In recent years we have come to realize that several threats to the environment
类型：学习教育
题目总量：200万+
软件评价：
下载版本
问答题The Threatened Environment
In recent years we have come to realize that several threats to the environment are fundamental. One is acid rain, which is created by the millions of tones of sulphur dioxide and nitrogen oxides spewed out of North American smokestacks and automobile exhaust pipes. The oxides mix with water vapor in the air to form weak sulphuric and nitric acid, which later falls as acid rain. The result is increased acidity in lakes, which has curtailed the ability of many fish to reproduce, and in the soil, which has slowed the growth of trees and increased their vulnerability to disease.
With every news report, the externality dimension of environmental problems seems to become clearer. For instance, it was recently reported that Lapp villagers in northern Sweden and Norway were forbidden to eat local reindeer meat after their herds became contaminated by fallout from the nuclear accident at ChernobyI in far-off Ukraine. Similarly, Canadian wildlife scientists have found high levels of PCBs and other contaminants in polar-bear livers.
But some pollution problems involve such dramatic externalities that the whole world is affected. One example is the greenhouse effect. The steadily rising and essentially irreversible concentration of carbon dioxide in the earth’s atmosphere causes it to trap increasing amounts of the heat radiated by the planet. The general warming trend is expected to have disastrous effects, including mass starvation in some less developed countries, flooding of entire coastal areas, and severe droughts on the Canadian Prairies, perhaps within the next fifty years.
Another worldwide threat is in the upper atmospherethe thinning of the layer of ozone, a bluish gas that shields the earth from the sun’s ultraviolet rays. Synthetic chemicals called chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) are depleting the ozone layer. One estimated result is that the chance of getting skin cancer is now 8 to 16 percent greater than it was in 1950.
Hazardous wastes (such as those from nuclear plants, industrial manufacturing, laboratories, and medical institutions) represent yet another critical environmental problem improperly disposed, they can threaten all forms of organic life. Unfortunately, little has been done so far to solve this problem. Indeed there are many instances in which industrialized countries have literally just shipped the problem off to the poorest of the less developed countriescountries unequipped with the necessary storage and treatment facilities, and certainly too poor to deal with the serious environmental problems that will follow. For example, in 1988 the government of Guinea-Bissau signed a contract with two British firms to receive 15 million tones of pharmaceutical wastes over a five-year period. While this arrangement was very inexpensive from the firms’ point of view, the payments to Guinea-Bissau totaled more than four times that county’s national product. It makes it difficult to solve the problem when parts of the world are so poor that they are forced to regard such transactions as “good deals”.
The users of the world’s resources simply must be made to take the external costs of their actions into consideration when making their decisions. The people who are hacking down the world’s rain forests at the rate of 1200 hectares an hour are literally cutting away the lungs of the earth, since rain forests contribute a large percentage of the oxygen in the earth’s atmosphere. But these individuals are not necessarily evil: in many cases, they are forced to overuse the environment for their own or their country’s immediate survival. For example, some developing countries’ needs for foreign exchange to pay for imports compel them to cut timber faster than it can be regenerated. They simply cannot afford to worry about the future.
Obviously, many of these problems cannot be solved without political decisions to redistribute income to the less developed countries, and to define property rights. But the right kinds of political and institutional changes will be forthcoming only if they are rooted in an understanding of the externality dimension of environmental issues.
In recent years we have come to realize that several threats to the environment are fundamental. One is acid rain, which is created by the millions of tones of sulphur dioxide and nitrogen oxides spewed out of North American smokestacks and automobile exhaust pipes. The oxides mix with water vapor in the air to form weak sulphuric and nitric acid, which later falls as acid rain. The result is increased acidity in lakes, which has curtailed the ability of many fish to reproduce, and in the soil, which has slowed the growth of trees and increased their vulnerability to disease.
With every news report, the externality dimension of environmental problems seems to become clearer. For instance, it was recently reported that Lapp villagers in northern Sweden and Norway were forbidden to eat local reindeer meat after their herds became contaminated by fallout from the nuclear accident at ChernobyI in far-off Ukraine. Similarly, Canadian wildlife scientists have found high levels of PCBs and other contaminants in polar-bear livers.
But some pollution problems involve such dramatic externalities that the whole world is affected. One example is the greenhouse effect. The steadily rising and essentially irreversible concentration of carbon dioxide in the earth’s atmosphere causes it to trap increasing amounts of the heat radiated by the planet. The general warming trend is expected to have disastrous effects, including mass starvation in some less developed countries, flooding of entire coastal areas, and severe droughts on the Canadian Prairies, perhaps within the next fifty years.
Another worldwide threat is in the upper atmospherethe thinning of the layer of ozone, a bluish gas that shields the earth from the sun’s ultraviolet rays. Synthetic chemicals called chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) are depleting the ozone layer. One estimated result is that the chance of getting skin cancer is now 8 to 16 percent greater than it was in 1950.
Hazardous wastes (such as those from nuclear plants, industrial manufacturing, laboratories, and medical institutions) represent yet another critical environmental problem improperly disposed, they can threaten all forms of organic life. Unfortunately, little has been done so far to solve this problem. Indeed there are many instances in which industrialized countries have literally just shipped the problem off to the poorest of the less developed countriescountries unequipped with the necessary storage and treatment facilities, and certainly too poor to deal with the serious environmental problems that will follow. For example, in 1988 the government of Guinea-Bissau signed a contract with two British firms to receive 15 million tones of pharmaceutical wastes over a five-year period. While this arrangement was very inexpensive from the firms’ point of view, the payments to Guinea-Bissau totaled more than four times that county’s national product. It makes it difficult to solve the problem when parts of the world are so poor that they are forced to regard such transactions as “good deals”.
The users of the world’s resources simply must be made to take the external costs of their actions into consideration when making their decisions. The people who are hacking down the world’s rain forests at the rate of 1200 hectares an hour are literally cutting away the lungs of the earth, since rain forests contribute a large percentage of the oxygen in the earth’s atmosphere. But these individuals are not necessarily evil: in many cases, they are forced to overuse the environment for their own or their country’s immediate survival. For example, some developing countries’ needs for foreign exchange to pay for imports compel them to cut timber faster than it can be regenerated. They simply cannot afford to worry about the future.
Obviously, many of these problems cannot be solved without political decisions to redistribute income to the less developed countries, and to define property rights. But the right kinds of political and institutional changes will be forthcoming only if they are rooted in an understanding of the externality dimension of environmental issues.
参考答案：
答案解析：
涉及考点
2022翻译三级笔译实务考试大纲
一、英译汉
7、资源环境类
相关题库
| 题库产品名称 | 试题数量 | 优惠价 | 免费体验 | 购买 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2022年翻译三级《英语笔译实务》考试题库 | 74题 | ￥98.00 | 免费体检 | 立即购买 |
你可能感兴趣的试题
- · 据有关官员和内部人士上周末透露，我国将于本月底之前开始实行有利于中低收入者的新住房政策查看答案
- · A famous American John Muir said in 1898：”The Grand Canyon…as unearthly in the查看答案
- · San Francisco, open your Golden Gate, sang the girl in the theatre. She 查看答案
- · However good the state schools may be, it is still true that if an English parent查看答案
- · The most common source of debt financing for start-ups often isn’t a commercial lending 查看答案
微信扫码关注焚题库
-
历年真题
历年考试真题试卷，真实检验
-
章节练习
按章节做题，系统练习不遗漏
-
考前试卷
考前2套试卷，助力抢分
-
模拟试题
海量考试试卷及答案，分数评估