Passage Four The world population reached 6. 6 billionthis year，upfrom 6 billion in 1999. By 2025, researchers expect nearly 8 billion peoplewill be living on the planet. Ninety-nine per cent of those new inhabitantswill be in developing countries. Three million migrants are moving frompoor countries to wealthier ones each year, and increasingly, their destinationis a neighboring country in developing parts of the world. Those statisticscome from an annual demographic snapshot of global population numbers andtrends, produced by the Population Reference Bureau. Rachel Nugent, an economist with theresearch group, points to the population shifts that are occurring now fromBangladesh to India or from India, Egypt and Yemen to the Persian Gulf. She says people are moving within thedeveloping world for the same reasons they migrate to wealthier nations. “People from very poorcountries (are) going to less poor countries ,people fleeing wars and conflict.” She adds that they are also responding to population pressuresbecause, she says, “some countries are very denselypopulated, and they often have high population growth. Those people need to gosomewhere, and they are often going looking for jobs. Nugent says migration from Guatemala toMexico is one such example. “And many Guatemalans go to Mexico, probably 25,000 a year that stayand 100,000 a year that go back and forth. And that is a pretty high proportionof 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 128million people, will lose 16 million. Population Reference Bureau seniordemographer and survey author Carl Haub says this is going to be a threat toeconomic health. “The number of young people in many European countries is half of thesize of their parents’ generation,” he says. “So what you see today are thecorporations, 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 findworkers’ So they will have to come from some place andthat’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
