Page 54 - In Focus (demo)

UNIT 2

2 Core vocabulary

A Scanning and skimming

1 Find and underline the keywords in the text. Try to guess their meanings.
Keywords

era estate forecast household increasingly
largely previous rural ultimately wage

Population

Pyramids

ne way of looking at population change is with
a type of graph called a population pyramid.
OIt is called a pyramid because that used to be
the most common shape. We can see this shape with
5 Japan’s population in 1950 in Chart A. Th e population
was largely young then, and it was the end of an era
when most people lived in the countryside. In these
rural areas, children often worked together with their parents
and helped to produce the food, goods, and household products

10 that the family needed. There were many diseases without cures
and these often killed children, so families were large to increase
the chance that some children would live to become adults.

In Chart B, the pyramid for the year 2000 shows a big diff erence
from the previous chart. There are two reasons for this change.

15 First, children increasingly went to school instead of working.
Rather than add to the family estate, children became an
expense. Second, new medicines cured children’s
diseases like smallpox, measles, and polio, so large
families were no longer needed.

20 While it is always difficult to give an accurate forecast,
it seems that Japan and other countries with similar
population structures, such as South Korea, will
ultimately have a pyramid like the one in Chart C.
The big question is how society will pay for the large

25 number of elderly people. Taxes on workers’ wages will
not be enough, so we may see major changes in those
societies.

2 Read the titles below. Which would also be a good title for the text?
Circle A, B, or C.

A Childhood Diseases
B Child Workers
10 C Changing Societies