Pertanyaan

The following text is for questions 41 to 43. Okutama, Japan (CNN). Four years ago, Naoko and Takayuki lda were given a house. For free. It'sa spacious, two-storey home nestled amid trees on a winding country road in the small town of Okutama, in Tokyo Prefecture. Before moving, the couple and their children-two teenagers and a five-year-old-were all living with Naoko's parents. "We had to do a lot of repair work (on our new home), but we'd always wanted to live in the countryside and have a big garden," said Naoko, 45. A free house may sound like a scam. But Japan faces an unusual property problem: it has more homes than people to live in them. ln 2013, there were 61 million houses and 52 million households, according to the Japan Policy Forum, and the situation is poised to get worse. Japan's population is expected to decline from 127 million to about 88 million by 2065, according to the National Institute of Population and Social Security, meaning even fewer people will need houses. As young people leave rural areas for city jobs, Japan's countryside has become haunted by deserted "ghost" houses, known as "akiya." It's predicted that by 2040, nearly 900 towns and villages across Japan will no longer exist - and Okutama is one of them. In that context, giving away property is a bid for survival. "In 2014, we discovered that Okutama was one of three Tokyo (prefecture) towns expected to vanish by 2040," says Kazutaka Niijima, an official with the Okutama Youth Revitalization (OYR) department, a government body set up to repopulate the town. ( Adopted from: https://edition.cnn.com/2018/12/05/asia/japanvacant-akiya-ghost-homes/index.html (April 25, 2019 )) '"In 2014, we discovered that Okutama was one of three Tokyo (prefecture) towns expected to vanish by 2040,' says Kazutaka Niijima, .... " (Last paragraph) The underlined word has similar meaning to ____.