问答题Read the following text carefully and then translate the underlined segments
into Chinese. Your translation should be written clearly on ANSWER SHEET
2. The world's environment is surprisingly healthy.
Discuss. If there were an examination topic, most students would tear it apart,
offering a long list of complaints from local smog (烟雾) to global climate
change, from the felling (砍伐) of forests to the extinction of species. The list
would largely be accurate, the concern legitimate. {{U}} {{U}} 1
{{/U}} {{/U}}{{U}}Yet the students who should be given the highest marks would
actually be those who agreed with the statement.{{/U}} The surprise is how good
things are, not how bad. After all, the world's population has
more than tripled during this century, and world output has risen hugely, so you
would expect the earth itself to have been affected. Indeed, if people lived,
consumed and produced things in the same way as they did in 1900 (or 1950, or
indeed 1980), the world by now would be a pretty disgusting place, smelly,
dirty, toxic and dangerous. But they don't. {{U}} {{U}} 2
{{/U}} {{/U}}{{U}}The reasons why they don't, and why the environment has not
been mined, have to do with prices, technological innovation, social change and
government regulation in response to popular pressure.{{/U}} That is why today's
environmental problems in the poor countries ought, in principle, to be
solvable. Raw materials have not run out, and show no sign of doing so.
Logically, one day they must: the planet is a finite place. Yet it is also very
big, and man is very ingenious. {{U}} {{U}} 3 {{/U}}
{{/U}}{{U}}What has happened is that every time a material seems to be running
short, the price has risen and, in response, people have looked for new sources
of supply, tried to find ways to use less of the material, or looked for a new
substitute.{{/U}} For this reason prices for energy and for
minerals have fallen in real terms during the century. The same is true for
food. {{U}} {{U}} 4 {{/U}} {{/U}}{{U}}Prices fluctuate, in
response to harvests, natural disasters and political instability; and when they
rise, it takes some time before new sources of supply become available.{{/U}} But
they always do, assisted by new farming and crop technology. The long term trend
has been downwards. {{U}} {{U}} 5 {{/U}}
{{/U}}{{U}}It is where prices and markets do not operate properly that this benign
(良性的) trend begins to stumble, and the genuine problems arise.{{/U}} Markets
cannot always keep the environment healthy. If no one owns the resource
concerned, no one has an interest in conserving it or fostering it: fish is the
best example of this.