大学英语实用阅读 ( 上 )

大学英语实用阅读(上) College English Reading

Unit 15 • Text: Is It Apocalypse Now? • Supplementary Reading: Passage 1 Is It Apocalypse Now? (continued) Passage 2 The End Is Not at Hand

Text: Is It Apocalypse Now? • Pre-Reading Questions • ComprehensionI. II. III.IV. • Vocabulary • Post-Reading Discussion

Pre-Reading Questions 1. What is apocalypse? And what does the author try to reveal here by using this word when discussing about environmental problems? 2. What are your attitudes toward the warnings given by the environmentalists? 3. Do you believe that the environmental problems we are facing will end life someday in the future?

Comprehension Directions: Translate following sentences into Chinese based on your understanding of the whole article. 1. Neither a brainless extrapolation of current trends nor a prediction, World 3 lays out possible futures and how they’d change if factors such as pollution control, fertility rate or crop yields changed. Its sobering conclusion: humankind is using resources and dumping waste at rates the planet cannot sustain. (Para. 2) World3游戏没有对当前发展趋势进行盲目推断和预测，它只是展示出未来可能的样子以及如何随着诸如污染控制、出生率和农业产量等因素的变化而变化。它所得出的一个实实在在的结论是：人类正在以这个星球无法承受的速度使用资源和倾倒废物。

2. What invention can’t cure, argue economists, markets can. (Para. 4) 经济学家们认为，会议（里约热内卢峰会）不能解决的，市场可以做到。 3. If governments would only scrap policies that encourage eco-stupidity—subsidies for cutting virgin forest in Oregon and Brazil, for growing rice in California, for raising cattle in Amazonia—the planet might be saved. (Para 4) 如果政府能废弃那些鼓励危害生态的愚蠢行径的政策，诸如为在巴西和美国俄勒冈州砍伐原始森林, 在美国加利福尼亚州种植水稻，以及在亚马逊流域牧牛而发放补贴，这个星球或许能够得救。

4. Eliminating that despair, especially by lowering infant-morality rates and raising the status of women, is how Europe, America, Canada, Japan and other nations managed to cap family size. (Para. 12) 设法消除这种绝望，这就是欧洲各国、美国、加拿大、日本及其他国家成功控制家庭规模所采用的方法，尤其是通过降低出生死亡率和提高妇女地位的方式。 5. If the technologies that brought acid rain and ozone holes along with sports cars and food processors are applied throughout the developing world, they will cause “truly catastrophic impacts on global climate, human health and the productivity of natural systems,” says WRI’s Speth. (Para. 13) 如果那些能够引致酸雨和臭氧空洞形成的科技成果同赛车和食品加工技术一样在发展中国家得到普遍利用的话，“它们将会给全球大气、人类健康以及大自然的产出带来灾难性的打击。”美国世界资源研究所的Speth先生如是说。

Comprehension Directions: Choose the best explanation to each of the sentences from the three choices that are following them. Its warning that population and growth might tip the world’s economic or biological life-support systems into collapse within 100 years was greeted with as much ridicule as reflection. (Para. 3) a. People were warned that population and growth might make the world’s economic or biological life-support systems break down within 100 years. This sounds ridiculous. b. People scorned the warning that the population and growth would probably destroy the world’s economic or biological life-support systems within 100 years. c. Those people who agreed with the warning that population and growth would tip the world’s economic or biological life-support systems into collapse within 100 years would be proved to be equally ridiculous as those who lost themselves in reflection.

Helping the poor to escape their misery through development has only a little to do with charity and everything to do with self-interest. (Para. 9) a. Self-interest, with a little of charity, is necessarily related in the process of helping those poor countries out of their great misfortune through their development. b. Self-interest, but not charity, is necessarily related in the process of helping those poor countries out of their great misfortune through their development. c. Self-interest, rather than charity, is necessarily related in the process of helping those poor countries out of their great misfortune through their development.

There will be no real brake on population growth as long as despair—over astronomical infant-mortality rates that make each birth a crapshoot, over eking out a living from garbage heaps and the unforgiving land—drives women to bear five, six, seven and eight children. (Para. 11) a. We will never reduce the speed of population growth until women are lifted out of the despair of having to bear more children in order to avoid the ill effect of infant-mortality rates and hard living. b. We will never reduce the speed of population growth and the despair that women are facing to bear more children in order to make infant-mortality rates lower and to make a better living. c. We will stop population growth by lifting women out of the despair of bearing more children in order to decrease infant-mortality rates.

Comprehension Directions: Learn how to support a viewpoint in an article by listing down facts or reasons. Try to restore the following paragraph excerpted from the article or list some items of fact in the form of a presentation in class. Rather than arguing about cyber-land, those who take World3 seriously prefer to make their case in the real world, where natural systems are already collapsing. (Para. 6) 1. Between 1985 and 1989 (the last available figures), food production per capita fell in 94 countries. 2. In parts of the United States and elsewhere, crop yields per acre are declining because of air pollution and the buildup of salt and chemicals. 3) The global fish catch fell (by 4 million tons) in 1990, for the first time in two decades.

4) Oysters in Chesapeake Bay, once so plentiful that they could filter all the bay’s water in three days, now number a mere 1 percent of their 1870 population; it takes the survivors one year to filter the bay. 5) Thailand had to ban commercial logging in 1989 when its forest cover fell from 29 percent in 1985 to 19 percent in 1988 and landslides from the denuded hills cost 40,000 people their homes; 6) The Philippines has suspended logging in most provinces. 7) Canada predicts that within 16 years all the old-growth forests of British Columbia will be gone; its wheat belt has lost half its organic material and is eroding badly, costing farmers $500 million to $900 million in lost crops.

(in the part of Stabilize population) How do these following two countries slash their fertility rate? China: Couples who have more children are fined as much as $2,000 and can be fired from their jobs. Costa Rica: The Caribbean nation provides near-universal access to birth control (in a nation where 90 percent of the population is Roman Catholic and local church officials regularly denounce contraception), boasts a literacy rate of 93 percent and produces billboards and condom packages advising, “Have only the number of children that you can make happy.” As a result, Costa Rica slashed its fertility rate from 7 to 3.5 children per woman in just 25 years.

Comprehension Directions: Discuss the following sayings quoted from the article and tell whether you agree or disagree with them. Explain your reasons. 1. “If changes are not made, then our computer model foresees collapse within 50 years.” (Para. 2) 2. The world must “change course” or face a collapse of the system that sustain life. (Para. 3) 3. “Unless we bring ourselves to accept the need from global and far-reaching change, we are headed for catastrophe.” (Para. 3)

4. “As long as there’s continued pressure for growth, and delays in reacting to limits, the system tends to [collapse].” (Para. 4) 5. “The scenarios are spun out of a mathematical model that has little to recommend it.” Economists who build scenarios “spend most of their time trying to verify that A is connected to B in the way the model says. There isn’t any reason to believe this model has done that. My view is that it’s bad science.” (Para 5)

6. “Poor people can be stopped at boarders, but poverty can’t be stopped. Poverty travels in the form of drugs, terrorism, global warming and AIDS. (Para 9) 7. “We think the human race is up to the challenge. We think that a better world is possible and that the acceptance of physical limits is the first step toward getting there.” (Para. 11) 8. “One child in the West consumes as much as 125 in the East. Nearly all the environmental degradation in the East is due to consumption in the West.” (Para. 11)

Vocabulary Directions: Choose the one word or phrase that is closest in meaning to the underlined part of the sentences taken or adapted from the article. By the year 2020 reserves of minerals and other resources have shrunk to just 30 years’ worth. Crop yields plummet; billions starve. Industrial output per capita crashes; the “rich” live at the level of 1900. a. plunge b. go up c. destroy d. decrease

Economists, who know all about wrong forecasts, criticize World3 for its hubris in plotting the 21st century’s population, industrial capacity, pollution and other indicators. a. stupidity b. alert c. arrogance d. kindness It also allows for pollution abatement, crop improvement and resource substitution. a. disappearance b. decrease c. control d. management

“The scenarios are spun out of a mathematical model that has little to recommend it,” says MIT’s Robert Solow, a Nobel laureate in economics. a. candidate b. winner c. applicant d. seeker But the incredible agricultural intensity causes galloping soil erosion. a. increasing b. enlarging c. expanding d. moving

China, Thailand, Singapore and Costa Rica have all gotten a grip on their once skyrocketing populations. a. control b. management c. punishment d. Encouragement If history is any guide, it will take a few generations for lower death rates to dampen birthrates. a. increase b. add c. affect d. reduce

“The most daunting environmental challenge,” … is meeting the needs of those 8 billion without running the planet into the ground. a. making the earth exhausted b. keeping the earth under great pressure c. destroying the earth d. exploding the earth

Post-Reading Discussion 1. Are there any points of view in the article that you do not agree with? Identify and explain your reasons. 2. Do you think our one childe policy in China will lead to sound environmental changes in the very near future? What added social costs will be put on our nation as a result of one child policy? 3. What should the developed countries do for environmental protection? Should they shoulder the same burden together with the developing countries or do more?

Supplementary Reading 1 Is It Apocalypse Now? (continued)

Directions: Decide whether the following statements are True (T) or False (F). 1. [ ] In order to solve the problem of fuel development, we must prevent industries from using the resources which cannot be renewed by natural process, agriculture from losing soil and pollution from increasing. 2. [ ] Mohamed El-Ashry suggested that the developing nations could find another independent way to keep up with the pace of the developed. T F

T 3. [ ] Developing nations believe that the rich countries should be blamed for having brought about the possibilities of a disastrous greenhouse effect and should pay the bill. 4. [ ] The author believes that the developed nations, although they do not believe so, should help those developing ones out of their situation of being poor in order to make a prosperous business of their own. 5. [ ] Japan does not agree with the U.S. to contribute more to a sustainable-development fund. T F

F 6. [ ] Patagonians could have probably burned polluting gas if the Argentine and German governments had not sponsored the solar-energy project. 7. [ ] Nepal villagers used to get hot water by burning wood. 8. [ ] Edward Kufuor thinks that the developing countries should not do more for the environment than the developed ones. 9. [ ] Meadows translates the sentence: “[there must be] changes in the measurements of progress to include indicators of quality as well as quantity” as “smart development rather than dumb growth.” T T T

In-class Discussion Directions: Discuss the following questions with your classmates. 1. What do you think of the attitudes of the developed countries toward the developing ones on environmental issues? 2. Do you think that there is any way for the developing countries to avoid growing themselves “the way the industrialized nations did?” 3. Do you agree that “the Third World can opt to grow anyway it pleases?” Why or why not?

Supplementary Reading 2 The End Is Not at Hand

Directions: In the following article, some sentences have been removed. Choose the most suitable one from the list a--g to fit into each of the numbered blank. There are two extra choices, which do not fit in any of the gaps. 1. b 2. g 3. d 4. a 5. e

大学英语 实用阅读 ( 上 )