgery had become much more common. Plus, antiviral drugs had been invented, and people were much more aware of the dangers of smoking. So perhaps it's not surprising that the population took off after this date.
Today, you might think that the projected population in the next 50 years might double again to 15 billion, but in fact, the growth rate seems to be slowing down. There are various theories as to why this might be, and ironically, good health might be one of them. As more children survive infancy and suffer less from childhood diseases, there is less need to have a large family. This is a change that took place in developed nations during the 20th century, and that is taking place now in other parts of the world.
