Vocabulary Practice 1
Ex.1. Suggest Russian equivalents for these word combinations, reproduce the context in which they are used in the text.
a demographic time bomb
to change beyond recognition
a looming crisis
a general rhetoric
inflow of migrants // influx of immigrants
plenty of entrants from all points of the compass
the most populous EU country
outnumber non-Muslims
projected growth rates
to stir unease
exacerbate tensions
hinder assimilation
spark off the debate
Ex.2. Continue the strings of collocations, translate them. Make up a sentence with one collocation from each list.
a looming crisis, __________, __________, _________
projected growth rates, ___________, ___________, __________
to exacerbate tensions, ____________, ___________, ___________
hinder assimilation, ____________, ___________, ___________, ___________
to spark off a debate, ___________, ___________, ___________, ___________
to stir unease, ______________, ________________, _____________, ____________
Ex.3. Fill in the gaps with the words from Ex. 1 and Ex. 2.
The _________ of immigrants appears likely to _________ _________ between some minority groups, particularly blacks, and immigrants.
Over the last 50 years the population has _________ _________ ________ so that these days the tag "Leicester born and bred" applies to people whose parents have settled here from all corners of the world.
A _______ _________ _________ is a potential crisis situation in most countries characterized by an increasing number of older people dependent on pension schemes.
If Afghanistan's growth rate remained the same (the country's ________ growth rate for 2025 is a mere 2.3%), then the population of 30 million would become 60 million in 2020.
Bishop Dr. Zac Niringiye has warned of a _______ _________ in Uganda if the population growth rate is not drastically reduced.
David Cameron has announced that he would abolish the climate change tax, but he has still not put forward a concrete alternative. This is yet another example of more empty ________ from the Tories.
The bill is starting to _______ _________, because it requires private organizations to make decisions that conflict with their deeply held beliefs.
In fact, demographers say this year could be the "tipping point" when the number of babies born to minorities ________ that of babies born to whites.
As Spain plunged into recession in 2009 the _________ of immigrants has slowed drastically and many foreign nationals have returned to their home countries after losing their jobs.
The United States began negotiations with Poland and the Czech Republic to install a radar and missile interceptors, angering Russia and _______ _______ in some European countries.
While the prolonged recession has led to a certain slowing of the influx of foreign _________ in Japan, the number of foreign residents in Japan has continued to increase.
India will become the most _________ country overtaking China by 2050, the United Nation Population Fund (UNFPA) has projected.
A landmark speech by Javier Solana was set to _________ the debate on future relations between the US and the EU after the huge damage created by the American-led preventative war against Iraq.
We are fighting against discriminations such as school segregation and covert racism in jobs that _________ ___________ of our group into the society.
Reading 2
PRE-READING QUESTIONS
What do you know about the consequences of China’s one-child policy?
Can you guess from the title what issue the article below deals with?
Skim the article to find out if you guessed correctly.
Gendercide: the worldwide war on baby girls
Technology, declining fertility and ancient prejudice are combining to unbalance societies The Economist print edition, March 2010
In January 2010 the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS) showed what can happen to a country when girl babies don’t count. Within ten years, the academy said, one in five young men would be unable to find a bride because of the dearth of young women—a figure unprecedented in a country at peace. The number is based on the sexual discrepancy among people aged 19 and below. According to CASS, China in 2020 will have 30m-40m more men of this age than young women. So within ten years, China faces the prospect of having the equivalent of the whole young male population of America with little prospect of marriage, not attached to a home of their own and without the stake in society that marriage and children provide.
Gendercide—to borrow the title of a 1985 book by Mary Anne Warren—is often seen as an unintended consequence of China’s one-child policy, or as a product of poverty or ignorance. But that cannot be the whole story. The surplus of bachelors—called in China guanggun, or “bare branches”— seems to have accelerated between 1990 and 2005, in ways not obviously linked to the one-child policy, which was introduced in 1979. And, as is becoming clear, the war against baby girls is not confined to China. Parts of India have male/female ratios as distorted as anything in its northern neighbour. Other East Asian countries—South Korea, Singapore and Taiwan—have peculiarly high numbers of male births. Former communist countries in the Caucasus and the western Balkans have been following suit since the collapse of the Soviet Union.
The real cause, argues Nick Eberstadt, a demographer and a think-tank in Washington, DC, is not any country’s particular policy but “the fateful collision between a discernible son preference, the use of rapidly spreading prenatal sex-determination technology and declining fertility.” These are global trends. And the selective destruction of baby girls is global, too.
Boys are slightly more likely to die in infancy than girls. To compensate, more boys are born than girls so there will be equal numbers of young men and women at puberty. In all societies between 103 and 106 boys are normally born for every 100 girls. The ratio has been so stable over time that it appears to be the natural order of things. That order has changed fundamentally in the past 25 years. According to CASS the sex ratio in China today is 123 boys per 100 girls. As CASS says, “the gender imbalance has been growing wider year after year.” These rates are biologically impossible without human intervention.
South Korea is experiencing some surprising consequences of similar gender imbalance. The surplus of bachelors in a rich country has sucked in brides from abroad. In 2008, 11% of marriages were “mixed”, mostly between a Korean man and a foreign woman. This is causing tensions in a hitherto homogeneous society, which is often hostile to the children of mixed marriages. The trend is especially marked in rural areas, where the government thinks half the children of farm households will be mixed by 2020. The children have produced a new word: “Kosians”, or Korean-Asians.
Conventional wisdom about such sexual disparities is that they are the result of “backward thinking” in old-fashioned societies or—in China—of the one-child policy. By implication, reforming the policy or modernising the society (by, for example, enhancing the status of women) should bring the sex ratio back to normal. But this is not always true and, where it is, the road to normal sex ratios is winding and bumpy.
Not all traditional societies show a discernible preference for sons over daughters. But in those that do—especially those in which the family line passes through the son and in which he is supposed to look after his parents in old age—a son is worth more than a daughter. A girl is deemed to have joined her husband’s family on marriage, and is lost to her parents. As a Hindu saying puts it, “Raising a daughter is like watering your neighbours’ garden.”
Until the 1980s people in poor countries could do little about their son preference: before birth, nature took its course. But in that decade, ultrasound scanning and other methods of detecting the sex of a child before birth began to make their appearance. These technologies changed everything. Doctors in India started advertising ultrasound scans with the slogan “Pay 5,000 rupees ($110) today and save 50,000 rupees tomorrow” (the saving was on the cost of a daughter’s dowry). The use of sex-selective abortion was banned in India in 1994 and in China in 1995. It is illegal in most countries (though Sweden legalised the practice in 2009). But since it is almost impossible to prove that an abortion has been carried out for reasons of sex selection, the practice remains widespread.
Sexual disparities tend to rise with income and education, which you would not expect if “backward thinking” was all that mattered. In India, some of the most prosperous states—Maharashtra, Punjab, Gujarat—have the worst sex ratios. In China, the higher a province’s literacy rate, the more skewed its sex ratio. The ratio also rises with income per head. Modernisation and rising incomes make it easier and more desirable to select the sex of your children. And on top of that smaller families combine with greater wealth to reinforce the imperative to produce a son. If you have only one or two children, the birth of a daughter may be at a son’s expense. So, with rising incomes and falling fertility, more and more people live in the smaller, richer families that are under the most pressure to produce a son.
The hazards of bare branches
Throughout human history, young men have been responsible for the vast preponderance of crime and violence—especially single men in countries where status and social acceptance depend on being married and having children, as it does in China and India. A rising population of frustrated single men spells trouble.
The crime rate has almost doubled in China during the past 20 years of rising sex ratios, with stories abounding of bride abduction, the trafficking of women, rape and prostitution. A study into whether these things were connected concluded that they were, and that higher sex ratios accounted for about one-seventh of the rise in crime. In India, too, there is a correlation between provincial crime rates and sex ratios. The social problems of biased sex ratios could even lead to more authoritarian policing. Governments must decrease the threat to society posed by these young men. Increased authoritarianism in an effort to crack down on crime, gangs, smuggling and so forth can be one of the results.
Violence is not the only consequence. In parts of India, the cost of dowries is said to have fallen. Where people pay a bride price that price has risen. During the 1990s, China saw the appearance of tens of thousands of “extra-birth guerrilla troops”—couples from one-child areas who live in a legal limbo, shifting restlessly from city to city in order to shield their two or three children from the authorities’ baleful eye. And, according to the World Health Organisation, female suicide rates in China are among the highest in the world (as are South Korea’s). Suicide is the commonest form of death among Chinese rural women aged 15-34 who cannot live with the knowledge that they have killed their baby daughters.
Some of the consequences of the skewed sex ratio have been unexpected. It has probably increased China’s savings rate. This is because parents with a single son save to increase his chances of attracting a wife in China’s ultra-competitive marriage market. About half the increase in China’s savings in the past 25 years can be attributed to the rise in the sex ratio.
Over the next generation, many of the problems associated with sex selection will get worse. The social consequences will become more evident because the boys born in large numbers over the past decade will reach maturity then. Meanwhile, the practice of sex selection itself may spread because fertility rates are continuing to fall and ultrasound scanners reach throughout the developing world.
Yet the story of the destruction of baby girls does not end in deepest gloom. At least one country—South Korea—has reversed its cultural preference for sons and cut the distorted sex ratio. There are reasons for thinking China and India might follow suit. Though it takes a long time for social norms favouring sons to alter, and though the transition can be delayed by the introduction of ultrasound scans, eventually change will come. Modernisation not only makes it easier for parents to control the sex of their children, it also changes people’s values and undermines those norms which set a higher store on sons. At some point, one trend becomes more important than the other.
Though the two giants are much poorer than South Korea, their governments are doing more than it ever did to persuade people to treat girls equally (through anti-discrimination laws and media campaigns). The unintended consequences of sex selection have been vast. They may get worse. But, at long last there seems to be an incipient turnaround in the phenomenon of “missing girls” in Asia.
COMPREHENSION ASSIGNMENTS
A. In pairs, discuss how you understand the clauses/sentences below. If still in doubt, discuss them as a class.
… when baby girls don’t count.
Former communist countries … have been following suit …
The surplus of bachelors in a rich country has sucked in brides from abroad.
… the road to normal sex ratios is winding and bumpy.
“Raising a daughter is like watering your neighbours’ garden.”
A rising population of frustrated single men spells trouble.
… couples from one-child areas who live in a legal limbo, shifting restlessly from city to city in order to shield their two or three children from the authorities’ baleful eye.
B. Answer the questions on the text.
What countries/regions have skewed male/female ratios?
What do these sexual disparities result from? What facts prove that they don’t stem from ‘backward thinking’?
What are the current and likely consequences of the distorted sex ratio?
What is being done and can be done to reverse the trend?
Speak Up
DISCUSSION QUESTION
Do you think the trend discussed in the article has any implications for international politics?
FOLLOW-UP
A. Make a three-minute statement on
demographic trends in Europe, Asia, the Americas and their implications for global development.
Vocabulary Practice 2
Ex.4. Suggest Russian equivalents for these word combinations from the text, reproduce the context in which they are used in the text.
the dearth of young women
sexual discrepancy // disparities
unintended consequence
the surplus of bachelors
male/female ratio // sex ratio
a distorted ratio
to follow suit
a discernible son preference // to show a discernible preference for sons over daughters
prenatal sex-determination technology
declining // falling fertility
gender imbalance
a hitherto homogeneous society
backward thinking
spell trouble
the authorities’ baleful eye
Ex.5. Continue the following strings of collocations with the words in bold. Use some of the word combinations in sentences of your own.
sexual, ___________, ___________, ___________ discrepancy
distorted ratio, __________, __________, ___________
a discernible preference, __________, __________, __________
homogeneous society, ___________, ___________, ______________
spell trouble, __________, __________, __________, _______________
Ex.6. Fill in the gaps using the words and expressions from Ex.4 and Ex.5.
The new recruitment policies _________ _________ as men lacking even an elementary education were entering an organization whose greatest demand was for personnel with high technical qualifications.
In less developed nations the gender _________ in life expectancy is smaller than in the developed nations, and it has increased in favor of women in the last 35.
Whether a country of integration or of a melting pot, America thrives and has always thrived due to the __________ of immigrants finding refuge in America.
An __________ __________ comes about when a mechanism that has been installed in the world with the intention of producing one result is used to produce a different (and often conflicting) result.
The human _________ __________ is the number of males for each female in a population.
Ukraine's accession to the World Trade Organization will encourage Belarus to _________ __________.
Simplest conclusion is that the __________ of women scientists is caused largely by bias and social factors.
Make sure that you are actually comfortable with the instructor as there is nothing worse than operating under the __________ __________ of a teacher you simply detest.
Mr. Camby has no ___________ ___________ between alligator and crocodile but says his favorite reptile ''is a dead one.''
_________ __________ leads to backward behaviour, backward behaviour leads to backward society, backward society leads to exploitation and corruption.
If parents are given the opportunity to choose the sex of their child and if children of one sex are preferred this will result in a __________ sex ratio among children and adults.
The Indian Parliament had to pass a law regulating medical use of __________ technology and made it illegal to advertise such services.
The grave consequences of _________ have escaped public attention because of the great concern during the past decades about overpopulation.
Seriously though, there is a _________ __________ in Russia, due to the shortage of Russian men Russian women have no option but to marry foreigners.
A ___________ society is such a society where most of the people share the same type of cultural values, language, ethnicity and religious system.