考研英语经济学人文章阅读训练五十
考研英语经济学人文章阅读训练2020082202

Cloth of gold一块价值堪比黄金的布Why the economic value of a face mask is$56.14为什么说一个口罩的经济价值是56.14美元After a brutal first six months of the year,governments across the world are hoping for an economic bounce-back.Rich-world GDP fell by about 10%in the first half of2020.在经历今年上半年的残酷考验后,世界各国政府都期待经济能够触底反弹。
2020年上半年,发达国家的GDP下降了约10%。
Yet much has changed since—including that more people are now wearing masks.Economists,obsessed with translating everything into GDP,wonder if more widespread face-covering could help the recovery.然而,自从越来越多的人戴上口罩后,情况发生了显著变化。
经济学家痴迷于用GDP来解释一切事物,如今他们想知道,随着更多的人戴上了口罩,经济能否走向复苏。
The thinking goes that masks can,in part,substitute for lockdowns. People wearing them need not be discouraged as much from using public transport.More shops and offices might be able to reopen,albeit while practising social distancing.这种想法基于这样一个逻辑,戴口罩在一定程度上可以代替封锁措施。
考研英语阅读理解外刊原文经济学人

Diageo last week took a majority stake in Seedlip, a non-alcoholic spirit sold as an alternative to gin — a move seen by analysts as the drinks giant’s attempt to grab more of the growing teetotal market. The young are more abstemious than their elders, and manufacturers and marketers need to keep up.帝亚吉欧(Diageo)不久前收购了Seedlip的多数股权,这是一种被作为金酒替代品出售的无酒精型烈酒——市场分析师们将此举解读为酒业巨头试图在日益扩张的无酒精饮料市场中分一杯羹。
年轻一代相对于他们的长辈在饮酒方面更加节制,酒类生产商和营销机构必须跟上这种趋势。
For those of us who don’t drink or, in my case, only occasionally, a reduction in others’ drinking, along with a fall in the antisocial consequences, is a welcome development. At a wedding in Italy this summer, I marvelled as a group of Italian and French guests partied under a hot afternoon sun and late into the night, without anyone staggering or slurring in the way they would inevitably have done in the UK.对于我们当中那些不喝酒——或者以我自己为例——仅偶尔喝一杯的人来说,他人饮酒量的下降,以及与之相随的危害社会公共利益问题的减少,是一种令人愉快的新变化。
考研英语阅读理解外刊原文经济学人

The Guardian view on unaffordable homes: building injustice into the economy《卫报》关于难以负担的住房的观点:在经济中制造不公The average wage of the top 1% in Britain rose to £13,770 a month in December. Jeevun Sandher, an economist at King’s College London, points out the very richest saw their incomes rise the fastest during the pandemic. This group were also likely to have been able to save the most while Covid raged. Where do the very wealthiest spend their cash? One place is housing, for which there is a low level of stock being released on to the market. The result is rising house prices. Over the past 12 months, asking prices have gone up by 9.5%.12月,英国最富有的1%人群的平均工资上升至每月13770英镑。
伦敦国王学院的经济学家桑德尔指出,在疫情期间,最富有的人的收入增长最快。
在新冠病毒肆虐期间,这一群体也可能是能够存最多钱的人。
最富有的人把钱花在哪里?其中一个地方就是住房,因为住房市场上的存量很低。
结果就是房价上涨。
在过去12个月里,住房要价上涨了9.5%。
This has a knock-on effect for renters. UK rents rose by 8.3% in the last three months of 2021. For would-be first-time buyers, the situation is as bad if not worse, with the current average price of £277,000 nearly £25,000 higher than just a year ago. Those looking to have a roof to live under will find little solace in official figures. These record an 11% drop in the number of total homes added in 2021 compared with the year before. The number of new affordable houses that began being built dropped 16% year-on-year. Shortages of labour and materials, as well as planning delays, will make it harder for the 11th Tory housing minister since 2010 to meet government targets for new homes.这对租客产生了连锁反应。
考研英语阅读理解外刊原文经济学人

The Guardian view on plastics: a treaty could stem the tide《卫报》关于塑料的观点:一项条约可以遏制这个趋势There is no data on global plastic pollution that is equivalent to the regular measurements of carbon dioxide in the Earth’s atmosphere. But as with greenhouse gases, the recent news has been nearly all bad. In 1950, worldwide production of plastics stood at 2m tons per year. In 2020, it was 367m tons (down from 368m the year before due to the coronavirus pandemic). An increase this enormous is hard to visualise. But the 8.8m tons of plastic waste that is estimated to enter the world’s marine environment each year is the equivalent of a rubbish truck filled with plastic being tipped into the sea every minute.关于全球塑料污染,目前还没有与地球大气中二氧化碳的常规测量值相当的数据。
但和温室气体一样,最近的消息几乎都是坏的。
1950年,全球塑料产量达到每年200万吨。
2020年,这一数字为3.67亿吨(由于新冠肺炎疫情,它比前一年的3.68亿吨有所下降)。
考研英语阅读理解外刊原文经济学人

We must pay the cost of carbon if we are to cut it让每一个人都有减排的动力Shouldn’t we be doing more to respond to the climate emergency? It’s a natural question to ask. But, perhaps, we should turn the question around, and ask: why haven’t we solved the climate change problem already?为了应对气候紧急状态,我们难道不应该多做一点事情?这是个很自然的问题。
然而,也许我们应该反过来问:为什么我们还没有解决气候变化问题?Economics suggests a ready answer: externalities. Unfortunately, the concept of externalities is a century old, and it shows. So why do economists persist in using this dusty old term, and is it still useful?经济学给出了一个现成的答案:外部性。
可是,外部性的概念存在了一个世纪之久,而且得到了印证。
那么,经济学家们为什么还要使用这个陈旧的术语呢?它是否仍然有用?An externality is a cost — or sometimes, a benefit — that is not borne by either the buyer or the seller of a product. And, if neither has to bear the cost, neither has much reason to care.外部性是一种成本(有时是一种好处),是产品的买方和卖方都无需承担的成本。
考研英语阅读理解外刊原文经济学人

A global house-price slump is coming全球房价即将暴跌It won’t blow up the financial system, but it will be scary虽然不会摧毁金融体系,但仍然令人恐慌Over the past decade owning a house has meant easy money. Prices rose reliably for years and then went bizarrely ballistic in the pandemic. Yet today if your wealth is tied up in bricks and mortar it is time to get nervous.过去十年里,拥有一套房就意味着轻松赚钱。
房价多年来一直稳步上涨,甚至在疫情期间还异乎寻常地飙升了。
然而现如今,如果你的财富被套牢在房产上,那你应该感到紧张了。
House prices are now falling in nine rich economies. The drops in America are small so far, but in the wildest markets they are already dramatic. In condo-crazed Canada homes cost 9% less than they did in February.九个发达经济体的房价都在下跌。
到目前为止,美国房价的跌幅还不大,但最疯狂的市场的房价跌幅已经非常大了。
在热衷于共管公寓的加拿大,房价较今年2月下跌了9%。
As inflation and recession stalk the world a deepening correction is likely—even estate agents are gloomy. Although this will not detonate global banks as in 2007-09, it will intensify the downturn, leave a cohort of people with wrecked finances and start a political storm.随着通货膨胀和经济衰退的风险在全球范围内蔓延,房价或将迎来一场深度调整——甚至房地产经纪人也对此感到悲观。
考研英语阅读理解外刊原文经济学人

“This Mortal Coil” is a surprisingly upbeat history of death《人世纷扰》出人意料地以乐观态度讲述人类死亡史Andrew Doig’s study of how people die is a story of human ingenuity安德鲁·多伊格对人类死因的探究也是一个关于人类智慧的故事For over 200 years, France has diligently recorded the life spans of its citizens. Since 1816 their average life expectancy has more than doubled: long skewed by high infant mortality, it jumped from 41.1 years to 85.3 for French women, and from 39.1 years to 79.3 for men.200多年来,法国一直在孜孜不倦地记录着公民的寿命。
自1816年以来,法国人的平均预期寿命增长了一倍多:在经历长期被高婴儿死亡率拉低的阶段后,法国女性的平均预期寿命从41.1岁跃升至85.3岁,男性从39.1岁跃升至79.3岁。
In other words, it “has increased on average by five hours per day”, writes Andrew Doig in “This Mortal Coil”, a study of how people die. “So, every day, the date of a French person’s death gets closer by 24 hours due to the passing of time, but recedes by five hours, thanks to medicine, nutrition, sanitation, good government, trade, peace and so on.”安德鲁·多伊格在其研究人类如何死亡的著作《人世纷扰》中写道,换句话说,法国人的预期寿命“平均每天延长5个小时”。
《经济学人》英语热点文章精选8篇(中英文对照

(考研英语阅读原文很多来自《经济学人》,希望大家好好看看)印度的救赎IN MAY America’s Federal Reserve hinted that it would soon start to reduce its vast purchases of Treasury bonds. As global investors adjusted to a world without ultra—cheap money, there has been a great sucking of funds from emerging markets。
Currencies and shares have tumbled, from Brazil to Indonesia, but one country has been particularly badly hit。
今年五月,美国联邦储备委员会(Federal Reserve)暗示,它将很快开始缩减大量购买国债的规模。
随着全球投资者开始调整策略,以适应没有超廉价资金的世界,大量资金开始逃离新兴市场.从巴西到印度尼西亚,货币及股票纷纷暴跌,但有一个国家受创尤其严重.Not so long ago India was celebrated as an economic miracle. In 2008 Manmohan Singh,the prime minister,said growth of 8—9% was India’s new cruising speed. He even predicted the end of the “chronic poverty,ignorance and disease, which has been the fate of millions of our countrymen for centuries”. Today he admits the outlook is difficult. The rupee has tumbled by 13% in three months。
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Convalescent plasma and artificial antibodies:Survivors as saviours
恢复期血浆和人工抗体:康复者成为了人们的救星
During the flu pandemic of1918-19doctors at an American naval hospital developed a treatment which,according to the American Journal of Public Health,had“a decided influence in shortening the course of the disease and in lowering the mortality”.
据《美国公共卫生杂志》报道称,在1918年至1919年的流感大流行期间,美国一家海军医院的医生研发了一种能够“有效缩短疾病病程并降低患者死亡率”的治疗方法。
It involved clotting and then centrifuging blood from people who had got over the disease so as to separate out the antibodies it contained,then giving those antibodies to patients in dire need.
该方法是对处于恢复期的病人的血液进行采集和离心,进而分离出含有抗体的血浆,然后将其用于那些亟待治疗的患者。
Since then antibody-rich“convalescent plasma”(CP)has been used as a treatment for various diseases,including SARS and the pandemic strains of H1N1and H5N1influenza.Now covid-19has joined the list.
从那时起,富含抗体的“恢复期血浆”被广泛用于治疗包括SARS以及H1N1和H5N1流感大流行在内的各种疾病。
如今,新冠肺炎也也位列其中。
A recent study in Wuhan found that severely ill covid-19patients treated with CP did significantly better than patients matched with them by age, gender and severity of infection had done earlier in the epidemic.
最近在武汉进行的一项研究发现,相比疫情早期那些年龄、性别和病情相当的新冠肺炎患者,接受恢复期血浆治疗的重症患者的治疗效果明显要好一些。
Michael Joyner of the Mayo Clinic,which leads a CP research effort in America,expects randomised control trials to begin in a few weeks.They will not just look at CP’s potential as a treatment,but also as a prophylactic.If that worked,it would be a sort of halfway house on the road to a vaccine.
梅约医学中心的迈克尔·乔伊纳领导着美国一项有关恢复期血浆的研究计划,他预计将在几周内开始进行随机对照试验。
他们不仅将恢复期血浆视为一种潜在的治疗手段,同时还将其视为一种预防手段。
如果这种方法行之有效,那么它将为疫苗的研发奠定基础。
Even though CP donors get the other components of their blood—cells, platelets and the like—returned to them after the antibodies have been removed,the process is still something of a palaver,requiring a lot of medical attention.Despite the fact that various companies are trying to make a go of it,it is hard to see it scaling up all that far.
尽管在分离出抗体后,血液中的其他成分(血细胞、血小板等)会被输送回恢复期血浆捐献者的体内,但整个过程仍然十分繁琐,需要投入大量医护。
虽然许多公司都在努力推进恢复期血浆的制备,但规模难以扩大。
But there is an alternative.Antibodies are proteins,and that means a bit of genetic engineering will allow cell lines at biotechnology and pharma companies to mass produce them.The resulting product should be less prone to contamination,more consistent,and easier to scale up than CP.不过,还有另一种选择。
抗体本质上是蛋白质,这意味着一些生物技术和制药公司能够通过基因工程技术对其进行大规模生产。
由此得到的抗体相比恢复期血浆更不容易受到污染、更稳定、更易于实现规模化生产。
This approach has already been successful against Ebola.Regeneron,an American biotech company,developed a cocktail of three antibodies which recognised different parts of the protein’s coat.
这种方法已经成功地被用于对抗埃博拉病毒了。
再生元公司(一家美国生物技术公司)研发了一种由三种抗体(可识别蛋白质外壳上的不同位点)组成的混合抗体。
Trials in the Democratic Republic of Congo showed this therapy to be better than remdesivir,a drug designed to block the Ebola virus’s reproduction which is now,as it happens,being tested as a medicine for covid-19.
据他们在刚果民主共和国进行的试验显示,其疗效优于瑞德西韦,瑞德西韦本是一种用于阻止埃博拉病毒复制的药物,目前正被用作治疗新冠肺炎的药物进行试验。
Regeneron is now making a pair of antibodies that target the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein.It hopes to have produced enough to start trials soon.As with CP,it is possible that such antibodies may temporarily confer immunity on the uninfected,as well as helping the infected fight the disease.
再生元公司目前正在研发一种针对新冠病毒突刺蛋白的抗体。
该公司希望能够生产出足够的抗体,从而尽快开展试验。
就像恢复期血浆一样,这种抗体或能暂时赋予未感染者以抵抗力,并帮助感染者与病魔作斗争。
(红色标注词为重难点词汇)
重难点词汇:
convalescent[ˌkɑːnvəˈlesnt]adj.康复的;恢复期的n.恢复期病人saviour[ˈseɪvjər]n.救世主;救星;救助者
antibody[ˈæntibɑːdi]n.抗体
prophylactic[ˌproʊfəˈlæktɪk]adj.预防性的n.预防性药物;预防性措施temporarily[ˌtempəˈrerəli]adv.临时地。