Passage Four
The world population reached 6. 6 billion this year，up from 6 billion in 1999. By 2025, researchers expect nearly 8 billion people will be living on the planet. Ninety-nine per cent of those new inhabitants will be in developing countries.
Three million migrants are moving from poor countries to wealthier ones each year, and increasingly, their destination is a neighboring country in developing parts of the world. Those statistics come from an annual demographic snapshot of global population numbers and trends, produced by the Population Reference Bureau.
Rachel Nugent, an economist with the research group, points to the population shifts that are occurring now from Bangladesh to India or from India, Egypt and Yemen to the Persian Gulf.
She says people are moving within the developing world for the same reasons they migrate to wealthier nations. “People from very poor countries (are) going to less poor countries ,people fleeing wars and conflict.” She adds that they are also responding to population pressures because, she says, “some countries are very densely populated, and they often have high population growth. Those people need to go somewhere, and they are often going looking for jobs.
Nugent says migration from Guatemala to Mexico is one such example. “And many Guatemalans go to Mexico, probably 25,000 a year that stay and 100,000 a year that go back and forth. And that is a pretty high proportion of the Guatemalan population.”
The United Nations projects that by 2050, the population of Europe, now at 750 million, will fall by 75 million；and Japan, home to 128 million people, will lose 16 million. Population Reference Bureau senior demographer and survey author Carl Haub says this is going to be a threat to economic health.
“The number of young people in many European countries is half of the size of their parents’ generation,” he says. “So what you see today are the corporations, the health care system in this country saying,’Listen! We can’t find workers. We haven’t had enough workers and now we can’t find workers’ So they will have to come from some place and that’s going to have to come from outside the country.
The population in Europe and Japan is.
A、shrinking
B、declining
C、increasing
D、exploding
【正确答案】：A
【题目解析】：推理题。第6段分别用数字说明了欧洲和日本的人口将会大大缩减。A项表收缩，缩小；B项表下降，削减，其中shrink比decline下降的幅度大。A项符合文意。答案为 A0