General ESL Vocabulary MCQ Test With Answers – Advanced Level Exercise 12

_____ population growth in less developed countries is widely regarded as a major obstacle to their material progress and a major global economic and political problem.

The recent rapid increase in population in less developed countries reflects a _____ fall in mortality.

Thomas Malthus predicted in the late 18th century that world population would inevitably rise above the ability of the land to nourish it, and that the result would be mass _____ and war.

The population problem has global _____, but action to cope with it is mainly a national responsibility.

Providing structures, facilities and services, and coping with unemployment, pollution, congestion, crime and social alienation are formidable _____.

The Ministry of Agriculture experts cannot  _____ when the new technology will arrive or how it will affect international commerce in foodstuffs.

In the last 40 years alone, modern farming methods have _____ or even tripled yields per land unit for major food grains such as wheat, rice and corn.

To many people in industrialized countries, with their incomparably more _____ populations, food is something that comes from the supermarket; agriculture is a dusty and mysterious process of interest only to a group of people known as farmers.

In some cases, the more prosperous groups have been relatively recent immigrants, who mostly came in empty-handed but were  _____, ambitious, energetic, and resourceful.

Another development has been the scientific-technological industrial revolution which has since World War II changed social and environmental _____ so rapidly that many persons have lost their traditional role in society.

Biology has much to tell us about our nature and our origins -- though, admittedly, not too much about the reasons for our  _____.

This is legitimate investigation of reproductive biology, indispensible for birth control on the one hand and treatment of infertility on the other, with a more _____ possibility that it can contribute to efforts to prevent genetic defects.

To shy back in _____ from knowledge when we are at the threshold of knowing so much more would, in my view, be tragic.

Evolution, along with other theories and discoveries in biology, seems to _____ the materialist position.

The building blocks of living molecules have been produced in the laboratory by subjecting _____ materials to the simulated  conditions presumed to have existed in the earth's early atmosphere.

Chemical companies are speculating that the next _____ of chemicals will come, not from petroleum, but from genetically engineered plants.

The days when the farmer produced almost everything the farm needed from potatoes to pork, kept what was _____ and sold the rest, are long gone.

Even with the recent succession of better-than-average harvests, world food reserves today _____ only 19 percent of annual world consumption.

Developing countries are becoming increasingly _____ on food imports from two countries - the United States and Canada.

Present and foreseeable increases in world population will call for increases in materials and energy unlikely to be _____ if present practices, policies and lifestyles persist.