Question

Today, many green-leaning writers and activists argue that population control is the best solution to the problems we face. ___________________. Since the times of Thomas Malthus (1766-1834), a catastrophic vision of population growth causing the collapse of society, has formed an important part of the culturally pessimistic outlook. Back in the eighteenth century, it was predicted that population growth would lead to famine, starvation and death. Today’spessimists have raised the stakes further: they denounce population growth as a threat to bio-diversity and to the very existence of the planet.

• A. In the West, the population-control lobby castigates those who have large families for being environmentally irresponsible
• B. Twenty-first-century Malthusians are concerned that people are producing and consuming too much food and other commodities.
• C. This belief that there are ‘too many people’ inhabiting the globe has reared its ugly head numerous times over the past 200 years.
• D. Alongside today’s respect for human life, there is the increasingly popular idea that there is too much human life around, and that it is killing the planet.
• E. The humanist impulse that once drove the development of the modern world has been replaced by a tendency to view the growth of human beings with suspicion

Answer 1

The correct option is C This belief that there are ‘too many people’ inhabiting the globe has reared its ugly head numerous times over the past 200 years.

Option (c)

The passage is about present and past attitudes towards population growth. The missing sentence must link together these two, as the sentence before it talks about the present and the following sentence about the past. On this basis, [a] and [d] can be negated, as they refer only to the present attitudes, not the past ones. [e] contradicts the idea in the passage that both the past and present attitudes have been negative, i,e., in the past too, population growth was viewed with suspicion. [b] can be dismissed, as the term ‘Malthusians’ makes no sense prior to the introduction of Malthus, which is not until the next sentence. The word ‘this’ in [c] refers to the writers’ and activists’ arguments in the first sentence, and thereby suitably provides the necessary link. Hence, [c].