Cheer up: Life only gets better - Unit 17

C2 Proficiency · Multiple Matching · Based on C2 Proficiency exam text

You are going to read a newspaper article about optimism. For questions 1–10, choose from the sections (A-D). The sections may be chosen more than once.

The human capacity for solving problems has been improving our lot for 10,000 years. The human race has expanded in numbers from less than 10 million people to around 7 billion. Life expectancy has more than doubled since the Stone Age. But today's people are much better fed, much better sheltered, and much more likely to live to old age than their ancestors have ever been. It is my case that by 2110 humanity will be much better off than it is today, and so will the ecology of the planet. This view, which I call rational optimism, is deeply unfashionable but it is ascendant. This belief holds that the world will pull out of its current economic and ecological crises by the way that markets in goods, services and ideas allow human beings to exchange and specialise for the betterment of all. But a constant drumbeat of pessimism usually drowns out this sort of talk. Indeed, if you dare to say the world is going to go on getting better, you are considered embarrassingly mad.

Let me make a square concession at the start: the pessimists are right when they say that if the world continues as it is, it will end in disaster. If agriculture continues to depend on irrigation and water stocks are depleted, then starvation will ensue. Notice the word 'if'. The world will not continue as it is. It is my proposition that the human race has become a collective problem-solving machine which solves problems by changing its ways. This happens through invention driven by the market: scarcity raises price and that in turn encourages the development of alternatives and efficiencies. History demonstrates this. When whales grew scarce for example, petroleum was substituted instead as a source of fuel. The pessimists' mistake is to assume that the future is just a bigger version of the past. In 1943 IBM chairman Thomas Watson said there would be a world market for just five computers - his remark remains true enough at the time computers weighed a ton and cost a fortune.

Today's extreme environmentalists insist that the world has reached a 'turning point', quite unaware that their intellectual ancestors have been making exactly the same claim for 200 years. They maintain that the only acceptable solution is to retreat - to halt economic growth and enter a deliberately engineered recession. This means not just that increasing a company's sales would be undesirable, but that the failure to increase them would be too. But this makes no account of the important thing called the collective brain. There was a time in human history when big-brained people began to exchange things with each other, to become better off as a result. Making and using tools saves time - and the state of being 'better off' is, at the end of the day, simply time saved. Forget dollars or gold. The true measure of something's worth is the hours it takes to acquire it. The more humans diversified as consumers and specialised as producers, and the more they exchanged goods and services, the better off they became. And the good news is there is no inevitable end to this process.

I am aware that an enormous bubble of debt has burst around the world, with all that entails. But is this the end of growth? Hardly. So long as somebody allocates sufficient capital to innovation, then the credit crunch will not prevent the relentless upward march of human living standards. Even the Great Depression of the 1930s, although an appalling hardship for many, was just a dip in the slope of economic progress. All sorts of new products and industries were born during the depression: by 1937, 40% of Dupont's sales came from products that had barely existed before 1929, such as enamels and cellulose film. Growth will resume - unless it is hampered by the wrong policies. Research somewhere, is still happening: a piece of software, testing a theory, or transferring a gene to enable new varieties of maize to be grown in African soils. That means some African farmers will be growing and selling more maize, so they will have more money to spend. Some of them may buy mobile phones made by a western company. As a result of the higher sales, an engineer in that western company may get a pay rise, which she may spend on a pair of jeans made from cotton woven in an African factory, and so on. Forget poems. This is the true theme: the metastasis of exchange and specialisation.

Defining happiness

Cheer up: life only gets better

how short-term gloom tends to lift?

a pessimistic forecast that is nothing new?

expresses hope that progress is not hindered by bad decisions?

acknowledge trying to find common ground with those who would oppose him?

states directly how money needs to be invested?

accepts that his views are considered controversial?

gives an absurd scenario resulting from an opposing view to his own?

describes the unfortunate consequences of taking a positive stance?

redefines prosperity in life in a new way?

an example of well-intentioned ongoing research?

Which section does the writer

Available as a free printable PDF worksheet with an optional answer key.

More C2 Proficiency Multiple Matching practice · All C2 Proficiency practice