銀行◆英文題庫下載題庫

第一篇：

 In the late 1970s and early 1980s, the government advocated a “later, longer, fewer” lifestyle, encouraging people to marry later, have wider gaps between children and fewer children overall. It also set up the controversial one-child policy. These were attempts to curb population growth in order to help modernize the economy. 

Chinese women are having fewer children, but having a smaller generation following a boom generation—and longer life expectancies—means that by 2050, for every 100 people aged 20-64, there will be 45 people aged over 65, compared with about 15 today. 

China’s fertility rate—the average number of children a woman has in their lifetime—is 1.6, which is lower than the rate in the UK and the US. 

The Chinese government believes the one-child policy curtailed population growth, and that it prevented 400 million extra births. Yet a population expert’s findings suggest that China’s fertility would have declined at a similar rate without the one-child policy and would continue to decline even if the policy was discarded. One explanation could be that the policy caused anxiety among the population, which prompted many to have children at an earlier time. And there was a decline in age at first marriage and age at first childbearing in the 1980s. 

Since 2013, there has been a gradual relaxation of China’s family planning laws that already allowed minority ethnic families and rural couples whose firstborn was a girl to have more than one child. In 2015, China officially announced that all couples are allowed to have two children to balance population development and address the challenge of an aging society. But human rights groups said if China is serious about respecting human rights, the government should immediately end such invasive and punitive controls over people’s decisions to plan families and have children.