Passage One English is one of the most important languages of the world today spoken by more than 300,000,000 people, end it is the second widely used modem language. Only Chinese is spoken by more people. Linguists classify English as a Germanic language. Its closest linguistic 'relatives' are Frisian, Dutch, Flemish, and Low German. More distant relatives include Swedish, Danish, Norwegian, Icelandic, and Modem High German. Its most distant 'relatives' include other members of the Indo-European language family of which the Germanic languages are a part. The English language as we currently know it is the result of approximately 1500 years of development. Interestingly, the origins of modern English are not in England itself, but in southern Denmark and northern Germany, since the language which eventually developed into modern English was brought by people called the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes when they invaded the British Isles in the fifth Century. The Celtic language spoken by the earliest inhabitants of England were displaced and the Celtic-speaking people were driven by the invaders into what we now know as Wales, Scotland, end Ireland. Celtic languages are still spoken in parts of these countries. Linguists divide the development of English him 3 periods Old English, Middle English, and Modem English. The Modem English period is then further divided into Early Modem English end Late Modem English. The Old English period spanned approximately 500 years--from around 450 to around 1100. The Middle period lasted roughly 400 years--from about 1100 until around 1500. The Modem English period began around 1500, with Early Modem English lasting until approximately 1750 end Late Modem English from then to the present The vocabulary of Modern English is probably more extensive then that of may other languages in the world. It has been estimated that the total number of Modem English words is over 1,000,000, if one includes slang end recent technical and scientific terms. The great number of words in the Modem English lexicon is largely due to the fact that English has been always a 'word-borrowing' language. In the Old English period, there were borrowings from Latin, Greek, Danish, and, to a small extent, Celtic languages. In the Middle English period, there were further borrowings from Danish, and also—to a large degree--from Norman French. In the Modern English period, there have been more borrowings from Latin, Greek, and a large number of European and other languages. All in all, English has 'adopted' words from more than 50 other languages. Passage Two A very important world problem, if not the most serious of all the great world problems which affect us at the moment, is the increasing number of people who actually inhabit this planet. The limited amount of land and land resources will soon be unable to support the huge population if it continues to grow at the present rate. In an early survey conducted in 1888, a billion and a half inhabited the earth. Now, the population exceeds five billion and growing fast--by the staggering figure of 90 million in 1988 alone. This means that the world must accommodate a new population roughly equal to that of the United States and Canada every three years! Even though the rate of growth has begun to slow down, most experts believe the population size will still pass eight billion during the next 50 years. If we examine the amount of land available for this ever-increasing population, we begin to see the problem. If everyone on the planet had an equal share of land, we would each have about 50,000 square meters. This figure seems to be quite encouraging until we examine the type of land we would have. Not all land is useful to humans as it cannot produce food. We can cut out about one fifth of it because it is permanently covered by