I.Reading Comprehension (60 points).
AMultiple Choice (36 points).
Please read the following passages and choose A, B, C or D to best complete the statements about them.
The Greening of America
— How America is likely to take over leadership of the fight against climate change; and how it can get it right.
A country with a presidential system tends to get identified with its leader. So, for the rest of the world, America is George Bush's America right now. It is the country that has mismanaged the Iraq war; holds prisoners without trial at Guantánamo Bay; restricts funding for stem-cell research because of fundamentalist religious beliefs; and destroyed the chance of a global climate-change deal based on the Kyoto Protocol.
But to simplify thus is to misunderstand—especially in the case of the huge, federal America. One of its great strengths is the diversity of its political, economic and cultural life. While the White House dug its heels in on global warming, much of the rest of the country was moving. That's what forced the president's concession to greens in the state-of-the-union address. His poll ratings sinking under the weight of Iraq, President Bush is grasping for popular issues to keep him afloat; and global warming has evidently become such an issue. Albeit in the context of energy security, a now familiar concern of his, President Bush spoke for the first time to Congress of "the serious challenge of global climate change" and proposed measures designed, in part, to combat it.
It's the weather, appropriately, that has turned public opinion—starting with Hurricane Katrina. Scientists had been warning Americans for years that the risk of "extreme weather events" would probably increase as a result of climate change. But scientific papers do not drive messages home as convincingly as the destruction of a city. And the heat wave that torched America's west coast last year, accompanied by a constant drip of new research on melting glaciers and dying polar bears, has only strengthened the belief that something must be done.
Business is changing its mind too. Five years ago corporate America was solidly against carbon controls. But the threat of a patchwork of state regulations, combined with the opportunity to profit from new technologies, began to shift business attitudes. And that movement has gained momentum, because companies that saw their competitors espouse carbon controls began to fear that, once the government got down to designing regulations, they would be left out of the discussion if they did not jump on the bandwagon. So now the loudest voices are not resisting change but arguing for it.
Support for carbon controls has also grown among some unlikely groups: security hawks (who want to reduce America's dependence on Middle Eastern oil); farmers (who like subsidies for growing the raw material for et [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7] 下一页 |