2017年catti英语笔译初级模拟题：环境危机.doc

【英译汉】

The Threatened Environment

In recent years we have come to realize that several threats to the environment are fun dame ntal. One is acid rain, which is created by the millions of tones of sulphur dioxide and nitrogen oxides spewed out of North American smokestacks and automobile exhaust pipes 1. The oxides mix with water vapor in the air to form weak sulphuric and n itric acid, which later falls as acid rain. The result is in creased acidity in lakes, which has curtailed the ability of many fish to reproduce, and in the soil, which has slowed the growth of trees and in creased their vulnerability to disease. 2 With every news report, the externality dimension of environmental problems 3 seems to become clearer. For instanee, it was recently reported that 4 Lapp villagers in no rther n Swede n and Norway were forbidde n to eat local rein deer meat after their herds became con tami nated by fallout from the nu clear accide nt at Cher no byl 5 in far-off Ukraine. Similarly, Canadian wildlife scientists have found high levels of PCBs 6 and other contaminants in polar-bear livers.

But some pollution problems involve such dramatic externalities that the whole world is affected. One example is the greenhouse effect. The steadily rising and esse ntially irreversible concert trati on 7 of carb on dioxide in the earth's atmosphere causes it to trap increasing amounts of the heat radiated by the planet. The general warming trend is expected to 8 have disastrous effects, including mass starvation in some less developed countries, flooding of entire coastal areas, and severe droughts on the Canadian Prairies, perhaps within the next fifty years.

Another worldwide threat is in the upper atmosphere - the thinning of the layer of ozone, a bluish gas that shields the earth from the sun's ultraviolet rays. 9 Synthetic chemicals called chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) are depleting the ozone layer. One estimated result is that the chanee of getting skin cancer is now 8 to 16 percent greater than it was in 1950. Hazardous wastes (such as those from nuelear plants, in dustrial manufacturi ng, laboratories, and medical in stitutions) represe nt 10 yet another critical environmentai problem improperly disposed, they can threaten all forms of organic I讦e. Unfortunately, little has been done so far to solve this problem. Indeed there are many instances in which industrialized countries have literally just shipped the problem off toll the poorest of the less developed countries - countries unequipped with the necessary storage and treatment facilities, and certainly too poor to deal with the serious environmental problems that will follow. 12 For example, in 1988 the government of Guinea Bissau 13 signed a contract with two British firms to receive 15 million tonnes of pharmaceutical wastes over a five-year period. While this arrangement was very inexpensive from the firms' point of view, the payments to Guinea-Bissau totaled more than four times that county's national product. It makes it difficult to solve the problem when parts of the world are so