西班牙任命“房事部长” 挽救出生率

西班牙近年来人口出生率不断下降，政府想出了一个办法，任命首位房事部长（Minister of Sex），希望能挽救这一局面。

Spain has appointed its first Minister of Sex whose job will be to get people busy between the sheets.
西班牙任命首位“房事部长”，其职责就是让人们多多“滚床单”。

The government hopes to boost Spain’s falling birth rate, which is one of the lowest in the developed world.
西班牙政府希望藉此提高该国下滑的生育率，西班牙的生育率在发达国家中倒数。

Prime minister Mariano Rajoy appointed Edelmira Barreira as the country’s sex tsar to get Spaniards to produce more babies.
西班牙首相马里亚诺•拉霍伊任命芭雷拉为首位“房事部长”，提高西班牙的生育率。

The country is faced with a population crisis, with fewer births than deaths recorded for the first time last year.
西班牙面临人口危机。去年，该国的出生人口首次低于死亡人口。

Experts say long working hours and a culture of eating late at night and going to bed after midnight are partly to blame for the nation’s sex famine.
专家指出，工作时间长、太晚吃饭的习惯、午夜后才就寝，是造成西班牙“性饥荒”的部分原因。

Rafael Puyol, of the IE Business School in Madrid, said: “They do not help with making a family. Then when a child arrives it is even worse.”
马德里商学院的拉斐尔-普约尔说：“这些都对家庭生活无益，有了孩子会更糟糕。”

Since 2008 the number of births in Spain has plunged by 18 percent.
自2008年以来，西班牙的出生人口已经下降了18%。

And the number of childless couples has nearly tripled from 1.5million in 1977 to 4.4million in 2015.
2015年丁克夫妇人数为440万，是1977年150万的近三倍。

Most Spanish women say they would like two or more children but in 2015 those aged 18 to 49 had an average of 1.3 children – well below the EU figure of 1.58.
多数西班牙女性称她们想要两个或更多孩子，但2015年，年龄在18岁到49岁的女性平均只有1.3名子女，低于欧盟平均值1.58。