高级英语第三课Ships in the Desert
高级英语第一册Unit3 Ships in the Desertword版本
coast but now water had turned into sand therefore they were surrounded by sand and could not move. • 2) dune: a rounded hill or ridge of sand heaped up by the action • 3) that stretched... to the horizon: that extended as far as the eye could see; that extended to the far off place where the sky meets the earth
• 2) lap: to strike geቤተ መጻሕፍቲ ባይዱtly with a light, splashing sound
• 3) in all direction: everywhere
5. The other ships … to the
horizon
• l) How could the other ships be at rest in the sand? • The other ships were also anchored in the original
高级英语第一册 第三课词汇、课后练习及答案
第三课Ships in the Desert目录一、词汇(V ocabulary)--------------------------------------------------------------------------1二、课文解释------------------------------------------------------------------------------------5三、课后练习及答案--------------------------------------------------------------------------19四、补充练习及答案--------------------------------------------------------------------------19一、词汇(Vocabulary)lap ( v．) : (of waves，etc．)move or strike gently with a light，splashing sound such as a dog makes in lapping(波浪)拍打；泼溅----------------------------------------------------------------------------------divert ( v．) : turn(a person or thing)aside(from a course，direction，etc．)；deflect转移；使(人或物)转向；岔开，使偏斜----------------------------------------------------------------------------------Antarctic ( adj. ) : of or near the South Pole or the region around it南极的；近南极的；南极区的；南极地带的；南极周围的----------------------------------------------------------------------------------Trans—Antarctic (adj.) : crossing or spanning the Antarctic横贯南极的；横贯南极地带的----------------------------------------------------------------------------------parka ( n.) : a hip—length pullover fur garment with a hood，worn 1n arctic regions风雪大衣，派克大衣----------------------------------------------------------------------------------glacier ( n.) : a slowly moving river or mass of ice and snow that forms in areas where the rate of snowfall constantly exceeds the rate at which the snow melts冰河；冰川----------------------------------------------------------------------------------accessible ( adj.) : that can be approached or entered；easy to approach or enter能够接近的；能够进去的；易接近的；易进去的----------------------------------------------------------------------------------trap ( v．) : catch in or as in a trap；entrap诱捕；计捉----------------------------------------------------------------------------------inexorable ( adj.) :that cannot be altered，checked，etc．不可变的；不可抗拒的；无情的----------------------------------------------------------------------------------graph ( n.) : a diagram consisting of nodes and links and representing logical relationships or sequences of events(曲线)图，标绘图；图表；图形----------------------------------------------------------------------------------slab ( n.) : a piece that is flat，broad，and fairly thick平板；厚片----------------------------------------------------------------------------------frigid ( adj.) : extremely cold；without heat or warmth极冷的，寒冷的，严寒的----------------------------------------------------------------------------------snowmobile ( n.) : any of various motor vehicles for traveling over snow，usually with steerable runners at the front and tractor treads at the rear(机动)雪车；(履带式)雪上汽车----------------------------------------------------------------------------------rendezvous ( n.) : [Fr．] a place designated for meeting or assembling [法语]指定集合地；会合点----------------------------------------------------------------------------------hover ( v．) : stay suspended or flutter in the air near oneplace盘旋----------------------------------------------------------------------------------eerie，eery ( adj. ) : mysterious，uncanny，or weird，esp. in such a way as to frighten or make uneasy神秘的，离奇的，怪异的；阴森的，恐怖的，可怕的／eerily adv．----------------------------------------------------------------------------------hummock ( n.) : ridge or rise in an ice field冰群；(冰原上的)冰丘----------------------------------------------------------------------------------collide ( v．) : come into violent contact；strike violently against each other；crash碰撞；猛撞；互撞----------------------------------------------------------------------------------scenario ( n.) : a sequence 0f events esp. when imagined；an account or synopsis of a projected course of action or events(设想中的)未来事态；方案----------------------------------------------------------------------------------controversial ( adj. ) : of，subject to，or stirring up controversy；disbatable争论的；引起争论的；----------------------------------------------------------------------------------tundra ( n.) : any of the vast，nearly level，treeless plains of the arctic regions冻原；苔原；冻土带----------------------------------------------------------------------------------equator ( n.) : an imaginary circle around the earth，equally distant at all points from both the North Pole and the South Pole，dividing the earth's surface into the Northern Hemisphere and the Southern Hemisphere赤道----------------------------------------------------------------------------------billow ( v．) : surge，swell，or rise like or in a billow(巨浪)奔腾；(波涛)汹----------------------------------------------------------------------------------pasture ( n.) : ground suitable for grazing牧场----------------------------------------------------------------------------------slash (v．) : cut or wound with a sweeping stroke or strokes，as of a knife(用刀等)猛砍，乱砍----------------------------------------------------------------------------------blot (v．) : make blots on；spot；stain；blur(esp. used in blot out：darken or hide entirely；obscure)涂污；玷污；把……弄模糊；遮暗(尤用于bolt out：把……弄模糊；遮暗，遮蔽；掩蔽)----------------------------------------------------------------------------------noctilucent (adj.) : designating or of a luminous cloud of unknown composition。
高级英语03_Ships in the Desert
• 2.What environmental problem in Antarctic catches the attention of the author? • Para 2. air pollution in Antarctic
• 3. In south pole, what has happened to its atmosphere? Para 3. the change in the global atmosphere (more and more Carbon Dioxide exist in the atmosphere and makes the global warming) even in south pole.
• 4.Acre by acre, the rain forest is being burned to create fast pasture for fastfood beef. • Bit by bit trees in the rain forest are felled and the land is cleared and turned into pasture where cattle can be raised quickly and slaughtered and the beef can be used in hamburgers.
• 2.He moved his finger back in time to the ice of two decades ago. • His finger pointed to the layer of ice which was formed 20 years ago.
• 3… keeps its engines running to prevent the metal parts from freeze-locking together. • … keeps its engines running for fear that if he stops them, the metal parts would be frozen solid and the engines would not be able to start again.
(完整word版)高级英语第三课ShipsintheDesert.docx
Lesson 3 Ships in the DesertAL Gore1. I was standing in the sun on the hot steel deck of a fishing ship capable of processing afifty -ton catch on a good day. But it wasn’ t a good day. We were anchored in what used to be th most productive fishing site in all of central Asia, but as I looked out over the bow, the prospects ofa good catch looked bleak. Where there should have been gentle blue-green waves lapping againstthe side of the ship, there was nothing but hot dry sand——as far as I could see in all direct The other ships of the fleet were also at rest in the sand, scattered in the dunes that stretched all theway to the horizon. Ten years ago the Aral was the fourth -largest inland sea in the world,comparable to the largest of North America ’Greats Lakes. Now it is disappearing because thewater that used to feed it has been diverted in an ill-considered irrigation scheme to grow cotton inthe desert. The new shoreline was almost forty kilometers across the sand from where the fishingfleet was now permanently docked. Meanwhile, in the nearby town of Muynak the people werestill canning fish——brought not from the Aral Sea but shipped by rail through Siberia from the Pacific Ocean, more than a thousand miles away.2. My search for the underlying causes of the environmental crisis has led me to travel aroundthe world to examine and study many of these images of destruction. At the very bottom of theearth, high in the Trans-Antarctic Mountains, with the sun glaring at midnight through a hole in thesky, I stood in the unbelievable coldness and talked with a scientist in the late tall of 1988 about thetunnel he was digging through time. Slipping his parka back to reveal a badly burned face that was cracked and peeling, he pointed to the annual layers of ice in a core sample dug from the glacier onwhich we were standing. He moved his finger back in time to the ice of two decades ago.where the U.S Congress passed the Clean Air Act, ”he said. At the bottom of the world, twocontinents away from Washington, D.C., even a small reduction in one country's emissions hadchanged the amount of pollution found in the remotest end least accessible place on earth.3. But the most significant change thus far in the earth’ s atmosphere is the one that be the industrial revolution early in the last century and has picked up speed ever since. Industrymeant coal, and later oil, and we began to burn lots of it —— bringing rising levels of carbondioxide (CO2) , with its ability to trap more heat in the atmosphere and slowly warm the earth.Fewer than a hundred yards from the South Pole, upwind from the ice runway where the ski planelands and keeps its engines running to prevent the metal parts from freeze-locking together,scientists monitor the air several times every day to chart the course of that inexorable change.During my visit, I watched one scientist draw the results of that day’ s measurements, end of a steep line still higher on the graph. He told me how easy it is——there at the earth —— to see that this enormous change in the global atmosphere is still picking up speed.4. Two and a half years later I slept under the midnight sun at the other end of our planet, in asmall tent pitched on a twelve-toot-thick slab of ice floating in the frigid Arctic Ocean. After ahearty breakfast, my companions and I traveled by snowmobiles a few miles farther north to arendezvous point where the ice was thinner——only three and a half feet thick——and submarine hovered in the water below. After it crashed through the ice, took on its new passengers,and resub merged, I talked with scientists who were trying to measure more accurately thethickness of the polar ice cap, which many believe is thinning as a result of global warming. I hadjust negotiated an agreement between ice scientists and the U.S. Navy to secure the release ofpreviously top secret data from submarine sonar tracks, data that could help them learn what ishappening to the north polar cap. Now, I wanted to see the pole it-self, and some eight hours afterwe met the submarine, we were crashing through that ice, surfacing, and then I was standing in aneerily beautiful snowscape, windswept and sparkling white, with the horizon defined by little hummocks, or“ pressure ridges” of ice that are pushed up like tiny mountain ranges when separate sheets collide. But here too, CO2 , levels are rising just as rapidly, and ultimately temperature willrise with them——indeed, global warming is expected to push temperatures up much more rapidlyin the polar regions than in the rest of the world. As the polar air warms, the ice here will thin; andsince the polar cap plays such a crucial role in the world’ s weather system, the consequ thinning cap could be disastrous.5.Considering such scenarios is not a purely speculative exercise. Six months after I returnedfrom the North Pole, a team of scientists reported dramatic changes in the pattern of ice distributionin the Arctic, and a second team reported a still controversial claim (which a variety of data now suggest) that, over all, the north polar cap has thinned by 2 percent in just the last decade.Moreover, scientists established several years ago that in many land areas north of the Arctic Circle,the spring snowmelt now comes earlier every year, and deep in the tundra below, the temperatureof the earth is steadily rising.*6. As it happens, some of the most disturbing images of environmental destruction can befound exactly halfway between the North and South poles —— precisely athe equator in Brazil ——where billowing clouds of smoke regularly blacken the sky above the immense but nowthreatened Amazon rain forest. Acre by acre, the rain forest is being burned to create fastpasture for fast-food beef; as I learned when I went there in early 1989, the fires are set earlierand earlier in the dry season now, with more than one Tennessee ’worths of rain forest beingslashed and burned each year. According to our guide, the biologist Tom Lovejoy, there are more different species of birds in each square mile of the Amazon than exist in all of North America*7. But one doesn't have to travel around the world to witness humankind’ s assault on Images that signal the distress of our global environment are now commonly seen almost anywhere.On some nights, in high northern latitudes, the sky itself offers another ghostly image that signalsthe loss of ecological balance now in progress. If the sky is clear after sunset——a watching from a place where pollution hasn't blotted out the night sky altogether——youcan sometimes see a strange kind of cloud high in the sky. This “ noctilucentcloud ”occasionallyappears when the earth is first cloaked in the evening darkness; shimmering above us with atranslucent whiteness, these clouds seem quite unnatural. And they should: noctilucent clouds havebegun to appear more often because of a huge buildup of methane gas in the atmosphere. (Alsocalled natural gas, methane is released from landfills, from coal mines and rice paddies, frombillions of termites that swarm through the freshly cut forestland, from the burning of biomass andfrom a variety of other human activities. ) Even though noctilucent clouds were sometimes seen inthe past, all this extra methane carries more water vapor into the upper atmosphere, where itcondenses at much higher altitudes to form more clouds that the sun’ s rays still strike lon sunset has brought the beginning of night to the surface far beneath them.8. What should we feel toward these ghosts in the sky? Simple wonder or the mix of emotionswe feel at the zoo? Perhaps we should feel awe for our own power: just as men tear tusks fromelephants ’ headsuchin quantity as to threaten the beast with extinction, we are ripping matterfrom its place in the earth in such volume as to upset the balance between daylight and darkness. Inthe process, we are once again adding to the threat of global warming, because methane has beenone of the fastest-growing green-house gases, and is third only to carbon dioxide and water vaporin total volume, changing the chemistry of the upper atmosphere. But, without even consideringglisten with a spectral light? Or have our eyes adjusted so completely to the bright lights ofcivilization that we can’seet these clouds for what they are —— aphysical manifestation of theviolent collision between human civilization and the earth?*9. Even though it is sometimes hard to see their meaning, we have by now all witnessedsurprising experiences that signal the damage from our assault on the environment——the new frequency of days when the temperature exceeds 100 degrees, the new speed with whichthe sun burns our skin, or the new constancy of public debate over what to do with growingmountains of waste. But our response to these signals is puzzling. Why haven’wet launched amassive effort to save our environment? To come at the question another way: Why do someimages startle us into immediate action and focus our attention or ways to respond effectively? Andwhy do other images, though sometimes equally dramatic, produce instead a Kin. of paralysis,focusing our attention not on ways to respond but rather on some convenient, less painfuldistraction?10.Still, there are so many distressing images of environmental destruction that sometimes itseems impossible to know how to absorb or comprehend them. Before considering the threats themselves, it may be helpful to classify them and thus begin to organize our thoughts and feelings so that we may be able to respond appropriately.11.A useful system comes from the military, which frequently places a conflict in one of threedifferent categories, according to the theater in which it takes place. There are“ l “ regional” battles, and“ strategic” conflicts. This third category is reserved for struggles thatthreaten a nation’ s survival and must be under stood in a global context.12.Environmental threats can be considered in the same way. For example, most instanceslike acid rain, the contamination of underground aquifers, and large oil spills are fundamentally regional. In both of these categories, there may be so many similar instances of particular local and regional problems occurring simultaneously all over the world that the patter n appears to be global,but the problems themselves are still not truly strategic because the operation of the global environment is not affected and the survival of civilization is not at stake.13.However, a new class of environmental problems does affect the global ecological system,and these threats are fundamentally strategic. The 600 percent increase in the amount of chlorinein the atmosphere during the last forty years has taken place not just in those countries producingthe chlorofluorocarbons responsible but in the air above every country, above Antarctica, above the North Pole and the Pacific Ocean —— all the way from the surface of the earth to the top of the sky. The increased levels of chlorine disrupt the global process by which the earth regulates the amountof ultraviolet radiation from the sun that is allowed through the atmosphere to the surface; and itwe let chlorine levels continue to increase, the radiation levels will also increasethat all animal and plant life will face a new threat to their survival.14.Global warming is also a strategic threat. The concentration of carbon dioxide and otherheat-absorbing molecules has increased by almost 25 per cent since World War II, posing aworldwide threat to the earth’ s ability to regulate the amount of heat from the sun retained in the atmosphere. This increase in heat seriously threatens the global climate equilibrium that determinesthe pattern of winds, rainfall, surface temperatures,ocean currents, and sea level. These in turn determine the distribution of vegetative and animal life on land and sea and have a great effect onthe location and pattern of human societies.15.In other words, the entire relationship between humankind and the earth has beentransformed because our civilization is suddenly capable of affecting the entire global environment,not just a particular area. All of us know that human civilization has usually had a large impact onthe environment; to mention just one example, there is evidence that even in prehistoric times, vastareas were sometimes intentionally burned by people in their search for food. And in our own timewe have reshaped a large part of the earth’ s surface with concrete in our cities and carefully ten rice paddies, pastures, wheat fields, and other croplands in the countryside. But these changes,while sometimes appearing to be pervasive, have, until recently, been relatively trivial factors inthe global ecological sys-tem. Indeed, until our lifetime, it was always safe to assume that nothingwe did or could do would have any lasting effect on the global environment. But it is precisely that assumption which must now be discarded so that we can think strategically about our newrelationship to the environment.16. Human civilization is now the dominant cause of change in the global environment. Yet weresist this truth and find it hard to imagine that our effect on the earth must now be measured bythe same yardstick used to calculate the strength of the moon’ s pull on the oceans or the f the wind against the mountains. And it we are now capable of changing something so basic as the relationship between the earth and the sun, surely we must acknowledge a new responsibility touse that power wisely and with appropriate restraint. So far, however, We seem oblivious of thefragility of the earth’ s natural systems.*17.This century has witnessed dramatic changes in two key factors that define the physicalreality of our relationship to the earth: a sudden and startling surge in human population, with theaddition of one China ’ s worth of people every ten years, and a sudden acceleration of the scientific and technological revolution, which has allowed an almost unimaginable magnification of ourpower to affect the world around us by burning, cutting, digging, moving,and transforming the18.The surge in population is both a cause of the changed relationship and one of the clearest illustrations of how startling the change has been, especially when viewed in a historical context.From the emergence of modern humans 200,000 years ago until Julius Caesar’ s time, fewe 250 million people walked on the face of the earth. When Christopher Columbus set sail for theNew World 1,500 years later, there were approximately 500 million people on earth. By the timeThomas Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence in 1776, the number had doubled again,to 1 billion. By midway through this century, at the end of World War II, the number had risen tojust above 2 billion people.19. In other words, from the beginning of humanity’ s appearance on earth to 1945, it took m than ten thousand generations to reach a world population of 2 billion people. Now, in the courseof one human lifetime——mine——theworld population will increase from 2 to more than 9billion, and it is already more than halfway there.20.Like the population explosion, the scientific and technological revolution began to pick upspeed slowly during the eighteenth century. And this ongoing revolution has also suddenly accelerated exponentially. For example, it is now an axiom in many fields of science that more newand important discoveries have taken place in the last ten years that. in the entire previous historyof science. While no single discovery has had the kind of effect on our relationship to the earth thatunclear weapons have had on our relationship to warfare, it is nevertheless true that taken together,they have completely transformed our cumulative ability to exploit the earth for sustenancemaking the consequences of unrestrained exploitation every bit as unthinkable as the consequencesof unrestrained nuclear war.21.Now that our relationship to the earth has changed so utterly, we have to see that changeand understand its implications. Our challenge is to recognize that the startling images ofenvironmental destruction now occurring all over the world have much more in common than their ability to shock and awaken us. They are symptoms of an underlying problem broader in scope and more serious than any we have ever faced. Global warming, ozone depletion, the loss of living species, deforestation——theyall have a common cause: the new relationship between human civilization and the earth’ s natural balance.22.There are actually two aspects to this challenge. The first is to realize that our power to harm the earth can indeed have global and even permanent effects. The second is to realize that the only way to understand our new role as a co-architect of nature is to see ourselves as part of a complex system that does not operate according to the same simple rules of cause and effect we are used to. The problem is not our effect on the environment so much as our relationship with the environment. As a result, any solution to the problem will require a careful assessmentof thatrelationship as well as the complex interrelationship among factors within civilization and between them and the major natural components of the earth’ s ecological system.23.There is only one precedent for this kind of challenge to our thinking, and again it is military. The invention of nuclear weapons and the subsequent development by the United States and the Soviet Union of many thousands of strategic nuclear weapons forced a slow and painfulrecognition that the new power thus acquired forever changed not only the relationship betweenthe two superpowers but also the relationship of humankind to the institution at war-fare itself. The consequences of all-out war between nations armed with nuclear weapons suddenly included the possibility of the destruction of both nations —— completelyand simultaneously. That sobering realization led to a careful reassessment of every aspect of our mutual relationship to the prospectof such a war. As early as 1946 one strategist concluded that strategic bombing with missileswell tear away the veil of illusion that has so long obscured the reality of the change inwarfare —— from a fight to a process of destruction.”24.Nevertheless, during the earlier stages of the nuclear arms race, each of the superpower s assumed that its actions would have a simple and direct effect on the thinking of the other. For decades, each new advance in weaponry was deployed by one side for the purpose of inspiring fear in the other. But each such deployment led to an effort by the other to leapfrog the first one with a more advanced deployment of its own. Slowly, it has become apparent that the problem of the nuclear arms race is not primarily caused by technology. It is complicated by technology, true; but it arises out of the relationship between the superpowers and is based on an obsolete understanding of what war is all about.25.The eventual solution to the arms race will be found, not in a new deployment by one sideor the other of some ultimate weapon or in a decision by either side to disarm unilaterally , but ratter in new understandings and in a mutual transformation of the relationship itself. This transformation will involve changes in the technology of weaponry and the denial of nuclear technology to rogue states. But the key changes will be in the way we think about the institution of warfare and about the relationship between states.26. The strategic nature of the threat now posed by human civilization to the global environment and the strategic nature of the threat to human civilization now posed by changes in the global environment present us with a similar set of challenges and false hopes. Some argue that a new ultimate technology, whether nuclear power or genetic engineering, will solve the problem. Others hold that only a drastic reduction of our reliance on technology can improve the conditionsof life——a simplistic notion at best. But the real solution will be found in reinventing and finally healing the relationship between civilization and the earth. This can only be accomplished by undertaking a careful reassessmentof all the factors that led to the relatively recent dramaticchange in the relationship. The transformation of the way we relate to the earth will of course involve new technologies, but the key changes will involve new ways of thinking about the relationship itself.( from Earth in the Balance: Ecology and the Human Spirit, 1992 )11。
(完整word版)高级英语第三课Ships in the Desert
Lesson 3 Ships in the DesertAL Gore1.I was standing in the sun on the hot steel deck of a fishing ship capable of processing a fifty-ton catch on a good day. But it wasn’t a good day. We were anchored in what used to be the most productive fishing site in all of central Asia, but as I looked out over the bow, the prospects of a good catch looked bleak. Where there should have been gentle blue-green waves lapping against the side of the ship, there was nothing but hot dry sand——as far as I could see in all directions. The other ships of the fleet were also at rest in the sand, scattered in the dunes that stretched all the way to the horizon. Ten years ago the Aral was the fourth-largest inland sea in the world, comparable to the largest of North America’s Great Lakes. Now it is disappearing because the water that used to feed it has been diverted in an ill-considered irrigation scheme to grow cotton in the desert. The new shoreline was almost forty kilometers across the sand from where the fishing fleet was now permanently docked. Meanwhile, in the nearby town of Muynak the people were still canning fish——brought not from the Aral Sea but shipped by rail through Siberia from the Pacific Ocean, more than a thousand miles away.2.My search for the underlying causes of the environmental crisis has led me to travel around the world to examine and study many of these images of destruction. At the very bottom of the earth, high in the Trans-Antarctic Mountains, with the sun glaring at midnight through a hole in the sky, I stood in the unbelievable coldness and talked with a scientist in the late tall of 1988 about the tunnel he was digging through time. Slipping his parka back to reveal a badly burned face that was cracked and peeling, he pointed to the annual layers of ice in a core sample dug from the glacier on which we were standing. He moved his finger back in time to the ice of two decades ago. “Here’s where the U.S Congress passed the Clean Air Act,” he said. At the bottom of the world, twocontinents away from Washington, D.C., even a small reduction in one country's emissions had changed the amount of pollution found in the remotest end least accessible place on earth.3.But the most significant change thus far in the earth’s atmosphere is the one that began with the industrial revolution early in the last century and has picked up speed ever since. Industry meant coal, and later oil, and we began to burn lots of it——bringing rising levels of carbon dioxide (CO2) , with its ability to trap more heat in the atmosphere and slowly warm the earth. Fewer than a hundred yards from the South Pole, upwind from the ice runway where the ski plane lands and keeps its engines running to prevent the metal parts from freeze-locking together, scientists monitor the air several times every day to chart the course of that inexorable change. During my visit, I watched one scientist draw the results of that day’s measurements, pushing the end of a steep line still higher on the graph. He told me how easy it is——there at the end of the earth——to see that this enormous change in the global atmosphere is still picking up speed.4.Two and a half years later I slept under the midnight sun at the other end of our planet, in a small tent pitched on a twelve-toot-thick slab of ice floating in the frigid Arctic Ocean. After a hearty breakfast, my companions and I traveled by snowmobiles a few miles farther north to a rendezvous point where the ice was thinner——only three and a half feet thick——and a nuclear submarine hovered in the water below. After it crashed through the ice, took on its new passengers, and resub merged, I talked with scientists who were trying to measure more accurately the thickness of the polar ice cap, which many believe is thinning as a result of global warming. I had just negotiated an agreement between ice scientists and the U.S. Navy to secure the release of previously top secret data from submarine sonar tracks, data that could help them learn what is happening to the north polar cap. Now, I wanted to see the pole it-self, and some eight hours after we met the submarine, we were crashing through that ice, surfacing, and then I was standing in aneerily beautiful snowscape, windswept and sparkling white, with the horizon defined by little hummocks, or “pressure ridges” of ice that are pushed up like tiny mountain ranges when separate sheets collide. But here too, CO2, levels are rising just as rapidly, and ultimately temperature will rise with them——indeed, global warming is expected to push temperatures up much more rapidly in the polar regions than in the rest of the world. As the polar air warms, the ice here will thin; and since the polar cap plays such a crucial role in the world’s weather system, the consequences of a thinning cap could be disastrous.5.Considering such scenarios is not a purely speculative exercise. Six months after I returned from the North Pole, a team of scientists reported dramatic changes in the pattern of ice distribution in the Arctic, and a second team reported a still controversial claim (which a variety of data now suggest) that, over all, the north polar cap has thinned by 2 percent in just the last decade. Moreover, scientists established several years ago that in many land areas north of the Arctic Circle, the spring snowmelt now comes earlier every year, and deep in the tundra below, the temperature of the earth is steadily rising.*6.As it happens, some of the most disturbing images of environmental destruction can be found exactly halfway between the North and South poles——precisely at the equator in Brazil ——where billowing clouds of smoke regularly blacken the sky above the immense but now threatened Amazon rain forest. Acre by acre, the rain forest is being burned to create fast pasture for fast-food beef; as I learned when I went there in early 1989, the fires are set earlier and earlier in the dry season now, with more than one Tennessee’s worth of rain forest being slashed and burned each year. According to our guide, the biologist Tom Lovejoy, there are more different species of birds in each square mile of the Amazon than exist in all of North America——which means we are silencing thousands of songs we have never even heard.*7.But one doesn't have to travel around the world to witness humankind’s assault on the earth. Images that signal the distress of our global environment are now commonly seen almost anywhere. On some nights, in high northern latitudes, the sky itself offers another ghostly image that signals the loss of ecological balance now in progress. If the sky is clear after sunset——and it you are watching from a place where pollution hasn't blotted out the night sky altogether——you can sometimes see a strange kind of cloud high in the sky. This “noctilucent cloud” occasionally appears when the earth is first cloaked in the evening darkness; shimmering above us with a translucent whiteness, these clouds seem quite unnatural. And they should: noctilucent clouds have begun to appear more often because of a huge buildup of methane gas in the atmosphere. (Also called natural gas, methane is released from landfills, from coal mines and rice paddies, from billions of termites that swarm through the freshly cut forestland, from the burning of biomass and from a variety of other human activities. ) Even though noctilucent clouds were sometimes seen in the past, all this extra methane carries more water vapor into the upper atmosphere, where it condenses at much higher altitudes to form more clouds that the sun’s rays still strike long after sunset has brought the beginning of night to the surface far beneath them.8.What should we feel toward these ghosts in the sky? Simple wonder or the mix of emotions we feel at the zoo? Perhaps we should feel awe for our own power: just as men tear tusks from elephants’ heads in such quantity as to threaten the beast with extinction, we are ripping matter from its place in the earth in such volume as to upset the balance between daylight and darkness. In the process, we are once again adding to the threat of global warming, because methane has been one of the fastest-growing green-house gases, and is third only to carbon dioxide and water vapor in total volume, changing the chemistry of the upper atmosphere. But, without even considering that threat, shouldn’t it startle us that we have now put these clouds in the evening sky whichglisten with a spectral light? Or have our eyes adjusted so completely to the bright lights of civilization that we can’t see these clouds for what they are——a physical manifestation of the violent collision between human civilization and the earth?*9.Even though it is sometimes hard to see their meaning, we have by now all witnessed surprising experiences that signal the damage from our assault on the environment——whether it's the new frequency of days when the temperature exceeds 100 degrees, the new speed with which the sun burns our skin, or the new constancy of public debate over what to do with growing mountains of waste. But our response to these signals is puzzling. Why haven’t we launched a massive effort to save our environment? To come at the question another way: Why do some images startle us into immediate action and focus our attention or ways to respond effectively? And why do other images, though sometimes equally dramatic, produce instead a Kin. of paralysis, focusing our attention not on ways to respond but rather on some convenient, less painful distraction?10.Still, there are so many distressing images of environmental destruction that sometimes it seems impossible to know how to absorb or comprehend them. Before considering the threats themselves, it may be helpful to classify them and thus begin to organize our thoughts and feelings so that we may be able to respond appropriately.11.A useful system comes from the military, which frequently places a conflict in one of three different categories, according to the theater in which it takes place. There are “local” skirmishes, “regional” battles, and “strategic” conflicts. This third category is reserved for struggles that can threaten a nation’s survival and must be under stood in a global context.12.Environmental threats can be considered in the same way. For example, most instances of water pollution, air pollution, and illegal waste dumping are essentially local in nature. Problemslike acid rain, the contamination of underground aquifers, and large oil spills are fundamentally regional. In both of these categories, there may be so many similar instances of particular local and regional problems occurring simultaneously all over the world that the patter n appears to be global, but the problems themselves are still not truly strategic because the operation of the global environment is not affected and the survival of civilization is not at stake.13.However, a new class of environmental problems does affect the global ecological system, and these threats are fundamentally strategic. The 600 percent increase in the amount of chlorine in the atmosphere during the last forty years has taken place not just in those countries producing the chlorofluorocarbons responsible but in the air above every country, above Antarctica, above the North Pole and the Pacific Ocean——all the way from the surface of the earth to the top of the sky. The increased levels of chlorine disrupt the global process by which the earth regulates the amount of ultraviolet radiation from the sun that is allowed through the atmosphere to the surface; and it we let chlorine levels continue to increase, the radiation levels will also increase——to the point that all animal and plant life will face a new threat to their survival.14.Global warming is also a strategic threat. The concentration of carbon dioxide and other heat-absorbing molecules has increased by almost 25 per cent since World War II, posing a worldwide threat to the earth’s ability to regulate the amount of heat from the sun retained in the atmosphere. This increase in heat seriously threatens the global climate equilibrium that determines the pattern of winds, rainfall, surface temperatures, ocean currents, and sea level. These in turn determine the distribution of vegetative and animal life on land and sea and have a great effect on the location and pattern of human societies.15.In other words, the entire relationship between humankind and the earth has been transformed because our civilization is suddenly capable of affecting the entire global environment,not just a particular area. All of us know that human civilization has usually had a large impact on the environment; to mention just one example, there is evidence that even in prehistoric times, vast areas were sometimes intentionally burned by people in their search for food. And in our own time we have reshaped a large part of the earth’s surface with concrete in our cities and carefully tended rice paddies, pastures, wheat fields, and other croplands in the countryside. But these changes, while sometimes appearing to be pervasive, have, until recently, been relatively trivial factors in the global ecological sys-tem. Indeed, until our lifetime, it was always safe to assume that nothing we did or could do would have any lasting effect on the global environment. But it is precisely that assumption which must now be discarded so that we can think strategically about our new relationship to the environment.16.Human civilization is now the dominant cause of change in the global environment. Yet we resist this truth and find it hard to imagine that our effect on the earth must now be measured by the same yardstick used to calculate the strength of the moon’s pull on the oceans or the force of the wind against the mountains. And it we are now capable of changing something so basic as the relationship between the earth and the sun, surely we must acknowledge a new responsibility to use that power wisely and with appropriate restraint. So far, however, We seem oblivious of the fragility of the earth’s natural systems.*17.This century has witnessed dramatic changes in two key factors that define the physical reality of our relationship to the earth: a sudden and startling surge in human population, with the addition of one China’s worth of people every ten years, and a sudden acceleration of the scientific and technological revolution, which has allowed an almost unimaginable magnification of our power to affect the world around us by burning, cutting, digging, moving, and transforming the physical matter that makes up the earth.18.The surge in population is both a cause of the changed relationship and one of the clearest illustrations of how startling the change has been, especially when viewed in a historical context. From the emergence of modern humans 200,000 years ago until Julius Caesar’s time, fewer than 250 million people walked on the face of the earth. When Christopher Columbus set sail for the New World 1,500 years later, there were approximately 500 million people on earth. By the time Thomas Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence in 1776, the number had doubled again, to 1 billion. By midway through this century, at the end of World War II, the number had risen to just above 2 billion people.19.In other words, from the beginning of humanity’s appearance on earth to 1945, it took more than ten thousand generations to reach a world population of 2 billion people. Now, in the course of one human lifetime——mine——the world population will increase from 2 to more than 9 billion, and it is already more than halfway there.20.Like the population explosion, the scientific and technological revolution began to pick up speed slowly during the eighteenth century. And this ongoing revolution has also suddenly accelerated exponentially. For example, it is now an axiom in many fields of science that more new and important discoveries have taken place in the last ten years that. in the entire previous history of science. While no single discovery has had the kind of effect on our relationship to the earth that unclear weapons have had on our relationship to warfare, it is nevertheless true that taken together, they have completely transformed our cumulative ability to exploit the earth for sustenance —— making the consequences of unrestrained exploitation every bit as unthinkable as the consequences of unrestrained nuclear war.21.Now that our relationship to the earth has changed so utterly, we have to see that change and understand its implications. Our challenge is to recognize that the startling images ofenvironmental destruction now occurring all over the world have much more in common than their ability to shock and awaken us. They are symptoms of an underlying problem broader in scope and more serious than any we have ever faced. Global warming, ozone depletion, the loss of living species, deforestation——they all have a common cause: the new relationship between human civilization and the earth’s natural balance.22.There are actually two aspects to this challenge. The first is to realize that our power to harm the earth can indeed have global and even permanent effects. The second is to realize that the only way to understand our new role as a co-architect of nature is to see ourselves as part of a complex system that does not operate according to the same simple rules of cause and effect we are used to. The problem is not our effect on the environment so much as our relationship with the environment. As a result, any solution to the problem will require a careful assessment of that relationship as well as the complex interrelationship among factors within civilization and between them and the major natural components of the earth’s ecological system.23.There is only one precedent for this kind of challenge to our thinking, and again it is military. The invention of nuclear weapons and the subsequent development by the United States and the Soviet Union of many thousands of strategic nuclear weapons forced a slow and painful recognition that the new power thus acquired forever changed not only the relationship between the two superpowers but also the relationship of humankind to the institution at war-fare itself. The consequences of all-out war between nations armed with nuclear weapons suddenly included the possibility of the destruction of both nations——completely and simultaneously. That sobering realization led to a careful reassessment of every aspect of our mutual relationship to the prospect of such a war. As early as 1946 one strategist concluded that strategic bombing with missiles “may well tear away the veil of illusion that has so long obscured the reality of the change inwarfare——from a fight to a process of destruction.”24.Nevertheless, during the earlier stages of the nuclear arms race, each of the superpower s assumed that its actions would have a simple and direct effect on the thinking of the other. For decades, each new advance in weaponry was deployed by one side for the purpose of inspiring fear in the other. But each such deployment led to an effort by the other to leapfrog the first one with a more advanced deployment of its own. Slowly, it has become apparent that the problem of the nuclear arms race is not primarily caused by technology. It is complicated by technology, true; but it arises out of the relationship between the superpowers and is based on an obsolete understanding of what war is all about.25.The eventual solution to the arms race will be found, not in a new deployment by one side or the other of some ultimate weapon or in a decision by either side to disarm unilaterally , but ratter in new understandings and in a mutual transformation of the relationship itself. This transformation will involve changes in the technology of weaponry and the denial of nuclear technology to rogue states. But the key changes will be in the way we think about the institution of warfare and about the relationship between states.26.The strategic nature of the threat now posed by human civilization to the global environment and the strategic nature of the threat to human civilization now posed by changes in the global environment present us with a similar set of challenges and false hopes. Some argue that a new ultimate technology, whether nuclear power or genetic engineering, will solve the problem. Others hold that only a drastic reduction of our reliance on technology can improve the conditions of life——a simplistic notion at best. But the real solution will be found in reinventing and finally healing the relationship between civilization and the earth. This can only be accomplished by undertaking a careful reassessment of all the factors that led to the relatively recent dramaticchange in the relationship. The transformation of the way we relate to the earth will of course involve new technologies, but the key changes will involve new ways of thinking about the relationship itself.( from Earth in the Balance: Ecology and the Human Spirit, 1992 )11。
第三课 ships in the Desert
第三课沙漠之舟艾尔o戈尔我头顶烈日站在一艘渔船的滚烫的钢甲板上。
这艘渔船在丰收季节一天所处理加工的鱼可达15吨。
但现在可不是丰收季节。
这艘渔船此时此刻停泊的地方虽说曾是整个中亚地区最大的渔业基地，但当我站在船头向远处眺望时，却看出渔业丰收的希望非常渺茫。
极目四顾，原先那种湛蓝色海涛轻拍船舷的景象已不复存在，取而代之的是茫茫的一片干燥灼热的沙漠。
渔船队的其他渔船也都搁浅在沙漠上，散见于陂陀起伏、绵延至天边的沙丘间。
十年前，咸海还是世界上第四大内陆湖泊，可与北美大湖区五大湖中的最大湖泊相媲美。
而今，由于兴建了一项考虑欠周的水利工程，原来注入此湖的水被引入沙漠灌溉棉田，咸海这座大湖的水面已渐渐变小，新形成的湖岸距离这些渔船永远停泊的位置差不多有40公里远。
与此同时，这儿附近的莫里那克镇上人们仍在生产鱼罐头，但所用的鱼已不是咸海所产，而是从一千多英里以外的太平洋渔业基地穿越西伯利亚运到这儿来的。
我因要对造成环境危机的原因进行调查而得以周游世界，考察和研究许多类似这样破坏生态环境的事例。
一九八八年深秋时节，我来到地球的最南端。
高耸的南极山脉中太阳在午夜穿过天空中的一个孔洞照射着地面，我站在令人难以置信的寒冷中，与一位科学家进行着一场谈话，内容是他正在挖掘的时间隧道。
这位科学家一撩开他的派克皮大衣，我便注意到他脸上因烈日的曝晒而皮肤皲裂，干裂的皮屑正一层层地剥落。
他一边讲话一边指给我看。
从我们脚下的冰川中挖出的一块岩心标本上的年层。
他将手指．到二十年前的冰层上，告诉我说，"这儿就是美国国会审议通过化空气法案的地方。
"这里虽处地球之顶端，距美国首都华盛顿两大洲之遥，但世界上任何一个国家只要将废气排放量减少一席在空气污染程度上引起的相应变化便能在南极这个地球上最偏而人迹难至的地方反映出来。
迄今为止，地球大气层最重要的变化始于上世纪初的工业命，变化速度自那以后逐渐加快。
工业意味着先是煤、后是石油消耗。
高级英语 lesson 3
Background Information
• Albert Arnold Gore (Al Gore) • Earth in the Balance: Ecology and the Human Spirit • The Aral Sea • Great Lakes • Amazon rain forest • Thomas Jefferson • Clean Air Act
The Aral Sea
• The Aral sea is located in Central Asia in the lowlands of Turan. Administratively the water body is divided between the Republics of Kasachstan in the north and Karakalpakistan in the south. The latter is an autonomous republic within the republic of Usbekistan. • Especially in the last 35 years irrigation has been greatly intensified. Since this period the desiccation of the Aral sea has been dramatic, with the result that the former fourth-largest lake of the world is now the world's eighth largest lake. The irrigated area extends over approximately 28000 sq km, and is mainly used for the cash crops cotton and rice.
高级英语第一册lesson3 ships in the desert 课文上课讲义
高级英语第一册l e s s o n3s h i p s i n t h e d e s e r t课文高级英语第一册lesson3 ships in the desert 课文Ships in the DesertAL GoreI was standing in the sun on the hot steel deck of a fishing ship capable of processing a fifty-ton catch on a good day. But it wasn' t a good day. We were anchored in what used to be the most productive fishing site in all of central Asia, but as I looked out over the bow , theprospects of a good catch looked bleak. Where there should have been gentle blue-green waves lapping against the side of the ship, there was nothing but hot dry sand – as far as I could see in all directions. The other ships of the fleet were also at rest in the sand, scattered in the dunes that stretched all the way to the horizon . Ten year s ago the Aral was the fourth-largest inland sea in the world, comparable to the largest of North America's Great Lakes. Now it is disappearing because the water that used to feed it has been diverted in an ill-considered irrigation scheme to grow cotton In the user t. The new shoreline was almost forty kilometers across the sand from where the fishing fleet was now permanently docked. Meanwhile, in the nearby town of Muynak the people were still canning fish – brought not from the Aral Sea but shipped by rail through Siberia from the Pacific Ocean, more than a thousand miles away.My search for the underlying causes of the environmental crisis has led me to travel around the world to examine and study many of these images of destruction. At the very bottom of the earth, high in the Trans-Antarctic Mountains, with the sun glaring at midnight through a hole in the sky, I stood in the unbelievable coldness and talked with a scientist in the late tall of 1988 about the tunnel he was digging through time. Slipping his parka back to reveal a badly burned face that was cracked and peeling, he pointed to the annual layers of ice in a core sample dug from the glacier on which we were standing. He moved his finger back in time to the ice of two decades ago. "Here's where the U. S Congress passed the Clean Air Act, ” he said. At the bottom of the world, two continents away from Washington, D. C., even a small reduction in one country's emissions had changed the amount of pollution found in the remotest end least accessible place on earth.But the most significant change thus far in the earth' s atmosphere is the one that began with the industrial revolution early inthe last century and has picked up speed ever since. Industry meant coal, and later oil, and we began to burn lots of it – bringing rising levels of carbon dioxide (CO2) , with its ability to trap more heat in the atmosphere and slowly warm the earth. Fewer than a hundred yards from the South Pole, upwind from the ice runway where the ski plane lands and keeps its engines running to prevent the metal parts from freeze-locking together, scientists monitor the air several times every day to chart the course of that inexorable change. During my visit, I watched one scientist draw the results of that day's measurements, pushing the end of a steep line still higher on the graph. He told me how easy it is – there at the end of the earth – to see that this enormous change in the global atmosphere is still picking up speed.Two and a half years later I slept under the midnight sun at the other end of our planet, in a small tent pitched on a twelve-toot-thick slab of ice floating in the frigid Arctic Ocean. After a hearty breakfast, my companions and I traveled by snowmobiles a few miles farther north to a rendezvous point where the ice was thinner – only three and a half feet thick – and a nuclear submarine hovered in the water below. After it crashed through the ice, took on its new passengers, and resubmerged, I talked with scientists who were trying to measure more accurately the thickness of the polar ice cap, which many believe is thinning as a re-suit of global warming. I had just negotiated an agreement between ice scientists and the U. S. Navy to secure the release of previously top secret data from submarine sonar tracks, data that could help them learn what is happening to the north polar cap. Now, I wanted to see the pole it-self, and some eight hours after we met the submarine, we were crashing through that ice, surfacing, and then I was standing in an eerily beautiful snowcape, windswept and sparkling white, with the horizon defined by little hummocks, or "pressure ridges " of ice that are pushed up like tiny mountain ranges when separate sheets collide. But here too, CD, levels are rising just as rapidly, and ultimately temperature will rise with them – indeed, global warming is expected to push temperatures up much more rapidly in the polar regions than in the rest of the world. As the polar air warms, the ice her e will thin; and since the polar cap plays such a crucial role in the world's weather system, the consequences of a thinning cap could be disastrous.Considering such scenarios is not a purely speculative exercise. Six months after I returned from the North Pole, a team of scientists reported dramatic changes in the pattern of ice distribution in the Arctic, and a second team reported a still controversialclaim (which avariety of data now suggest) that, over all, the north polar cap has thinned by 2 per cent in just the last decade. Moreover, scientists established several years ago that in many land areas north of the Arctic Circle, the spring snowmelt now comes earlier every year, and deep in the tundra below, the temperature e of the earth is steadily rising.As it happens, some of the most disturbing images of environmental destruction can be found exactly halfway between the North and South poles – precisely at the equator in Brazil – where billowing clouds of smoke regularly blacken the sky above the immense but now threatened Amazon rain forest. Acre by acre, the rain forest is being burned to create fast pasture for fast-food beef; as I learned when I went there in early 1989, the fires are set earlier and earlier in the dry season now, with more than one Tennessee's worth of rain forest being slashed and burned each year. According to our guide, the biologist Tom Lovejoy, there are more different species of birds in each square mile of the Amazon than exist in all of North America – which means we are silencing thousands of songs we have never even heard.But one doesn't have to travel around the world to witness humankind's assault on the earth. Images that signal the distress of our global environment are now commonly seen almost anywhere. On some nights, in high northern latitudes, the sky itself offers another ghostly image that signals the loss of ecological balance now in progress. If the sky is clear after sunset -- and if you are watching from a place where pollution hasn't blotted out the night sky altogether -- you can sometimes see a strange kind of cloud high in the sky. This "noctilucent cloud" occasionally appears when the earth is first cloaked in the evening darkness; shimmering above us with a translucent whiteness, these clouds seem quite unnatural. And they should: noctilucent clouds have begun to appear more often because of a huge buildup of methane gas in the atmosphere. (Also called natural gas, methane is released from landfills , from coal mines and rice paddies, from billions of termites that swarm through the freshly cut forestland, from the burning of biomass and from a variety of other human activities. ) Even though noctilucent clouds were sometimes seen in the past., all this extra methane carries more water vapor into the upper atmosphere, where it condenses at much higher altitudes to form more clouds that the sun's rays still strike long after sunset has brought the beginning of night to the surface far beneath them.What should we feel toward these ghosts in the sky? Simple wonder or the mix of emotions we feel at the zoo? Perhaps we should feelawe for our own power: just as men "t ear tusks from elephants’ heads in such quantity as to threaten the beast with extinction, we are ripping matter from its place in the earth in such volume as to upset the balance between daylight and darkness. In the process, we are once again adding to the threat of global warming, because methane has been one of the fastest-growing green-house gases, and is third only to carbon dioxide and water vapor in total volume, changing the chemistry of the upper atmosphere. But, without even considering that threat, shouldn't it startle us that we have now put these clouds in the evening sky which glisten with a spectral light? Or have our eyes adjusted so completely to the bright lights of civilization that we can't see these clouds for what they are – a physical manifestation of the violent collision between human civilization and the earth?Even though it is sometimes hard to see their meaning, we have by now all witnessed surprising experiences that signal the damage from our assault on the environment --whether it's the new frequency of days when the temperature exceeds 100 degrees, the new speed with which the -un burns our skin, or the new constancy of public debate over what to do with growing mountains of waste. But our response to these signals is puzzling. Why haven't we launched a massive effort to save our environment? To come at the question another way' Why do some images startle us into immediate action and focus our attention or ways to respond effectively? And why do other images, though sometimes equally dramatic, produce instead a Kind of paralysis, focusing our attention not on ways to respond but rather on some convenient, less painful distraction?Still, there are so many distressing images of environmental destruction that sometimes it seems impossible to know how to absorb or comprehend them. Before considering the threats themselves, it may be helpful to classify them and thus begin to organize our thoughts and feelings so that we may be able to respond appropriately.A useful system comes from the military, which frequently places a conflict in one of three different categories, according to the theater in which it takes place. There are "local" skirmishes, "regional" battles, and "strategic" conflicts. This third category is reserved for struggles that can threaten a nation's survival and must be understood in a global context.Environmental threats can be considered in the same way. For example, most instances of water pollution, air pollution, and illegal waste dumping are essentially local in nature. Problems like acid rain, thecontamination of underground aquifers, and large oil spills are fundamentally regional. In both of these categories, there may be so many similar instances of particular local and regional problems occurring simultaneously all over the world that the pattern appears to be global, but the problems themselves are still not truly strategic because the operation of the global environment is not affected and the survival of civilization is not at stake.However, a new class of environmental problems does affect the global ecological system, and these threats are fundamentally strategic. The 600 percent increase in the amount of chlorine in the atmosphere during the last forty years has taken place not just in those countries producing the chlorofluorocarbons responsible but in the air above every country, above Antarctica, above the North Pole and the Pacific Ocean –all the way from the surface of the earth to the top of the sky. The increased levels of chlorine disrupt the global process by which the earth regulates the amount of ultraviolet radiation from the sun that is allowed through the atmosphere to the surface; and it we let chlorine levels continue to increase, the radiation levels will all so increase – to the point that all animal and plant life will face a new threat to their survival.Global warming is also a strategic threat. The concentration of carbon dioxide and other heat-absorbing molecules has increased by almost 25 per cent since World War II, posing a worldwide threat to the earth's ability to regulate the amount of heat from the sun retained in the atmosphere. This increase in heat seriously threatens the global climate equilibrium that determines the pattern of winds, rainfall, surface temperatures, ocean currents, and sea level. These in turn determine the distribution of vegetative and animal life on land and sea and have a great effect on the location and pattern of human societies.In other words, the entire relationship between humankind and the earth has been transformed because our civilization is suddenly capable of affecting the entire global environment, not just a particular area. All of us know that human civilization has usually had a large impact on the environment; to mention just one example, there is evidence that even in prehistoric times, vast areas were sometimes intentionally burned by people in their search for food. And in our own time we have reshaped a large part of the earth's surface with concrete in our cities and carefully tended rice paddies, pastures, wheatfields, and other croplands in the countryside. But these changes, while sometimes appearing to be pervasive , have, until recently, been relatively trivial factors in the global ecological system. Indeed, until our lifetime, it was always safe to assumethat nothing we did or could do would have any lasting effect on the global environment. But it is precisely that assumption which must now be discarded so that we can think strategically about our new relationship to the environment.Human civilization is now the dominant cause of change in the global environment. Yet we resist this truth and find it hard to imagine that our effect on the earth must now be measured by the same yardstick used to calculate the strength of the moon's pull on the oceans or the force of the wind against the mountains. And it we are now capable of changing something so basic as the relationship between the earth and the sun, surely we must acknowledge a new responsibility to use that power wisely and with appropriate restraint. So far, however, We seem oblivious of the fragility of the earth's natural systems.This century has witnessed dramatic changes in two key factors that define the physical reality of our relationship to the earth: a sudden and startling surge in human population, with the addition of one China's worth of people every ten years, and a sudden acceleration of the scientific and technological revolution, which has allowed an almost unimaginable magnification of our power to affect the world around us by burning, cutting, digging, moving, and transforming the physical matter that makes up the earth. The surge in population is both a cause of the changed relationship and one of the clearest illustrations of how startling the change has been, especially when viewed in a historical context. From the emergence of modern humans 200 000 years ago until Julius Caesar's time, fewer than 250 million people walked on the face of the earth. When Christopher Columbus set sail for the New World 1500 years later, there were approximately 500 million people on earth. By the time Thomas Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence in 1776, the number had doubled again, to 1 billion. By midway through this century, at the end of World War II, the number had risen to just above 2 billion people. In other words, from the beginning of humanity's appearance on earth to 1945, it took more than ten thousand generations to reach a world population of 2 billion people. Now, in the course of one human lifetime -- mine -- the world population will increase from 2 to more than 9 million, and it is already more than halfway there.Like the population explosion, the scientific and technological revolution began to pick up speed slowly during the eighteenth century. And this ongoing revolution has also suddenly accelerated exponentially. For example, it is now an axiom in many fields of science that more new and important discoveries have taken place in the last ten years that. inthe entire previous history of science. While no single discover y has had the kind of effect on our relationship to the earth that unclear weapons have had on our relationship to warfare, it is nevertheless true that taken together, they have completely transformed our cumulative ability to exploit the earth for sustenance -- making the consequences, of unrestrained exploitation every bit as unthinkable as the consequences of unrestrained nuclear war.Now that our relationship to the earth has changed so utterly, we have to see that change and understand its implications. Our challenge is to recognize that the startling images of environmental destruction now occurring all over the world have much more in common than their ability to shock and awaken us. They are symptoms of an underlying problem broader in scope and more serious than any we have ever faced. Global warming, ozone depletion, the loss of living species, deforestation -- they all have a common cause: the new relationship between human civilization and the earth's natural balance. There are actually two aspects to this challenge. The first is to realize that our power to harm the earth can indeed have global and even permanent effects. The second is to realize that the only way to understand our new role as a co-architect of nature is to see ourselves as part of a complex system that does not operate according to the same simple rules of cause and effect we are used to. The problem is not our effect on the environment so much as our relationship with the environment. As a result, any solution to the problem will require a careful assessment of that relationship as well as the complex interrelationship among factors within civilization and between them and the major natural components of the earth's ecological system.There is only one precedent for this kind of challenge to our thinking, and again it is military. The invention of nuclear weapons and the subsequent development by the United States and the Soviet Union of many thousands of strategic nuclear weapons forced a slow and painful recognition that the new power thus acquired forever changed not only the relationship between the two superpowers but also the relationship of humankind to the institution at warfare itself. The consequences of all-out war between nations armed with nuclear weapons suddenly included the possibility of the destruction of both nations – completely and simultaneously. That sobering realization led to a careful reassessment of every aspect of our mutual relationship to the prospect of such a war. As early as 1946 one strategist concluded that strategic bombing with missiles "may well tear away the veil of illusion that has so long obscured the reality of the change in warfare – from a fight to a process ofdestruction.”Nevertheless, during the earlier stages of the nuclear arms race, each of the superpower s assumed that its actions would have a simple and direct effect on the thinking of the other. For decades, each new advance in weaponry was deployed by one side for the purpose of inspiring fear in the other. But each such deployment led to an effort by the other to leapfrog the first one with a more advanced deployment of its own. Slowly, it has become apparent that the problem of the nuclear arms race is not primarily caused by technology. It is complicated by technology, true; but it arises out of the relationship between the superpowers and is based on an obsolete understanding of what war is all about.The eventual solution to the arms race will be found, not in a new deployment by one side or the other of some ultimate weapon or in a decision by either side to disarm unilaterally , but ratter in new understandings and in a mutual transformation of the relationship itself. This transformation will involve changes in the technology of weaponry and the denial of nuclear technology to rogue states. But the key changes will be in the way we think about the institution of war far e and about the relationship between states.The strategic nature of the threat now posed by human civilization to the global environment and the strategic nature of the threat to human civilization now posed by changes in the global environment present us with a similar set of challenges and false hopes. Some argue that a new ultimate technology, whether nuclear power or genetic engineering, will solve the problem. Others hold that only a drastic reduction of our reliance on technology can improve the conditions of life -- a simplistic notion at best. But the real solution will be found in reinventing and finally healing the relationship between civilization and the earth. This can only be accomplished by undertaking a careful reassessment of all the factors that led to the relatively recent dramatic change in the relationship. The transformation of the way we relate to the earth will of course involve new technologies, but the key changes will involve new ways of thinking about the relationship itself.NOTESI) Al Gore: born in 1948 in Washington D. C., U. S. Senator (1984-1992) from the State of Tennessee,and U. S. Vice-President ( l 992-) under President Bill Clinton. He is the author of the book Earth in the Balance from which this piece is taken.2) Aral Sea: inland sea and the world’s fourth largest lake, c. 26 000sqmiles, SW Kazakhstan and NW Uzbekhstan, E of the Caspian Sea3) Great Lakes: group of five freshwater lakes, Central North America, between the United States and Canada, largest body of fresh water in the world. From west to east, they are Lake Superior,Lake Michigan,Lake Huron, Lake Erie, and Lake Ontario.4) Trans-Antarctic Mountains: mountain chain stretching across Antarctica from Victoria I and to Coats I and; separating the E Antarctic and W Antarctic subcontinents5) Clean Air Act: one of the oldest environmental laws of the U. S., as well as the most far-reaching, the costliest, and the most controversial. It was passed in 1970.6) Washington D. C.: capital of the United States. D. C. (District of Columbia).is added to distinguish it from the State of Washington and 3 other cities in the U. S bearing the sonic name.7) freeze-locking: the metal parts are frozen solid and unable to move freely8)midnight sun: phenomenon in which the sun remains visible in the sky for 24 hours or longer, occurring only in the polar regions9)global warming; The earth is getting warmer. The temperature of the earth's atmosphere and its surface is steadily rising.10) Submarine sonar tracks: the term sonar is an acronym for sound navigation ranging. It is used for communication between submerged submarines or between a submarine and a surface vessel, for locating mines and underwater hazards to navigation, and also as a fathometer, or depth finder.11) greenhouse (effect): process whereby heat is trapped at the surface of the earth by the atmosphere. An increase of man-made pollutants in the atmosphere will lead to a long-term warming of the earth's climate.12) Julius Caesar: (102? B. C -- 44 B. C:. ), Roman statesman and general13) Christopher Columbus: ( 1451-1506), discoverer of America, born Genoa, Italy14) Thomas Jefferson: (17-13-1826 ), 3d President of the United States(1801-1809), author of the Declaration of Independence.15) Declaration of Independence: full and formal declaration adopted July 4,1776, by representatives of the thirteen colonies in North精品资料仅供学习与交流，如有侵权请联系网站删除 谢谢11 America announcing the separation of those colonies from Great Britain and making them into the United States16)Ozone depletion: A layer of ozone in the stratosphere prevents most ultraviolet and other high-energy radiation, which is harmful to life, from penetrating to the earth's surface.Some.environmental, scientists fear that certain man-made pollutants, e.g. nitric oxide,CFCs(Chlorofluorocarbons), etc., may interfere with the delicate balance of reactions that maintains the ozone’ s concentration, possibly leading to a drastic depletion of stratospheric ozone. This is now happening in the stratosphere above the polar regions.。
高级英语第三课Ships in the Desert
Lesson 3 Ships in the DesertAL Gore1.I was standing in the sun on the hot steel deck of a fishing ship capable of processing a fifty-ton catch on a good day. But it wasn’t a good day. We were anchored in what used to be the most productive fishing site in all of central Asia, but as I looked out over the bow, the prospects of a good catch looked bleak. Where there should have been gentle blue-green waves lapping against the side of the ship, there was nothing but hot dry sand——as far as I could see in all directions. The other ships of the fleet were also at rest in the sand, scattered in the dunes that stretched all the way to the horizon. Ten years ago the Aral was the fourth-largest inland sea in the world, comparable to the largest of North America’s Great Lakes. Now it is disappearing because the water that used to feed it has been diverted in an ill-considered irrigation scheme to grow cotton in the desert. The new shoreline was almost forty kilometers across the sand from where the fishing fleet was now permanently docked. Meanwhile, in the nearby town of Muynak the people were still canning fish——brought not from the Aral Sea but shipped by rail through Siberia from the Pacific Ocean, more than a thousand miles away.2.My search for the underlying causes of the environmental crisis has led me to travel around the world to examine and study many of these images of destruction. At the very bottom of the earth, high in the Trans-Antarctic Mountains, with the sun glaring at midnight through a hole in the sky, I stood in the unbelievable coldness and talked with a scientist in the late tall of 1988 about the tunnel he was digging through time. Slipping his parka back to reveal a badly burned face that was cracked and peeling, he pointed to the annual layers of ice in a core sample dug from the glacier on which we were standing. He moved his finger back in time to the ice of two decades ago. “Here’s where the U.S Congress passed the Clean Air Act,” he said. At the bottom of the world, twocontinents away from Washington, D.C., even a small reduction in one country's emissions had changed the amount of pollution found in the remotest end least accessible place on earth.3.But the most significant change thus far in the earth’s atmosphere is the one that began with the industrial revolution early in the last century and has picked up speed ever since. Industry meant coal, and later oil, and we began to burn lots of it——bringing rising levels of carbon dioxide (CO2) , with its ability to trap more heat in the atmosphere and slowly warm the earth. Fewer than a hundred yards from the South Pole, upwind from the ice runway where the ski plane lands and keeps its engines running to prevent the metal parts from freeze-locking together, scientists monitor the air several times every day to chart the course of that inexorable change. During my visit, I watched one scientist draw the results of that day’s measurements, pushing the end of a steep line still higher on the graph. He told me how easy it is——there at the end of the earth——to see that this enormous change in the global atmosphere is still picking up speed.4.Two and a half years later I slept under the midnight sun at the other end of our planet, in a small tent pitched on a twelve-toot-thick slab of ice floating in the frigid Arctic Ocean. After a hearty breakfast, my companions and I traveled by snowmobiles a few miles farther north to a rendezvous point where the ice was thinner——only three and a half feet thick——and a nuclear submarine hovered in the water below. After it crashed through the ice, took on its new passengers, and resub merged, I talked with scientists who were trying to measure more accurately the thickness of the polar ice cap, which many believe is thinning as a result of global warming. I had just negotiated an agreement between ice scientists and the U.S. Navy to secure the release of previously top secret data from submarine sonar tracks, data that could help them learn what is happening to the north polar cap. Now, I wanted to see the pole it-self, and some eight hours after we met the submarine, we were crashing through that ice, surfacing, and then I was standing in aneerily beautiful snowscape, windswept and sparkling white, with the horizon defined by little hummocks, or “pressure ridges” of ice that are pushed up like tiny mountain ranges when separate sheets collide. But here too, CO2, levels are rising just as rapidly, and ultimately temperature will rise with them——indeed, global warming is expected to push temperatures up much more rapidly in the polar regions than in the rest of the world. As the polar air warms, the ice here will thin; and since the polar cap plays such a crucial role in the world’s weather system, the consequences of a thinning cap could be disastrous.5.Considering such scenarios is not a purely speculative exercise. Six months after I returned from the North Pole, a team of scientists reported dramatic changes in the pattern of ice distribution in the Arctic, and a second team reported a still controversial claim (which a variety of data now suggest) that, over all, the north polar cap has thinned by 2 percent in just the last decade. Moreover, scientists established several years ago that in many land areas north of the Arctic Circle, the spring snowmelt now comes earlier every year, and deep in the tundra below, the temperature of the earth is steadily rising.*6.As it happens, some of the most disturbing images of environmental destruction can be found exactly halfway between the North and South poles——precisely at the equator in Brazil ——where billowing clouds of smoke regularly blacken the sky above the immense but now threatened Amazon rain forest. Acre by acre, the rain forest is being burned to create fast pasture for fast-food beef; as I learned when I went there in early 1989, the fires are set earlier and earlier in the dry season now, with more than one Tennessee’s worth of rain forest being slashed and burned each year. According to our guide, the biologist Tom Lovejoy, there are more different species of birds in each square mile of the Amazon than exist in all of North America——which means we are silencing thousands of songs we have never even heard.*7.But one doesn't have to travel around the world to witness humankind’s assault on the earth. Images that signal the distress of our global environment are now commonly seen almost anywhere. On some nights, in high northern latitudes, the sky itself offers another ghostly image that signals the loss of ecological balance now in progress. If the sky is clear after sunset——and it you are watching from a place where pollution hasn't blotted out the night sky altogether——you can sometimes see a strange kind of cloud high in the sky. This “noctilucent cloud” occasionally appears when the earth is first cloaked in the evening darkness; shimmering above us with a translucent whiteness, these clouds seem quite unnatural. And they should: noctilucent clouds have begun to appear more often because of a huge buildup of methane gas in the atmosphere. (Also called natural gas, methane is released from landfills, from coal mines and rice paddies, from billions of termites that swarm through the freshly cut forestland, from the burning of biomass and from a variety of other human activities. ) Even though noctilucent clouds were sometimes seen in the past, all this extra methane carries more water vapor into the upper atmosphere, where it condenses at much higher altitudes to form more clouds that the sun’s rays still strike long after sunset has brought the beginning of night to the surface far beneath them.8.What should we feel toward these ghosts in the sky? Simple wonder or the mix of emotions we feel at the zoo? Perhaps we should feel awe for our own power: just as men tear tusks from elephants’ heads in such quantity as to threaten the beast with extinction, we are ripping matter from its place in the earth in such volume as to upset the balance between daylight and darkness. In the process, we are once again adding to the threat of global warming, because methane has been one of the fastest-growing green-house gases, and is third only to carbon dioxide and water vapor in total volume, changing the chemistry of the upper atmosphere. But, without even considering that threat, shouldn’t it startle us that we have now put these clouds in the evening sky whichglisten with a spectral light? Or have our eyes adjusted so completely to the bright lights of civilization that we can’t see these clouds for what they are——a physical manifestation of the violent collision between human civilization and the earth?*9.Even though it is sometimes hard to see their meaning, we have by now all witnessed surprising experiences that signal the damage from our assault on the environment——whether it's the new frequency of days when the temperature exceeds 100 degrees, the new speed with which the sun burns our skin, or the new constancy of public debate over what to do with growing mountains of waste. But our response to these signals is puzzling. Why haven’t we launched a massive effort to save our environment? To come at the question another way: Why do some images startle us into immediate action and focus our attention or ways to respond effectively? And why do other images, though sometimes equally dramatic, produce instead a Kin. of paralysis, focusing our attention not on ways to respond but rather on some convenient, less painful distraction?10.Still, there are so many distressing images of environmental destruction that sometimes it seems impossible to know how to absorb or comprehend them. Before considering the threats themselves, it may be helpful to classify them and thus begin to organize our thoughts and feelings so that we may be able to respond appropriately.11.A useful system comes from the military, which frequently places a conflict in one of three different categories, according to the theater in which it takes place. There are “local” skirmishes, “regional” battles, and “strategic” conflicts. This third category is reserved for struggles that can threaten a nation’s survival and must be under stood in a global context.12.Environmental threats can be considered in the same way. For example, most instances of water pollution, air pollution, and illegal waste dumping are essentially local in nature. Problemslike acid rain, the contamination of underground aquifers, and large oil spills are fundamentally regional. In both of these categories, there may be so many similar instances of particular local and regional problems occurring simultaneously all over the world that the patter n appears to be global, but the problems themselves are still not truly strategic because the operation of the global environment is not affected and the survival of civilization is not at stake.13.However, a new class of environmental problems does affect the global ecological system, and these threats are fundamentally strategic. The 600 percent increase in the amount of chlorine in the atmosphere during the last forty years has taken place not just in those countries producing the chlorofluorocarbons responsible but in the air above every country, above Antarctica, above the North Pole and the Pacific Ocean——all the way from the surface of the earth to the top of the sky. The increased levels of chlorine disrupt the global process by which the earth regulates the amount of ultraviolet radiation from the sun that is allowed through the atmosphere to the surface; and it we let chlorine levels continue to increase, the radiation levels will also increase——to the point that all animal and plant life will face a new threat to their survival.14.Global warming is also a strategic threat. The concentration of carbon dioxide and other heat-absorbing molecules has increased by almost 25 per cent since World War II, posing a worldwide threat to the earth’s ability to regulate the amount of heat from the sun retained in the atmosphere. This increase in heat seriously threatens the global climate equilibrium that determines the pattern of winds, rainfall, surface temperatures, ocean currents, and sea level. These in turn determine the distribution of vegetative and animal life on land and sea and have a great effect on the location and pattern of human societies.15.In other words, the entire relationship between humankind and the earth has been transformed because our civilization is suddenly capable of affecting the entire global environment,not just a particular area. All of us know that human civilization has usually had a large impact on the environment; to mention just one example, there is evidence that even in prehistoric times, vast areas were sometimes intentionally burned by people in their search for food. And in our own time we have reshaped a large part of the earth’s surface with concrete in our cities and carefully tended rice paddies, pastures, wheat fields, and other croplands in the countryside. But these changes, while sometimes appearing to be pervasive, have, until recently, been relatively trivial factors in the global ecological sys-tem. Indeed, until our lifetime, it was always safe to assume that nothing we did or could do would have any lasting effect on the global environment. But it is precisely that assumption which must now be discarded so that we can think strategically about our new relationship to the environment.16.Human civilization is now the dominant cause of change in the global environment. Yet we resist this truth and find it hard to imagine that our effect on the earth must now be measured by the same yardstick used to calculate the strength of the moon’s pull on the oceans or the force of the wind against the mountains. And it we are now capable of changing something so basic as the relationship between the earth and the sun, surely we must acknowledge a new responsibility to use that power wisely and with appropriate restraint. So far, however, We seem oblivious of the fragility of the earth’s natural systems.*17.This century has witnessed dramatic changes in two key factors that define the physical reality of our relationship to the earth: a sudden and startling surge in human population, with the addition of one China’s worth of people every ten years, and a sudden acceleration of the scientific and technological revolution, which has allowed an almost unimaginable magnification of our power to affect the world around us by burning, cutting, digging, moving, and transforming the physical matter that makes up the earth.18.The surge in population is both a cause of the changed relationship and one of the clearest illustrations of how startling the change has been, especially when viewed in a historical context. From the emergence of modern humans 200,000 years ago until Julius Caesar’s time, fewer than 250 million people walked on the face of the earth. When Christopher Columbus set sail for the New World 1,500 years later, there were approximately 500 million people on earth. By the time Thomas Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence in 1776, the number had doubled again, to 1 billion. By midway through this century, at the end of World War II, the number had risen to just above 2 billion people.19.In other words, from the beginning of humanity’s appearance on earth to 1945, it took more than ten thousand generations to reach a world population of 2 billion people. Now, in the course of one human lifetime——mine——the world population will increase from 2 to more than 9 billion, and it is already more than halfway there.20.Like the population explosion, the scientific and technological revolution began to pick up speed slowly during the eighteenth century. And this ongoing revolution has also suddenly accelerated exponentially. For example, it is now an axiom in many fields of science that more new and important discoveries have taken place in the last ten years that. in the entire previous history of science. While no single discovery has had the kind of effect on our relationship to the earth that unclear weapons have had on our relationship to warfare, it is nevertheless true that taken together, they have completely transformed our cumulative ability to exploit the earth for sustenance —— making the consequences of unrestrained exploitation every bit as unthinkable as the consequences of unrestrained nuclear war.21.Now that our relationship to the earth has changed so utterly, we have to see that change and understand its implications. Our challenge is to recognize that the startling images ofenvironmental destruction now occurring all over the world have much more in common than their ability to shock and awaken us. They are symptoms of an underlying problem broader in scope and more serious than any we have ever faced. Global warming, ozone depletion, the loss of living species, deforestation——they all have a common cause: the new relationship between human civilization and the earth’s natural balance.22.There are actually two aspects to this challenge. The first is to realize that our power to harm the earth can indeed have global and even permanent effects. The second is to realize that the only way to understand our new role as a co-architect of nature is to see ourselves as part of a complex system that does not operate according to the same simple rules of cause and effect we are used to. The problem is not our effect on the environment so much as our relationship with the environment. As a result, any solution to the problem will require a careful assessment of that relationship as well as the complex interrelationship among factors within civilization and between them and the major natural components of the earth’s ecological system.23.There is only one precedent for this kind of challenge to our thinking, and again it is military. The invention of nuclear weapons and the subsequent development by the United States and the Soviet Union of many thousands of strategic nuclear weapons forced a slow and painful recognition that the new power thus acquired forever changed not only the relationship between the two superpowers but also the relationship of humankind to the institution at war-fare itself. The consequences of all-out war between nations armed with nuclear weapons suddenly included the possibility of the destruction of both nations——completely and simultaneously. That sobering realization led to a careful reassessment of every aspect of our mutual relationship to the prospect of such a war. As early as 1946 one strategist concluded that strategic bombing with missiles “may well tear away the veil of illusion that has so long obscured the reality of the change inwarfare——from a fight to a process of destruction.”24.Nevertheless, during the earlier stages of the nuclear arms race, each of the superpower s assumed that its actions would have a simple and direct effect on the thinking of the other. For decades, each new advance in weaponry was deployed by one side for the purpose of inspiring fear in the other. But each such deployment led to an effort by the other to leapfrog the first one with a more advanced deployment of its own. Slowly, it has become apparent that the problem of the nuclear arms race is not primarily caused by technology. It is complicated by technology, true; but it arises out of the relationship between the superpowers and is based on an obsolete understanding of what war is all about.25.The eventual solution to the arms race will be found, not in a new deployment by one side or the other of some ultimate weapon or in a decision by either side to disarm unilaterally , but ratter in new understandings and in a mutual transformation of the relationship itself. This transformation will involve changes in the technology of weaponry and the denial of nuclear technology to rogue states. But the key changes will be in the way we think about the institution of warfare and about the relationship between states.26.The strategic nature of the threat now posed by human civilization to the global environment and the strategic nature of the threat to human civilization now posed by changes in the global environment present us with a similar set of challenges and false hopes. Some argue that a new ultimate technology, whether nuclear power or genetic engineering, will solve the problem. Others hold that only a drastic reduction of our reliance on technology can improve the conditions of life——a simplistic notion at best. But the real solution will be found in reinventing and finally healing the relationship between civilization and the earth. This can only be accomplished by undertaking a careful reassessment of all the factors that led to the relatively recent dramaticchange in the relationship. The transformation of the way we relate to the earth will of course involve new technologies, but the key changes will involve new ways of thinking about the relationship itself.( from Earth in the Balance: Ecology and the Human Spirit, 1992 )11。
高级英语第三课Ships in the Desertppt课件
Desert
.
Compare the following:
❖ Desert : n. [‘dezət] wildness; waste land; waterless and treeless, often sand covered;
❖ Desert : v. [di ‘zə:t] abandon; give up; go away from
Land 旧名为 Palmer Peninsula .
Some Proper Names
❖ Arctic Circle:北极圈 ❖ Mid-night sun: 午夜太阳 (see Note 8) ❖ Ozone depletion: 臭氧层空洞 (see Note 16)
❖ Ozone is an unstable, pale-blue gas, O3 with a penetratin demonstrates that the quality of our air and water is urgently at risk. He clearly illustrates how problems that once were regional have now become global. Gore argues for a worldwide mobilization to save us from disaster.
their deserts. ❖ Some people failed to get their deserts. ❖ He is a man of deserts. ❖ Dessert fork \ knife \ spoon \ wine
.
unit 3 Ships in the Desert
--bringing rising…with its ability …warm the earth:
adverbial of result: making the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere grow; heat cannot easily get through carbon dioxide and go into the high altitude so carbon dioxide plays the role of a cover, keeping the heat near the earth.
Clean Air Act:
American Congress passed the Clean Air Act in 1970, which is one of the oldest environmental laws of the U.S. as well as the most farreaching, the costliest, and the most controversial.
What’s Paragraph 3 talking about?
What’s the cause of the global warming?
Began with the industrial revolution,
Industry meant coal:
the development of industry meant the use of large amount of coal as fuel to generate power.
to feed it has been diverted in an ill-considered irrigation scheme to grow cotton in the dessert:
高级英语第一册lesson3 ships in the desert 课文
高级英语第一册lesson3 ships in the desert 课文 Ships in the DesertAL GoreI was standing in the sun on the hot steel deck of a fishing ship capable of processing a fifty-ton catch on a good day. But it wasn' t a good day. We were anchored in what used to be the most productive fishing site in all of central Asia, but as I looked out over the bow , the prospects of a good catch looked bleak. Where there should have been gentle blue-green waves lapping against the side of the ship, there was nothing but hot dry sand – as far as I could see in all directions. The other ships of the fleet were also at rest in the sand, scattered in the dunes that stretched all the way to the horizon . Ten year s ago the Aral was the fourth-largest inland sea in the world, comparable to the largest of North America's Great Lakes. Now it is disappearing because the water that used to feed it has been diverted in an ill-considered irrigation scheme to grow cotton In the user t. The new shoreline was almost forty kilometers across the sand from where the fishing fleet was now permanently docked. Meanwhile, in the nearby town of Muynak the people were still canning fish – brought not from the Aral Sea but shipped by rail through Siberia from the Pacific Ocean, more than a thousand miles away.My search for the underlying causes of the environmental crisishas led me to travel around the world to examine and study many of these images of destruction. At the very bottom of the earth, high in the Trans-Antarctic Mountains, with the sun glaring at midnight through a hole in the sky, I stood in the unbelievable coldness and talked with a scientist in the late tall of 1988 about the tunnel he was digging through time. Slipping his parka back to reveal a badly burned face that was cracked and peeling, he pointed to the annual layers of ice in a core sample dug from the glacier on which we were standing. He moved his finger back in time to the ice of two decades ago. "Here's where the U. S Congress passed the Clean Air Act, ” he said. At the bottom of the world, two continents away from Washington, D. C., even a small reduction in one country's emissions had changed the amount of pollution found in the remotest end least accessible place on earth.But the most significant change thus far in the earth' s atmosphere is the one that began with the industrial revolution early in the last century and has picked up speed ever since. Industry meant coal, and later oil, and we began to burn lots of it – bringing rising levels of carbon dioxide (CO2) , with its ability to trap more heat in the atmosphere and slowly warm the earth. Fewer than a hundred yards from the South Pole, upwind from the ice runway where the ski plane lands and keeps its engines running to prevent the metal parts from freeze-locking together, scientists monitor the air several times every day to chart the course ofthat inexorable change. During my visit, I watched one scientist draw the results of that day's measurements, pushing the end of a steep line still higher on the graph. He told me how easy it is – there at the end of the earth – to see that this enormous change in the global atmosphere is still picking up speed.Two and a half years later I slept under the midnight sun at the other end of our planet, in a small tent pitched on a twelve-toot-thick slab of ice floating in the frigid Arctic Ocean. After a hearty breakfast, my companions and I traveled by snowmobiles a few miles farther north to a rendezvous point where the ice was thinner – only three and a half feet thick – and a nuclear submarine hovered in the water below. After it crashed through the ice, took on its new passengers, and resubmerged, I talked with scientists who were trying to measure more accurately the thickness of the polar ice cap, which many believe is thinning as a re-suit of global warming. I had just negotiated an agreement between ice scientists and the U. S. Navy to secure the release of previously top secret data from submarine sonar tracks, data that could help them learn what is happening to the north polar cap. Now, I wanted to see the pole it-self, and some eight hours after we met the submarine, we were crashing through that ice, surfacing, and then I was standing in an eerily beautiful snowcape, windswept and sparkling white, with the horizon defined by little hummocks, or "pressure ridges " of ice that are pushed up like tinymountain ranges when separate sheets collide. But here too, CD, levels are rising just as rapidly, and ultimately temperature will rise with them –indeed, global warming is expected to push temperatures up much more rapidly in the polar regions than in the rest of the world. As the polar air warms, the ice her e will thin; and since the polar cap plays such a crucial role in the world's weather system, the consequences of a thinning cap could be disastrous.Considering such scenarios is not a purely speculative exercise. Six months after I returned from the North Pole, a team of scientists reported dramatic changes in the pattern of ice distribution in the Arctic, and a second team reported a still controversialclaim (which a variety of data now suggest) that, over all, the north polar cap has thinned by 2 per cent in just the last decade. Moreover, scientists established several years ago that in many land areas north of the Arctic Circle, the spring snowmelt now comes earlier every year, and deep in the tundra below, the temperature e of the earth is steadily rising.As it happens, some of the most disturbing images of environmental destruction can be found exactly halfway between the North and South poles – precisely at the equator in Brazil – where billowing clouds of smoke regularly blacken the sky above the immense but now threatened Amazon rain forest. Acre by acre, the rain forest is beingburned to create fast pasture for fast-food beef; as I learned when I went there in early 1989, the fires are set earlier and earlier in the dry season now, with more than one Tennessee's worth of rain forest being slashed and burned each year. According to our guide, the biologist Tom Lovejoy, there are more different species of birds in each square mile of the Amazon than exist in all of North America – which means we are silencing thousands of songs we have never even heard.But one doesn't have to travel around the world to witness humankind's assault on the earth. Images that signal the distress of our global environment are now commonly seen almost anywhere. On some nights, in high northern latitudes, the sky itself offers another ghostly image that signals the loss of ecological balance now in progress. If the sky is clear after sunset -- and if you are watching from a place where pollution hasn't blotted out the night sky altogether -- you can sometimes see a strange kind of cloud high in the sky. This "noctilucent cloud" occasionally appears when the earth is first cloaked in the evening darkness; shimmering above us with a translucent whiteness, these clouds seem quite unnatural. And they should: noctilucent clouds have begun to appear more often because of a huge buildup of methane gas in the atmosphere. (Also called natural gas, methane is released from landfills , from coal mines and rice paddies, from billions of termites that swarm through the freshly cut forestland, from the burning of biomass and from a variety of other humanactivities. ) Even though noctilucent clouds were sometimes seen in the past., all this extra methane carries more water vapor into the upper atmosphere, where it condenses at much higher altitudes to form more clouds that the sun's rays still strike long after sunset has brought the beginning of night to the surface far beneath them.What should we feel toward these ghosts in the sky? Simple wonder or the mix of emotions we feel at the zoo? Perhaps we should feel awe for our own power: just as men "t ear tusks from elephants’ heads in such quantity as to threaten the beast with extinction, we are ripping matter from its place in the earth in such volume as to upset the balance between daylight and darkness. In the process, we are once again adding to the threat of global warming, because methane has been one of the fastest-growing green-house gases, and is third only to carbon dioxide and water vapor in total volume, changing the chemistry of the upper atmosphere. But, without even considering that threat, shouldn't it startle us that we have now put these clouds in the evening sky which glisten with a spectral light? Or have our eyes adjusted so completely to the bright lights of civilization that we can't see these clouds for what they are – a physical manifestation of the violent collision between human civilization and the earth?Even though it is sometimes hard to see their meaning, we have bynow all witnessed surprising experiences that signal the damage from our assault on the environment --whether it's the new frequency of days when the temperature exceeds 100 degrees, the new speed with which the -un burns our skin, or the new constancy of public debate over what to do with growing mountains of waste. But our response to these signals is puzzling. Why haven't we launched a massive effort to save our environment? To come at the question another way' Why do some images startle us into immediate action and focus our attention or ways to respond effectively? And why do other images, though sometimes equally dramatic, produce instead a Kind of paralysis, focusing our attention not on ways to respond but rather on some convenient, less painful distraction?Still, there are so many distressing images of environmental destruction that sometimes it seems impossible to know how to absorb or comprehend them. Before considering the threats themselves, it may be helpful to classify them and thus begin to organize our thoughts and feelings so that we may be able to respond appropriately.A useful system comes from the military, which frequently places a conflict in one of three different categories, according to the theater in which it takes place. There are "local" skirmishes, "regional" battles, and "strategic" conflicts. This third category is reserved for struggles that can threaten a nation's survival and must be understood in a globalcontext.Environmental threats can be considered in the same way. For example, most instances of water pollution, air pollution, and illegal waste dumping are essentially local in nature. Problems like acid rain, the contamination of underground aquifers, and large oil spills are fundamentally regional. In both of these categories, there may be so many similar instances of particular local and regional problems occurring simultaneously all over the world that the pattern appears to be global, but the problems themselves are still not truly strategic because the operation of the global environment is not affected and the survival of civilization is not at stake.However, a new class of environmental problems does affect the global ecological system, and these threats are fundamentally strategic. The 600 percent increase in the amount of chlorine in the atmosphere during the last forty years has taken place not just in those countries producing the chlorofluorocarbons responsible but in the air above every country, above Antarctica, above the North Pole and the Pacific Ocean – all the way from the surface of the earth to the top of the sky. The increased levels of chlorine disrupt the global process by which the earth regulates the amount of ultraviolet radiation from the sun that is allowed through the atmosphere to the surface; and it we let chlorine levels continue toincrease, the radiation levels will all so increase – to the point that all animal and plant life will face a new threat to their survival.Global warming is also a strategic threat. The concentration of carbon dioxide and other heat-absorbing molecules has increased by almost 25 per cent since World War II, posing a worldwide threat to the earth's ability to regulate the amount of heat from the sun retained in the atmosphere. This increase in heat seriously threatens the global climate equilibrium that determines the pattern of winds, rainfall, surface temperatures, ocean currents, and sea level. These in turn determine the distribution of vegetative and animal life on land and sea and have a great effect on the location and pattern of human societies.In other words, the entire relationship between humankind and the earth has been transformed because our civilization is suddenly capable of affecting the entire global environment, not just a particular area. All of us know that human civilization has usually had a large impact on the environment; to mention just one example, there is evidence that even in prehistoric times, vast areas were sometimes intentionally burned by people in their search for food. And in our own time we have reshaped a large part of the earth's surface with concrete in our cities and carefully tended rice paddies, pastures, wheatfields, and other croplands in the countryside. But these changes, while sometimes appearing to bepervasive , have, until recently, been relatively trivial factors in the global ecological system. Indeed, until our lifetime, it was always safe to assume that nothing we did or could do would have any lasting effect on the global environment. But it is precisely that assumption which must now be discarded so that we can think strategically about our new relationship to the environment.Human civilization is now the dominant cause of change in the global environment. Yet we resist this truth and find it hard to imagine that our effect on the earth must now be measured by the same yardstick used to calculate the strength of the moon's pull on the oceans or the force of the wind against the mountains. And it we are now capable of changing something so basic as the relationship between the earth and the sun, surely we must acknowledge a new responsibility to use that power wisely and with appropriate restraint. So far, however, We seem oblivious of the fragility of the earth's natural systems.This century has witnessed dramatic changes in two key factors that define the physical reality of our relationship to the earth: a sudden and startling surge in human population, with the addition of one China's worth of people every ten years, and a sudden acceleration of the scientific and technological revolution, which has allowed an almost unimaginable magnification of our power to affect the world around us byburning, cutting, digging, moving, and transforming the physical matter that makes up the earth. The surge in population is both a cause of the changed relationship and one of the clearest illustrations of how startling the change has been, especially when viewed in a historical context. From the emergence of modern humans 200 000 years ago until Julius Caesar's time, fewer than 250 million people walked on the face of the earth. When Christopher Columbus set sail for the New World 1500 years later, there were approximately 500 million people on earth. By the time Thomas Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence in 1776, the number had doubled again, to 1 billion. By midway through this century, at the end of World War II, the number had risen to just above 2 billion people. In other words, from the beginning of humanity's appearance on earth to 1945, it took more than ten thousand generations to reach a world population of 2 billion people. Now, in the course of one human lifetime -- mine -- the world population will increase from 2 to more than 9 million, and it is already more than halfway there.Like the population explosion, the scientific and technological revolution began to pick up speed slowly during the eighteenth century. And this ongoing revolution has also suddenly accelerated exponentially. For example, it is now an axiom in many fields of science that more new and important discoveries have taken place in the last ten years that. in the entire previous history of science. While no single discover y has had thekind of effect on our relationship to the earth that unclear weapons have had on our relationship to warfare, it is nevertheless true that taken together, they have completely transformed our cumulative ability to exploit the earth for sustenance -- making the consequences, of unrestrained exploitation every bit as unthinkable as the consequences of unrestrained nuclear war.Now that our relationship to the earth has changed so utterly, we have to see that change and understand its implications. Our challenge is to recognize that the startling images of environmental destruction now occurring all over the world have much more in common than their ability to shock and awaken us. They are symptoms of an underlying problem broader in scope and more serious than any we have ever faced. Global warming, ozone depletion, the loss of living species, deforestation -- they all have a common cause: the new relationship between human civilization and the earth's natural balance. There are actually two aspects to this challenge. The first is to realize that our power to harm the earth can indeed have global and even permanent effects. The second is to realize that the only way to understand our new role as a co-architect of nature is to see ourselves as part of a complex system that does not operate according to the same simple rules of cause and effect we are used to. The problem is not our effect on the environment so much as our relationship with the environment. As a result, any solution to the problem will require a carefulassessment of that relationship as well as the complex interrelationship among factors within civilization and between them and the major natural components of the earth's ecological system.There is only one precedent for this kind of challenge to our thinking, and again it is military. The invention of nuclear weapons and the subsequent development by the United States and the Soviet Union of many thousands of strategic nuclear weapons forced a slow and painful recognition that the new power thus acquired forever changed not only the relationship between the two superpowers but also the relationship of humankind to the institution at warfare itself. The consequences of all-out war between nations armed with nuclear weapons suddenly included the possibility of the destruction of both nations – completely and simultaneously. That sobering realization led to a careful reassessment of every aspect of our mutual relationship to the prospect of such a war. As early as 1946 one strategist concluded that strategic bombing with missiles "may well tear away the veil of illusion that has so long obscured the reality of the change in warfare – from a fight to a process of destruction.”Nevertheless, during the earlier stages of the nuclear arms race, each of the superpower s assumed that its actions would have a simple and direct effect on the thinking of the other. For decades, each new advancein weaponry was deployed by one side for the purpose of inspiring fear in the other. But each such deployment led to an effort by the other to leapfrog the first one with a more advanced deployment of its own. Slowly, it has become apparent that the problem of the nuclear arms race is not primarily caused by technology. It is complicated by technology, true; but it arises out of the relationship between the superpowers and is based on an obsolete understanding of what war is all about.The eventual solution to the arms race will be found, not in a new deployment by one side or the other of some ultimate weapon or in a decision by either side to disarm unilaterally , but ratter in new understandings and in a mutual transformation of the relationship itself. This transformation will involve changes in the technology of weaponry and the denial of nuclear technology to rogue states. But the key changes will be in the way we think about the institution of war far e and about the relationship between states.The strategic nature of the threat now posed by human civilization to the global environment and the strategic nature of the threat to human civilization now posed by changes in the global environment present us with a similar set of challenges and false hopes. Some argue that a new ultimate technology, whether nuclear power or genetic engineering, will solve the problem. Others hold that only a drasticreduction of our reliance on technology can improve the conditions of life -- a simplistic notion at best. But the real solution will be found in reinventing and finally healing the relationship between civilization and the earth. This can only be accomplished by undertaking a careful reassessment of all the factors that led to the relatively recent dramatic change in the relationship. The transformation of the way we relate to the earth will of course involve new technologies, but the key changes will involve new ways of thinking about the relationship itself.NOTESI) Al Gore: born in 1948 in Washington D. C., U. S. Senator(1984-1992) from the State of Tennessee,and U. S. Vice-President ( l 992-) under President Bill Clinton. He is the author of the book Earth in the Balance from which this piece is taken.2) Aral Sea: inland sea and the world’s fourth la rgest lake, c. 26 000 sqmiles, SW Kazakhstan and NW Uzbekhstan, E of the Caspian Sea3) Great Lakes: group of five freshwater lakes, Central North America, between the United States and Canada, largest body of fresh water in the world. From west to east, they are Lake Superior,Lake Michigan,Lake Huron, Lake Erie, and Lake Ontario.4) Trans-Antarctic Mountains: mountain chain stretching across Antarctica from Victoria I and to Coats I and; separating the E Antarcticand W Antarctic subcontinents5) Clean Air Act: one of the oldest environmental laws of the U. S., as well as the most far-reaching, the costliest, and the most controversial. It was passed in 1970.6) Washington D. C.: capital of the United States. D. C. (District of Columbia).is added to distinguish it from the State of Washington and 3 other cities in the U. S bearing the sonic name.7) freeze-locking: the metal parts are frozen solid and unable to move freely8)midnight sun: phenomenon in which the sun remains visible in the sky for 24 hours or longer, occurring only in the polar regions9)global warming; The earth is getting warmer. The temperature of the earth's atmosphere and its surface is steadily rising.10) Submarine sonar tracks: the term sonar is an acronym for sound navigation ranging. It is used for communication between submerged submarines or between a submarine and a surface vessel, for locating mines and underwater hazards to navigation, and also as a fathometer, or depth finder.11) greenhouse (effect): process whereby heat is trapped at the surface of the earth by the atmosphere. An increase of man-made pollutants in the atmosphere will lead to a long-term warming of theearth's climate.12) Julius Caesar: (102? B. C -- 44 B. C:. ), Roman statesman and general13) Christopher Columbus: ( 1451-1506), discoverer of America, born Genoa, Italy14) Thomas Jefferson: (17-13-1826 ), 3d President of the United States(1801-1809), author of the Declaration of Independence.15) Declaration of Independence: full and formal declaration adopted July 4,1776, by representatives of the thirteen colonies in North America announcing the separation of those colonies from Great Britain and making them into the United States16)Ozone depletion: A layer of ozone in the stratosphere prevents most ultraviolet and other high-energy radiation, which is harmful to life, from penetrating to the earth's surface.Some.environmental, scientists fear that certain man-made pollutants, e.g. nitric oxide,CFCs(Chlorofluorocarbons), etc., may interfere with the delicate balance of reactions that maintains the ozone’ s concentration, possibly leading to a drastic depletion of stratospheric ozone. This is now happening in the stratosphere above the polar regions.。
ships in the desert课文翻译
ships in the desert课文翻译Unit 3 - Ships In The DesertShips In The DesertI was standing in the sun on the hot steel deck of a fishing ship capable of processing a fifty-ton catch on a good day. But it wasn't a good day.We were anchored in what used to be the most productive fishing site in all of central Asia, but as I looked out over the bow, the prospects of a good catch looked bleak.Where there should have been gentle blue-green waves lapping against the side of the ship, there was nothing but hot dry sand-as far as I could see in all directions.The other ships of the fleet were also at rest in the sand, scattered in the dunes that stretched all the way to the horizon.Ten years ago the Aral was the fourth largest inland sea in the world, comparable to the largest of North America's Great Lakes.Now it is disappearing because the water that used to feed it has been diverted in an ill-considered irrigation scheme to grow cotton in the desert.The new shoreline was almost forty kilometers across, the sand from where the fishing fleet was now permanently docked.Meanwhile, in the nearby town of Muynak the people were still canning fish -brought not from the Aral Sea but shipped by rail through Siberia from the Pacific Ocean, more than a thousand miles away.My search for the underlying causes of the environmental crisis has led me to travel around the world to examine and study many of these images of destruction.At the very bottom of the earth, high in the Trans-Antarctic Mountains, with the sun glaring at midnight through a hole in the sky, I stood in the unbelievable coldness and talked with a scientist in the late fall of 1988 about the tunnel he was digging through time.Slipping his parka back to reveal a badly burned face that was cracked and peeling, he pointed to the annual layers of ice in a core sample dug from the glacier on which we were standing.He moved his finger back in time to the ice of two decades ago. "Here's where the U.S. Congress passed the Clean Air Act," he said.At the bottom of the world, two continents away from Washington, D. C., even a small reduction in one country's emissions had changed the amount of pollution found in the remotest and least accessible place on earth.But the most significant change thus far in the earth's atmosphere is the one that began with the industrial revolution early in the last century and has picked up speed ever since.Industry meant coal, and later oil, and we began to burn lots of it-bringing rising levels of carbon dioxide (CO2), with its ability to trap more heat in the atmosphere and slowly warm the earth.Fewer than a hundred yards from the South Pole, upwind from the ice runway where the ski plane lands and keeps its engines running to prevent the metal parts from freeze-locking together, scientists monitor the air several times every day to chart the course of that inexorable change.During my visit, I watched one scientist draw the results of that day's measurements, pushing the end of a steep line still higher on the graph.He told me how easy it is-there at the end of the earth-to see that this enormous change in the global atmosphere is still picking up speed.Two and a half years later I slept under the midnight sun at the other end of our planet, in a small tent pitched on atwelve-foot-thick slab of ice floating in the frigid Arctic Ocean.After a hearty breakfast, my companions and I traveled by snowmobiles a few miles farther north to a rendezvous point wherethe ice was thinner -only three and a half feet thick-and a nuclear submarine hovered in the water below.After it crashed through the ice, took on its new passengers, and resubmerged, I talked with scientists who were trying to measure more accurately the thickness of the polar ice cap, which many believe is thinning as a result of global warming.I had just negotiated an agreement between ice scientists and the U. S. Navy to secure the release of previously top secret data from submarine sonar tracks, data that could help them learn what is happening to the north polar cap.Now, I wanted to see the pole itself, and some eight hours after we met the submarine, we were crashing through that ice, surfacing, and then I was standing in an eerily beautiful snowscape, windswept and sparkling white, with the horizon defined by little hummocks, or "pressure ridges" of ice that are pushed up like tiny mountain ranges when separate sheets collide.But here too, CO2 levels are rising just as rapidly, and ultimately temperature will rise with them-indeed, global warming is expected to push temperatures up much more rapidly in the polar regions than in the rest of the world.As the polar air warms, the ice here will thin; and since then, polar cap plays such a crucial role in the world's weather system, the consequences of a thinning cap could be disastrous.Considering such scenarios is not a purely speculative exercise.Six months after I returned from the North Pole, a team of scientists reported dramatic changes in the pattern of ice distribution in the Arctic, and a second team reported a still controversial claim (which a variety of data now suggest) that, overall, the north polar cap has thinned by 2 percent in just the last decade.Moreover, scientists established several years ago that in many land areas north of the Arctic Circle, the spring snowmelt now comes earlier every year, and deep in the tundra below, the temperature of the earth is steadily rising.As it happens, some of the most disturbing images of environmental destruction can be found exactly halfway between the North and South poles -precisely at the equator in Brazil-where billowing clouds of smoke regularly blacken the sky above the immense but now threatened Amazon rain forest.Acre by acre, the rain forest is being burned to create fast pasture for fast-food beef; as I learned when I went there in early 1989, the fires are set earlier and earlier in the dry season now,with more than one Tennessee's worth of rain forest being slashed and burned each year.According to our guide, the biologist Tom Lovejoy, there are more different species of birds in each square mile of the Amazon than exist in all of North America-which means we are silencing thousands of songs we have never even heard.But one doesn't have to travel around the world to witness humankind's assault on the earth. Images that signal the distress of our global environment are now commonly seen almost anywhere.On some nights, in high northern latitudes, the sky itself offers another ghostly image that signals the loss of ecological balance now in progress.If the sky is clear after sunset-and if you are watching from a place where pollution hasn't blotted out the night sky altogether-you can sometimes see a strange kind of cloud high in the sky.This "noctilucent cloud" occasionally appears when the earth is first cloaked in the evening darkness; shimmering above us with a translucent whiteness, these clouds seem quite unnatural: And they should:noctilucent clouds have begun to appear more often because of a huge buildup of methane gas in the atmosphere.Also called natural gas, methane is released from landfills, from coal mines and rice paddies, from billions of termites that swarm through the freshly cut forestland, from the burning of biomass and from a variety of other human activities.Even though noctilucent clouds were sometimes seen in the past, all this extra methane carries more water vapor into the upper atmosphere, where it condenses at much higher altitudes to form more clouds that the sun's rays still strike long after sunset has brought the beginning of night to the surface far beneath them.What should we feel toward these ghosts in the sky? Simple wonder or the mix of emotions we feel at the zoo?Perhaps we should feel awe for our own power: just as men tear tusks from elephants' heads in such quantity as to threaten the beast with extinction, we are ripping matter from its place in the earth in such volume as to upset the balance between daylight and darkness.In the process, we are once again adding to the threat of global warming, because methane has been one of the fastest-growing greenhouse gases, and is third only to carbon dioxide and water vapor in total volume, changing the chemistry of the upper atmosphere.But, without even considering that threat, shouldn't it startle us that we have now put these clouds in the evening sky which glisten with a spectral light?Or have our eyes adjusted so completely to the bright lights of civilization that we can't see these clouds for what they are-a physical manifestation of the violent collision between human civilization and the earth?Even though it is sometimes hard to see their meaning, we have by now all witnessed surprising experiences that signal the damage from our assault on the environment-whether it's the new frequency of days when the temperature exceeds 100 degrees, the new speed with which the sun burns our skin, or the new constancy of public debate over what to do with growing mountains of waste.But our response to these signals is puzzling. Why haven't we launched a massive effort to save our environment?To come at the question another way: Why do some images startle us into immediate action and focus our attention on ways to respond effectively?And why do other images, though sometimes equally dramatic, produce instead a kind of paralysis, focusing our attention not on ways to respond but rather on some convenient, less painful distraction?Still, there are so many distressing images of environmental destruction that sometimes it seems impossible to know how to absorb or comprehend them.Before considering the threats themselves, it may be helpful to classify them and thus begin to organize our thoughts and feelings so that we may be able to respond appropriately.A useful system comes from the military, which frequently places a conflict in one of three different categories, according to the theater in which it takes place.There are "local" skirmishes, “regional" battles, and "strategic" conflicts. This third category is reserved for struggles that can threaten a nation's survival and must be understood in a global context.Environmental threats can be considered in the same way. For example, most instances of water pollution, air pollution, and illegal waste dumping are essentially local in nature.Problems like acid rain, the contamination of underground aquifers, and large oil spills are fundamentally regional.In both of these categories, there may be so many similar instances of particular local and regional problems occurring simultaneously all over the world that the pattern appears to be global, but the problems themselves are still not truly strategicbecause the operation of the global environment is not affected and the survival of civilization is not at stake.However, a new class of environmental problems does affect the global ecological system, and these threats are fundamentally strategic.The 600 percent increase in the amount of chlorine in the atmosphere during the last forty years has taken place not just in those countries producing the chlorofluorocarbons responsible but in the air above every country, above Antarctica, above the North Pole and the Pacific Ocean-all the way from the surface of the earth to the top of the sky.参考译文——沙漠中的捕鱼船队沙漠中的捕鱼船队我在阳光中站在一艘渔轮的灼热的钢甲板上。
(完整word版)高级英语 第三版 12课 原文 Ships_in_the_Desert
Lesson 3 Ships in the DesertShips in the DesertAL Gore1. I was standing in the sun on the hot steel deck of a fishing ship capableof processing a fifty-ton catch on a good day. But it wasn' t a good day. We were anchored in what used to be the most productive fishing site in all of central Asia, but as I looked out over the bow , the prospects of a good catch looked bleak. Where there should have been gentle blue-green waves lapping against the side of the ship, there was nothing but hot dry sand – as far as I could see in all directions. The other ships of the fleet were also at rest in the sand, scattered in the dunes that stretched all the way to the horizon . Ten year s ago the Aral was the fourth-largest inland sea in the world, comparable to the largest of North America's Great Lakes. Now it is disappearing because the water that used to feed it has been diverted in an ill-considered irrigation scheme to grow cotton In the user t. The new shoreline was almost forty kilometers across the sand from where the fishing fleet was now permanently docked. Meanwhile, in the nearby town of Muynak the people were still canning fish – brought not from the Aral Sea but shipped by rail through Siberia from the Pacific Ocean, more than a thousand miles away.2. My search for the underlying causes of the environmental crisis has led me to travel around the world to examine and study many of these images of destruction. At the very bottom of the earth, high in the Trans-Antarctic Mountains, with the sun glaring at midnight through a hole in the sky, I stood in the unbelievable coldness and talked with a scientist in the late tall of 1988 about the tunnel he was digging through time. Slipping his parka back to reveal a badly burned face that was cracked and peeling, he pointed to the annual layers of ice in a core sample dug from the glacier on which we were standing. He moved his finger back in time to the ice of two decades ago. "Here's where the U. S Congress passed the Clean Air Act, ” he said. At the bottom of the world, two continents away from Washington, D. C., even a small reduction in one country's emissions had changed the amount of pollution found in the remotest end least accessible place on earth.3. But the most significant change thus far in the earth' s atmosphere is the one that began with the industrial r evolution early in the last century and has picked up speed ever since. Industry meant coal, and later oil, and we began to burn lots of it –bringing rising levels of carbon dioxide (CO2) , with its ability to trap more heat in the atmosphere and slowly warm the earth. Fewer than a hundred yards from the South Pole, upwind from the ice runway where the ski plane lands and keeps its engines running to prevent the metal parts from freeze-locking together, scientists monitor the air sever al times ever y day to chart the course of that inexorable change. During my visit, I watched one scientist draw the results of that day's measurements, pushing the end of a steep line still higher on the graph. He told me how easy it is –there at the end of the earth –to see that this enormous change in the global atmosphere is still picking up speed.4. Two and a half years later I slept under the midnight sun at the other end ofour planet, in a small tent pitched on a twelve-toot-thick slab of ice floating in the frigid Arctic Ocean. After a hearty breakfast, my companions and I traveled by snowmobiles a few miles farther north to a rendezvous point where the ice was thinner – only three and a half feet thick –and a nuclear submarine hovered in the water below. After it crashed through the ice, took on its new passengers, and resubmerged, I talked with scientists who were trying to measure more accurately the thickness of the polar ice cap, which many believe is thinning as a re-suit of global warming. I had just negotiated an agreement between ice scientists and the U. S. Navy to secure the re-lease of previously top secret data from submarine sonar tracks, data that could help them learn what is happening to the north polar cap. Now, I wanted to see the pole it-self, and some eight hours after we met the submarine, we were crashing through that ice, surfacing, and then I was standing in an eerily beautiful snowcape, windswept and sparkling white, with the horizon defined by little hummocks, or "pressure ridges " of ice that are pushed up like tiny mountain ranges when separate sheets collide. But here too, CD, levels are rising just as rapidly, and ultimately temperature will rise with them –indeed, global warming is expected to push temperatures up much more rapidly in the polar regions than in the rest of the world. As the polar air warms, the ice her e will thin; and since the polar cap plays such a crucial role in the world's weather system, the consequences of a thinning cap could be disastrous.5. Considering such scenarios is not a purely speculative exercise. Six months after I returned from the North Pole, a team of scientists reported dramatic changes in the pattern of ice distribution in the Arctic, and a second team reported a still controversialclaim (which a variety of data now suggest) that, over all, the north polar cap has thinned by 2 per cent in just the last decade. Moreover, scientists established several years ago that in many land areas north of the Arctic Circle, the spring snowmelt now comes earlier every year, and deep in the tundra below, the temperature e of the earth is steadily rising.6. As it happens, some of the most disturbing images of environmental destruction can be found exactly halfway between the North and South poles –precisely at the equator in Brazil –where billowing clouds of smoke regularly black-en the sky above the immense but now threatened Amazon rain forest. Acre by acre, the rain forest is being burned to create fast pasture for fast-food beef; as I learned when I went there in early 1989, the fires are set earlier and earlier in the dry season now, with more than one Tennessee's worth of rain forest being slashed and burned each year. According to our guide, the biologist Tom Lovejoy, there are more different species of birds in each square mile of the Amazon than exist in all of North America –which means we are silencing thousands of songs we have never even heard.7. But one doesn't have to travel around the world to wit-ness humankind's assault on the earth. Images that signal the distress of our global environment are now commonly seen almost anywhere. On some nights, in high northern latitudes, the sky itself offers another ghostly image that signals the loss of ecological balance now in progress. If the sky is clear after sunset -- and it you are watching from a place wherepollution hasn't blotted out the night sky altogether -- you can sometimes see a strange kind of cloud high in the sky. This "noctilucent cloud" occasionally appears when the earth is first cloaked in the evening dark-ness; shimmering above us with a translucent whiteness, these clouds seem quite unnatural. And they should: noctilucent clouds have begun to appear more often because of a huge buildup of methane gas in the atmosphere. (Also called natural gas, methane is released from landfills , from coal mines and rice paddies, from billions of termites that swarm through the freshly cut forestland, from the burning of biomass and from a variety of other human activities. ) Even though noctilucent clouds were sometimes seen in the past., all this extra methane carries more water vapor into the upper atmosphere, where it condenses at much higher altitudes to form more clouds that the sun's rays still strike long after sunset has brought the beginning of night to the surface far beneath them.8. What should we feel toward these ghosts in the sky? Simple wonder or the mix of emotions we feel at the zoo? Perhaps we should feel awe for our own power: just as men "ear tusks from elephants’ heads in such quantity as to threaten the beast with extinction, we are ripping matter from its place in the earth in such volume as to upset the balance between daylight and darkness. In the process, we are once again adding to the threat of global warming, be-cause methane has been one of the fastest-growing green-house gases, and is third only to carbon dioxide and water vapor in total volume, changing the chemistry of the upper atmosphere. But, without even considering that threat, shouldn't it startle us that we have now put these clouds in the evening sky which glisten with a spectral light? Or have our eyes adjusted so completely to the bright lights of civilization that we can't see these clouds for what they are – a physical manifestation of the violent collision between human civilization and the earth?9. Even though it is sometimes hard to see their meaning, we have by now all witnessed surprising experiences that signal the damage from our assault on the environment --whether it's the new frequency of days when the temperature exceeds 100 degrees, the new speed with which the -un burns our skin, or the new constancy of public debate over what to do with growing mountains of waste. But our response to these signals is puzzling. Why haven't we launched a massive effort to save our environment? To come at the question another way' Why do some images startle us into immediate action and focus our attention or ways to respond effectively? And why do other images, though sometimes equally dramatic, produce instead a Kin. of paralysis, focusing our attention not on ways to respond but rather on some convenient, less painful distraction?10. Still, there are so many distressing images of environ-mental destruction that sometimes it seems impossible to know how to absorb or comprehend them. Before considering the threats themselves, it may be helpful to classify them and thus begin to organize our thoughts and feelings so that we may be able to respond appropriately.11. A useful system comes from the military, which frequently places a conflict in one of three different categories, according to the theater in which it takes place. There are "local" skirmishes, "regional" battles, and "strategic" conflicts. This third category is reserved for struggles that can threaten a nation's survival and must beunder stood in a global context.12. Environmental threats can be considered in the same way. For example, most instances of water pollution, air pollution, and illegal waste dumping are essentially local in nature. Problems like acid rain, the contamination of under-ground aquifers, and large oil spills are fundamentally regional. In both of these categories, there may be so many similar instances of particular local and regional problems occurring simultaneously all over the world that the patter n appears to be global, but the problems themselves are still not truly strategic because the operation of- the global environment is not affected and the survival of civilization is not at stake.13. However, a new class of environmental problems does affect the global ecological system, and these threats are fundamentally strategic. The 600 percent increase in the amount of chlorine in the atmosphere during the last forty years has taken place not just in those countries producing the chlorofluorocarbons responsible but in the air above every country, above Antarctica, above the North Pole and the Pacific Ocean – all the way from the surface of the earth to the top of the sky. The increased levels of chlorine disrupt the global process by which the earth regulates the amount of ultraviolet radiation from the sun that is allowed through the atmosphere to the surface; and it we let chlorine levels continue to increase, the radiation levels will al-so increase – to the point that all animal and plant life will face a new threat to their survival.14. Global warming is also a strategic threat. The concentration of carbon dioxide and other heat-absorbing molecules has increased by almost 25 per cent since World War II, posing a worldwide threat to the earth's ability to regulate the amount of heat from the sun retained in the atmosphere. This increase in heat seriously threatens the global climate equilibrium that determines the pattern of winds, rainfall, surface temperatures, ocean currents, and sea level. These in turn determine the distribution of vegetative and animal life on land and sea and have a great effect on the location and pattern of human societies.15. In other words, the entire relationship between humankind and the earth has been transformed because our civilization is suddenly capable of affecting the entire global environment, not just a particular area. All of us know that human civilization has usually had a large impact on the environment; to mention just one example, there is evidence that even in prehistoric times, vast areas were sometimes intentionally burned by people in their search for food. And in our own time we have reshaped a large part of the earth's surface with concrete in our cities and carefully tended rice paddies, pastures, wheat fields, and other croplands in the countryside. But these changes, while sometimes appearing to be pervasive , have, until recently, been relatively trivial factors in the global ecological sys-tem. Indeed, until our lifetime, it was always safe to assume that nothing we did or could do would have any lasting effect on the global environment. But it is precisely that assumption which must now be discarded so that we can think strategically about our new relationship to the environment.16. Human civilization is now the dominant cause of change in the global environment. Yet we resist this truth and find it hard to imagine that our effect on theearth must now be measured by the same yardstick used to calculate the strength of the moon's pull on the oceans or the force of the wind against the mountains. And it we are now capable of changing something so basic as the relationship between the earth and the sun, surely we must acknowledge a new responsibility to use that power wisely and with appropriate restraint. So far, however, We seem oblivious of the fragility of the earth's natural systems.17. This century has witnessed dramatic changes in two key factors that define the physical reality of our relation-ship to the earth: a sudden and startling surge in human population, with the addition of one China's worth of people every ten years, and a sudden acceleration of the scientific and technological revolution, which has allowed an almost unimaginable magnification of our power to affect the world around us by burning, cutting, digging, moving, and trans-forming the physical matter that makes up the earth.18. The surge in population is both a cause of the changed relationship and one of the clearest illustrations of how startling the change has been, especially when viewed in a historical context. From the emergence of modern humans 200 000 years ago until Julius Caesar's time, fewer than 250 million people walked on the face of the earth. When Christopher Columbus set sail for the New World 1500 years later, there were approximately 500 million people on earth. By the time Thomas Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence in 1776, the number had doubled again, to 1 billion. By midway through this century, at the end of World War II, the number had risen to just above 2 billion people.19. In other words, from the beginning of humanity's appearance on earth to 1945, it took more than ten thousand generations to reach a world population of 2 billion people. Now, in the course of one human lifetime -- mine -- the world population will increase from 2 to more than 9 million, and it is already more than halfway there.20. Like the population explosion, the scientific and technological revolution began to pick up speed slowly during the eighteenth century. And this ongoing revolution has also suddenly accelerated exponentially. For example, it is now an axiom in many fields of science that more new and important discoveries have taken place in the last ten years that. in the entire previous history of science. While no single discover y has had the kind of effect on our relationship to the earth that unclear weapons have had on our relationship to warfare, it is nevertheless true that taken together, they have completely transformed our cumulative ability to exploit the earth for sustenance -- making the consequences, of unrestrained exploitation every bit as unthinkable as the consequences of unrestrained nuclear war.21. Now that our relationship to the earth has changed so utterly, we have to see that change and understand its implications. Our challenge is to recognize that the startling images of environmental destruction now occurring all over the world have much more in common than their ability to shock and awaken us. They are symptoms of an underlying problem broader in scope and more serious than any we have ever faced. Global warming, ozone depletion, the loss of living species, deforestation -- they all have a common cause: the new relationship between human civilization andthe earth's natural balance.22. There are actually two aspects to this challenge. The first is to realize that our power to harm the earth can in-deed have global and even permanent effects. The second is to realize that the only way to understand our new role as a co-architect of nature is to see ourselves as part of a complex system that does not operate according to the same simple rules of cause and effect we are used to. The problem is not our effect on the environment so much as our relationship with the environment. As a result, any solution to the problem will require a careful assessment of that relationship as well as the complex interrelationship among factors within civilization and between them and the major natural components of the earth's ecological system.23. The strategic nature of the threat now posed by human civilization to the global environment and the strategic nature of the threat to human civilization now posed by changes in the global environment present us with a similar set of challenges and false hopes. Some argue that a new ultimate technology, whether nuclear power or genetic engineering, will solve the problem. Others hold that only a drastic reduction of our reliance on technology can improve the conditions of life -- a simplistic notion at best. But the real solution will be found in reinventing and finally healing the relationship between civilization and the earth. This can only be accomplished by undertaking a careful reassessment of all the factors that led to the relatively recent dramatic change in the relationship. The transformation of the way we relate to the earth will of course involve new technologies, but the key changes will involve new ways of thinking about the relationship itself.。
高英第三版ships in the desert 修辞
高英第三版ships in the desert 修辞
"Ships in the Desert" 是一个富有象征和隐喻的短语，其修辞手法主要体现在以
下几个方面：
1.象征（Symbolism）：沙漠通常被视为一个艰难、无水、无生命的境地，而“船”则
常被视为希望、安全或逃脱的象征。
因此，“ships in the desert”可以象征在困境中看到希望，或在逆境中看到出路。
2.隐喻（Metaphor）：这个短语实际上是一个隐喻，暗示着尽管环境艰难，但仍有某
种可能性或希望存在。
这可能意味着即使在最困难的情况下，也有可能找到出路或解决方案。
3.对比（Contrast）：沙漠的干燥和船的湿润、沙漠的无生命和船的载人能力等形成
了鲜明的对比，增强了修辞的效果。
4.渲染情感（Affective Language）：通过使用“ships in the desert”这种富有情感和想象
力的语言，可以引发读者的共鸣，使读者对所描述的情境有更深入的理解和感受。
在实际应用中，这种修辞手法常常用于诗歌、散文或其他文学作品中，以表达深邃的思想、情感或情境。
在分析这种修辞时，重要的是理解其背后的象征意义以及它在整个文本中的语境含义。
高级英语第一册Unit3 Ships in the Desert
8. At the very bottom... through time
• l) at the very bottom of the earth: the southern end of the earth's axis; bottom here means farthest end • 2) high in the... Mountains: at a high p1ace in the mountain chain • 3) Why did the author say the sun glared through a hole in the sky? Where comes the hole? • It refers to ozone depletion. • 4) unbelievable coldness: so cold that you cannot imagine • 5) the tunne1 he wa5 digging through time: he was drilling to get samples from the glacier, the deeper he drilled, the farther the sample in time; in other words, the surface of the glacier is an indication of recent time while the deeper part of the • glacier tells of 6ituation of a much remote period
Part 1 (Para 1-5) Questions on comprehension:
• What are the three geographical locations mentioned in this part? • What are the scientists doing in Antarctic Ocean? What have they verified? • Why does the writer especially mention his visit by submarine? • According to Para. 3, what is the main cause of the significant change in the earth’s atmosphere? • How disastrous will the consequences of a thinning cap be? • What is the main idea of the part and how are all paragraphs related here?
最新unit3.ships in the desert参考译文汇编
第三课沙漠之舟艾尔•戈尔我头顶烈日站在一艘渔船的滚烫的钢甲板上。
这艘渔船在丰收季节一天所处理加工的鱼可达15吨。
但现在可不是丰收季节。
这艘渔船此时此刻停泊的地方虽说曾是整个中亚地区最大的渔业基地，但当我站在船头向远处眺望时，却看出渔业丰收的希望非常渺茫。
极目四顾，原先那种湛蓝色海涛轻拍船舷的景象已不复存在，取而代之的是茫茫的一片干燥灼热的沙漠。
渔船队的其他渔船也都搁浅在沙漠上，散见于陂陀起伏、绵延至天边的沙丘间。
十年前，咸海还是世界上第四大内陆湖泊，可与北美大湖区五大湖中的最大湖泊相媲美。
而今，由于兴建了一项考虑欠周的水利工程，原来注入此湖的水被引入沙漠灌溉棉田，咸海这座大湖的水面已渐渐变小，新形成的湖岸距离这些渔船永远停泊的位置差不多有40公里远。
与此同时，这儿附近的莫里那克镇上人们仍在生产鱼罐头，但所用的鱼已不是咸海所产，而是从一千多英里以外的太平洋渔业基地穿越西伯利亚运到这儿来的。
我因要对造成环境危机的原因进行调查而得以周游世界，考察和研究许多类似这样破坏生态环境的事例。
一九八八年深秋时节，我来到地球的最南端。
高耸的南极山脉中太阳在午夜穿过天空中的一个孔洞照射着地面，我站在令人难以置信的寒冷中，与一位科学家进行着一场谈话，内容是他正在挖掘的时间隧道。
这位科学家一撩开他的派克皮大衣，我便注意到他脸上因烈日的曝晒而皮肤皲裂，干裂的皮屑正一层层地剥落。
他一边讲话一边指给我看。
从我们脚下的冰川中挖出的一块岩心标本上的年层。
他将手指．到二十年前的冰层上，告诉我说，“这儿就是美国国会审议通过化空气法案的地方。
”这里虽处地球之顶端，距美国首都华盛顿两大洲之遥，但世界上任何一个国家只要将废气排放量减少一席在空气污染程度上引起的相应变化便能在南极这个地球上最偏而人迹难至的地方反映出来。
迄今为止，地球大气层最重要的变化始于上世纪初的工业命，变化速度自那以后逐渐加快。
工业意味着先是煤、后是石油消耗。
我们燃烧了大量的煤和石油——导致大气层二氧化碳含的增加，这就使更多的热量得以留存在大气层中，从而使地球的候逐渐变暖。
高级英语第三课Ships-in-the-Desert
很远的地区） High latitudes; ❖ low latitudes：低纬度地区（距离赤道很近的地区）
❖ Warm \ cold latitudes; south \ north latitude ❖ Equator: 赤道 ❖ Equatorial: of or near the equator ❖ Longitude：经度 ❖ Altitude: height , esp. above sea-level. ❖ Cf. attitude: the position or manner of standing of the
❖ The glacier: 冰河、冰川 n. a slowly moving river or mass of ice and snow that forms in areas where the rate of snowfall constantly exceeds the rate at which the snow melts.
penetrating odor. ❖ Depletion means the gradual using up or
destruction of capital asserts esp. of natural resources . ❖ The polar region: 南北极地区 at the very bottom of the earth; at the other end of our planet; Antarctic as one end and Arctic as the other end.
For examples
Unit_3_ships_in_the_desert
Part 2 (para. 9-16):
analysis of the global threats posed by the environmental destruction and the common cause---the change in the relationship between human civilization and the earth’s natural balance l para. 9: transition--- the author proposes some questions for us to think over. para. 10-16: analysis of the global threats posed by the environmental destruction and the common cause---the change in the relationship between human civilization and the earth’s natural balance
Air Pollution
Global Warming
Hazardous Waste
Ozone Depletion
Water Pollution
Deforestation
Desertification
7. In your opinion, what can we do to reinforce environmental protection?
Ships anchored in the desert. This is an eye-catching title and it gives an image that people hardly see. When readers read the title, they can’t help wondering why and how.
unit3.ships-in-the-desert参考译文
第三课沙漠之舟艾尔•戈尔我头顶烈日站在一艘渔船的滚烫的钢甲板上。
这艘渔船在丰收季节一天所处理加工的鱼可达15吨。
但现在可不是丰收季节。
这艘渔船此时此刻停泊的地方虽说曾是整个中亚地区最大的渔业基地，但当我站在船头向远处眺望时，却看出渔业丰收的希望非常渺茫。
极目四顾，原先那种湛蓝色海涛轻拍船舷的景象已不复存在，取而代之的是茫茫的一片干燥灼热的沙漠。
渔船队的其他渔船也都搁浅在沙漠上，散见于陂陀起伏、绵延至天边的沙丘间。
十年前，咸海还是世界上第四大内陆湖泊，可与北美大湖区五大湖中的最大湖泊相媲美。
而今，由于兴建了一项考虑欠周的水利工程，原来注入此湖的水被引入沙漠灌溉棉田，咸海这座大湖的水面已渐渐变小，新形成的湖岸距离这些渔船永远停泊的位置差不多有40公里远。
与此同时，这儿附近的莫里那克镇上人们仍在生产鱼罐头，但所用的鱼已不是咸海所产，而是从一千多英里以外的太平洋渔业基地穿越西伯利亚运到这儿来的。
我因要对造成环境危机的原因进行调查而得以周游世界，考察和研究许多类似这样破坏生态环境的事例。
一九八八年深秋时节，我来到地球的最南端。
高耸的南极山脉中太阳在午夜穿过天空中的一个孔洞照射着地面，我站在令人难以置信的寒冷中，与一位科学家进行着一场谈话，内容是他正在挖掘的时间隧道。
这位科学家一撩开他的派克皮大衣，我便注意到他脸上因烈日的曝晒而皮肤皲裂，干裂的皮屑正一层层地剥落。
他一边讲话一边指给我看。
从我们脚下的冰川中挖出的一块岩心标本上的年层。
他将手指．到二十年前的冰层上，告诉我说，“这儿就是美国国会审议通过化空气法案的地方。
”这里虽处地球之顶端，距美国首都华盛顿两大洲之遥，但世界上任何一个国家只要将废气排放量减少一席在空气污染程度上引起的相应变化便能在南极这个地球上最偏而人迹难至的地方反映出来。
迄今为止，地球大气层最重要的变化始于上世纪初的工业命，变化速度自那以后逐渐加快。
工业意味着先是煤、后是石油消耗。
我们燃烧了大量的煤和石油——导致大气层二氧化碳含的增加，这就使更多的热量得以留存在大气层中，从而使地球的候逐渐变暖。
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ultra-: beyond e.g. ultrared （红外线的）, ultrashort （超短波的）, ultrasonic （超音波 的）, ultramodern（极其现代化的）
Axiom: n. a statement, esp. one that is short, that is generally accepted as true and doesn’t need to be proved. It is an axiom that if equals are added to equals the result will be equal. 等量加等量和相等，这是一条公理。 Cf. maxim: n. a rule for good and sensible behavior, esp. when expressed in a short wellknown saying 格言，箴言 , 例如：Time and tide waits for no man.
For examples
The Sahara Desert The streets were deserted. He deserted his wife and children and went abroad. They are rewarded (punished) according to their deserts. Some people failed to get their deserts. He is a man of deserts. Dessert fork \ knife \ spoon \ wine
Some Proper Names
Arctic Circle:北极圈 Mid-night sun: 午夜太阳 (see Note 8) Ozone depletion: 臭氧层空洞 (see Note 16) Ozone is an unstable, pale-blue gas, O3 with a penetrating odor. Depletion means the gradual using up or destruction of capital asserts esp. of natural resources . The polar region: 南北极地区 at the very bottom of the earth; at the other end of our planet; Antarctic as one end and Arctic as the other end.
Lesson Three Ships in the Desert
Compare the following:
Desert : n. [‘dezət] wildness; waste land; waterless and treeless, often sand covered; Desert : v. [di ‘zə:t] abandon; give up; go away from Deserts: n. [di ‘zə:ts] (usu.pl.) what sb. deserves beyond the purple end of the range of colors (spectrum) that make up light that can be seen by human beings
ultraviolet rays: 紫外线
Amazon rain forest
The Brazilian Amazon contains about a third of the Earth‘s remaining tropical forest and a very high portion of its biological diversity. One hectare 公顷(2.47 acres) of Amazonian moist forest contains more plant species than all of Europe. Yet still it is being destroyed just like other rainforests around the world.
Some Proper Names
Clear Air Act: 净化空气法案 (see Note 5) one of the oldest environmental laws of the US as well as the most far-reaching, the costliest (the most valuable), and the most controversial,. It was passed in 1970. The glacier: 冰河、冰川 n. a slowly moving river or mass of ice and snow that forms in areas where the rate of snowfall constantly exceeds the rate at which the snow melts. The polar ice cap：极地冰帽 Submarine sonar tracks: 水下声纳系统探测 Noctilucent cloud: 夜光云彩 Translucent: adj. Partially transparent , as frosted glass
Why did the writer go to the Aral Sea? What did he see there?
Some Proper Names
The Aral Sea:咸海 (see Note 2) Great Lakes: 五大湖 (see Note 3) Trans-Antarctic Mountains : 南极山脉 (see Note 4) Four Oceans: the Atlantic\ Pacific \ Indian \ Arctic Ocean Seven Continents: Asia; North America; Africa; Europe; Australia; Antarctica; South America Antarctic Peninsula: 南极半岛 ，又名 Graham Land 旧名为 Palmer Peninsula
the sun glaring at midnight through a hole in the sky
the sun shining at midnight through the
ozone depletion a hole: ozone depletion 臭氧层空洞
To chart the course of CO2 emission and temperature in the Antarctic
Chlorofluorocarbons: CFC 氟里昂
Chlorine 氯
Chlorocarbon 氯碳化合物 Fluorine: 氟 Chlorofluorocarbon : any of a series of gaseous or low-boiling, inert, nonflammable derivatives of methane or ethane, used as refrigerants and solvents and as propellants in aerosol products
What does the writer call “ghosts in the sky”?
“noctilucent clouds” This “luminous cloud” occasionally appears when the earth is first hidden in the evening darkness; shining unsteadily above us with a partially transparent whiteness, these clouds don’t seem natural.
Al Gore's profound analysis of where humanity has gone wrong ranges across history, politics, science, economics, psychology, philosophy, and religion.
Some Proper Names
Latitude: 纬度 In high northern latitudes 在北纬高纬度地区（距离赤道 很远的地区） High latitudes; low latitudes：低纬度地区（距离赤道很近的地区）
Warm \ cold latitudes; south \ north latitude Equator: 赤道 Equatorial: of or near the equator Longitude：经度 Altitude: height , esp. above sea-level. Cf. attitude: the position or manner of standing of the body; a manner of feeling and behaving
1. Introduction about the author
Al Gore was born in 1948 in Washington D.C., U.S. He has been a Senator (1984-1992) representing the State of Tennessee, and U.S. Vice-President (1992-2000) under President Bill Clinton. He ran for the Presidency against George W. Bush jr. but the latter won the closely tied election and has become the 43rd American President. The text is taken from Al Gore’s book Earth in the Balance