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【正文】 nce, argues Paul Ehrlich of Stanford University, a pioneer of environmental studies, are those who question the evidence supporting global warming, the depletion of the ozone layer and other consequences of industrial growth.Indeed, some observers fear that the antiscience epithet is in danger of being meaningless. “The term ‘antiscience’ can lump together too many, quite different things,” notes Harvard University philosopher Gerald Holton in his 1993 work Science and AntiScience. “They have in mon only one thing that they tend to annoy or threaten those who regard themselves as more enlightened.”Text 4Emerging from the 1980 census is the picture of a nation developing more and more regional petition, as population growth in the Northeast and Midwest reaches a near standstill.This development and its strong implications for US politics and economy in years ahead has enthroned the South as America’s most densely populated region for the first time in the history of the nation’s head counting.Altogether, the US population rose in the 1970s by million people numerically the third largest growth ever recorded in a single decade. Even so, that gain adds up to only percent, lowest in American annual records except for the Depression years.Americans have been migrating south and west in larger number since World War II, and the pattern still prevails.Three sunbelt states Florida, Texas and California together had nearly 10 million more people in 1980 than a decade earlier. Among large cities, San Diego moved from 14th to 8th and San Antonio from 15th to 10th with Cleveland and Washington. D. C. dropping out of the top 10.Not all that shift can be attributed to the movement out of the snow belt, census officials say, Nonstop waves of immigrants played a role, too and so did bigger crops of babies as yesterday’s “baby boom” generation reached its child bearing years.Moreover, demographers see the continuing shift south and west as joined by a related but newer phenomenon: More and more, Americans apparently are looking not just for places with more jobs but with fewer people, too. Some instances—■Regionally, the Rocky Mountain states reported the most rapid growth rate percent since 1970 in a vast area with only 5 percent of the US population.■Among states, Nevada and Arizona grew fastest of all: and percent respectively. Except for Florida and Texas, the top 10 in rate of growth is posed of Western states with million people about 9 per square mile.The flight from overcrowdedness affects the migration from snow belt to more bearable climates.Nowhere do 1980 census statistics dramatize more the American search for spacious living than in the Far West. There, California added million to its population in the 1970s, more than any other state.In that decade, however, large numbers also migrated from California, mostly to other parts of the West. Often they chose and still are choosing somewhat colder climates such as Oregon, Idaho and Alaska in order to escape smog, crime and other plagues of urbanization in the Golden State.As a result, California’s growth rate dropped during the 1970s, to percent little more than two thirds the 1960s’ growth figure and considerably below that of other Western states.Text 5Scattered around the globe are more than 100 small regions of isolated volcanic activity known to geologists as hot spots. Unlike most of the world’s volcanoes, they are not always found at the boundaries of the great drifting plates that make up the earth’s surface。 on the contrary, many of them lie deep in the interior of a plate. Most of the hot spots move only slowly, and in some cases the movement of the plates past them has left trails of dead volcanoes. The hot spots and their volcanic trails are milestones that mark the passage of the plates.That the plates are moving is now beyond dispute. Africa and South America, for example, are moving away from each other as new material is injected into the sea floor between them. The plementary coastlines and certain geological features that seem to span the ocean are reminders of where the two continents were once joined. The relative motion of the plates carrying these continents has been constructed in detail, but the motion of one plate with respect to another cannot readily be translated into motion with respect to the earth’s interior. It is not possible to determine whether both continents are moving in opposite directions or whether one continent is stationary and the other is drifting