Today, experts guess that over 50% of people worldwide live in cities. By the year 2050, they expect 70% are going to be living in cities. They also say that more of the world’s cities will be megacities!
A megacity is a huge city. It might be any city with over 10 million people. However, it is harder to count the exact number of people living in a city than one might think. For one thing, it is not always clear who to count. For the other, many megacities do not have clear borders(边界) for where the city ends. Suburbs and regions around the city may or may not be included in the city’s total population.
Even with the difficulty of saying where a city ends and who to count, it is clear that certain cities around the world are megacities. Sao Paulo, the city with the most people in South America, is one, New York, the most famous city in North America, is another. Then there is Tokyo, a megacity with over 30 million people. This makes it the largest megacity in the world.
A mega-region, develops when megacities become so big that we can consider them to be connected. One report by the United Nations said the largest mega-region today is in China. The megacities included in this region are Hong Kong, Shenzhen, and Guangzhou. However, a mega-region does not have to be limited to one country. In West Africa, a mega-region connects four countries: Nigeria, Benin, Togo, and Ghana.
An important fact about mega-regions is how much economic power they have. Research by the United Nations found that 66% of economic activity worldwide happened within the world’s 40 largest mega-regions. The research also showed that 85% of new ideas in technology and science came from these 40 mega-regions. Less than 20% of the world’s population, however, lives in these mega-regions.
【小题1】What is the best title for the text?| A．Good Things about Living in Cities | B．Problems with Too Many People |
| C．Huge Cities and Regions | D．The City with the Highest Population |
| A．People are born every day. | B．The suburbs grow too quickly. |
| C．More people move to the cities. | D．Defining the border of the city is hard. |
| A．London. | B．Nigeria. | C．Guangdong. | D．Hong Kong. |
| A．Connected megacities. | B．Large areas with many suburbs. |
| C．Places with over 10 million people. | D．Countries with three or more megacities. |
| A．There is a mega-region in Africa. |
| B．One-third of the world’s population lives in them. |
| C．Most new ideas in science and technology come from them. |
| D．Two-thirds of the world’s economic activity happens in them. |
