Passage4

Questions 16 to 20 are based on the following passage.

In 1575, the French scholar Louis LeRoy published a learned book in which he voiced despair over the changes caused by the social and technological innovations of his time, what we now call the Renaissance. We also feel that our times are out of order; we even have reason to believe that our descendants will be worse off than we are.

The earth will soon be overcrowded and its resources exhausted. Pollution will ruin the environment, upset the climate, and damage human health. The gap in living standards between the rich and the poor will widen and lead the angry, hungry people of the world to acts of desperation including the use of nuclear weapons as blackmail. Such are the inevitable consequences of population and technological growth if present trends continue.

The future is never a projection (投射) of the past Animals probably have no chance to escape the tyranny of biological evolution, but human beings are blessed with the freedom of social evolution. For us, trend is not destiny. The escape from existing trends is now facilitated by the fact that societies anticipate future dangers and take preventive steps against expected changes.

Despite the widespread belief that the world has become to complex for comprehension by the human brain, modem societies have often responded effectively to critical situations. The decrease in birth rates, the partial prohibition of pesticides and the rethinking of technologies of the production and use of energy are but a few examples illustrating a sudden reversal of trends caused not by political upsets or scientific breakthroughs, but by public awareness of consequences.

Even more striking are the situations in which social attitudes concerning future difficulties undergo rapid changes before the problems have arisen. There have been the heated arguments about the problems of behavior control and of genetic engineering, even though there is as yet no proof that effective methods can be developed to manipulate behavior and genes on ? population scale.

One of the characteristics of our times is thus the rapidity with which steps can be taken to change the orientation of certain trends and even to reverse them. Such changes usually emerge from grassroots movements rather than from official directives.

It can be inferred from the 1 paragraph that Louis LeRoy, the changes in his time ______