Comprehension Passages
Baby killed in front of parents
from The Star
Beijing - China has been shaken by one of the most horrifying cases of official infanticide after family planners drowned a healthy baby in front of its parents.
The actions of the officials in the village of Caidian, in the central Hubei province, carried
out as part of China's one-child policy, caused a public outcry. It forced the Hubei government
to pledge that those responsible would be punished.
The baby's mother, identified by Chinese newspapers as Mrs Liu, was expecting her fourth child.
She was forcibly injected with a saline solution to induce labour and kill the child. However, the baby was born healthy, to the surprise of family-planning officials who had ordered the injection, which ordinarily destroys the infant's nervous system.
Immediately after the birth, they ordered the father to kill the child, but he refused.
During the ensuing argument, the officials grabbed the baby, dragged it out of the
house and drowned it in a paddy field.
Since its implementation in the early 1970s, the one-child policy has been dogged by allegations that family-planning officials force those who break the rules into having abortions.
The policy was introduced to ensure that China, a land historically beset by floods and famine, could feed all its people, now exceeding 1.1 billion, from a mere 7% of the world's arable
land. - The Times, London
Questions
- What do the following words mean?
- infanticide (paragraph 1)
- outcry (paragraph 2)
- saline (paragraph 3)
- arable (paragraph 6)
- From what you have read, describe what China's family-planning policy is.
- How had the Liu family broken the law?
- Quote a sentence which suggests that this is not the first time this sort of thing has happened.
- If the policy is so controversial, why do you think it was introduced?
Debate topic
This House proposes that a one-child policy should be adopted in South Africa!
