Soaring divorce rates around the globe are affecting the environment, American researchers suggested in a study released Monday.
Michigan State University researcher Jianguo “Jack” Liu and his assistant Eunice Yu said the increasing number of divorces leads to more households with fewer people and greater consumption of water and energy. They said housing units require space, construction materials and fuel to heat and cool, regardless of the number of inhabitants.
For example, in the United States in 2005, divorced households consumed an extra 73 billion kilowatt hours of electricity and 627 billion gallons of water. An additional 38 million extra rooms required heating and lighting that same year due to divorced households.
“A married household actually uses resources more efficiently than a divorced household”, Liu said. He said that in cohabitating households, people will watch the same television, share the air conditioning and heat and use the same refrigerator, all things that use energy at a regularly stable rate regardless of the number of users.
Liu said he was not condemning divorce, “Some people really need to get divorces.” He said that cohabitation was simply a more environmentally friendly option. Additionally, the researchers noted that trends other than divorce are also changing family living structures, such as the end of multiple generations of a family sharing a home and people remaining single longer.
“People’s first reaction to this research is surprise, and then it seems simple.” Liu said in a release, “But a lot of things become simple after research is done. Our challenges were to connect the dots and quantify their relationships. People have been talking about how to protect the environment and refuse climate change, but divorce is an overlooked factor that needs to be considered.”
He said the increasing energy demands caused by divorce should be considered by governments when they are creating environmental policies.
This passage is mainly meant to ____.
A. inform the reader of the increasing divorce in America
B. emphasize the importance of protecting the environment
C. tell people the effect divorce has on the environment
D. appeal to married people to keep their households
According to the passage, what’s the attitude of Mr. Liu towards divorce?
A. Supportive B. Objective. C. Indifferent. D. Unclear.
It can be inferred from the passage that ____.
A. divorced households will promote the sales of products
B. married households are more willing to protect the environment
C. divorced households contribute more to the society’s development
D. divorce is not taken into account when people are protecting the environment
From this passage we can find that ____.
A. divorce rates are quickly rising globally these years
B. cohabiting households will increase consumption of water and energy
C. to divorce is a wise option according to the passage
D. the end of multi-generations of a family will save energy