BEC阅读汇集

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BEC阅读：Earth Day Dawns on a Climate

On the the 40th anniversary of Earth Day [April 22], this warming planet we live on is posing serious new challenges to human civilization: increasingly severe droughts, floods, and storms across the globe, and slowly rising ocean levels.

Author, educator and environmental activist Bill McKibben offers some advice in his new book on how to live on what he calls our "tough new planet."

Changing world

When Bill McKibben wrote "The End of Nature" 20 years ago, he thought that if he simply pointed out ecological problems, people would do something about them."I was a 27-year old and more than a little naïve. I completely failed to understand the depth of the kind of cultural transformation that we were going to have to make it we were ever going to deal with climate change."

Holt & Company

Bill McKibben says climate change has created a new planet, still recognizable but fundamentally different, that we may as well call 'Eaarth.' Since that time McKibben has written a dozen books that address climate change from many different angles. His latest is "Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet." He spells Eaarth with an extra letter "a," to make a point.

"The planet on which our civilization evolved no longer exists." It's a place, he says, "where the atmosphere holds more water moisture, where the poles are melting, where we seeing the oceans acidify, not for our grandchildren, but for us. It will get a lot worse if we don't get our act together, but it's already started."

Deadly consequences

The United Nations estimates that 300,000 people die each year from the effects of global warming.

Climate change is driving higher rates of migration and civil conflict while also fueling increases in poverty, disease, and hunger. McKibben wants the United States, the world's greatest polluter behind China, to do more.

He notes that the U.S. House of Representatives recently passed the American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009. The bill would require the nation's industries to reduce their carbon emissions by 83 percent over the next four decades. But the measure has stalled in the Senate.

Kris Krüg

Bill McKibben attended the Copenhagen climate talks with 350.org, a grassroots advocacy group whose goal is to spread the message that 350 parts per million of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is too much. Paying the price

McKibben believes that, ultimately, a price must be put on carbon. "If coal and gas and oil had to pay the price for the damage that they did, we would use a whole lot less of them. That would mean that we would have to find other ways to do things."

McKibben says the move to a new and greener economy won't happen overnight. While demand for renewable energy is growing, those supplies currently meet just seven percent of world energy needs.

"We're going to have to change some habits because those energy sources are fundamentally different. They are diffuse, dispersed, spread out instead of concentrated the way that fossil energy was. We'll want to have centralized power stations. We'll want to have an endless spread out Internet for power systems, with all kinds of people pushing power from their rooftops down the grid."

Survival essentials

McKibben says we must stop focusing economies on growth and start thinking about survival. He lists three essentials for life on this tough new planet: food, energy and the Internet. He advocates small scale agriculture, neighbors generating power for neighbors and communities empowered by the Internet.

"I think it's the one wildcard we've got going forward. We are going to need more local lives. We are going to need to learn to live in our own economies. But in the past that has always meant a kind of parochialism. Not necessarily anymore. The Internet offers a constant window on the rest of the world. We can keep discussion of all kinds alive, new ideas flowing."

McKibben notes that the debate on climate change in the United States has been highly charged and focused not solely on science, but on ideology. "One good piece of news from my travels around the world is that that polarization is mostly confined to this country. Other places have adopted a more sober and mature attitude when thinking about climate than we have."

Looking ahead

Despite what he sees as a failure of the global community to come to an agreement at the Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen last December, McKibben says international cooperation on climate change is critical.

"The thing that stands in the way of a global agreement is the incredible inequity and the gulf between rich and poor which makes the future look very different, depending on where you live. We need to figure out some way to transfer resources, mostly in the form of technology, north to south, so that countries like India or China or continents like Africa have some decent shot at development without having to go through the fossil fuel era."

McKibben says he's encouraged by the growth of grassroots activism around the globe, especially among young people. He believes they will create the political will to help us save the planet — and ourselves — from disaster.

BEC阅读：金钱可以“买”到快乐?

Money can buy happiness, but only if you spend it on someone else, researchers reported.

Spending as little as $US5 a day on someone else could significantly boost happiness, the team at the University of British Columbia and Harvard Business School found.

Their experiments on more than 630 Americans showed they were measurably happier when they spent money on others -- even if they thought spending the money on themselves would make them happier.

"We wanted to test our theory that how people spend their money is at least as important as how much money they earn," said Elizabeth Dunn, a psychologist at the University of British Columbia.

They asked their 600 volunteers first to rate their general happiness, report their annual income and detail their monthly spending including bills, gifts for themselves, gifts for others and donations to charity.

"Regardless of how much income each person made, those who spent money on others reported greater happiness, while those who spent more on themselves did not," Dunn said in a statement.

Dunn's team also surveyed 16 employees at a company in Boston before and after they received an annual profit-sharing bonus of between $US3000 and $US8000.

"Employees who devoted more of their bonus to pro-social spending experienced greater happiness after receiving the bonus, and the manner in which they spent that bonus was a more important predictor of their happiness than the size of the bonus itself," they wrote in their report, published in the journal Science.

They gave their volunteers $US5 or $US20 and half got clear instructions on how to spend it. Those who spent the money on someone or something else reported feeling happier about it.

"These findings suggest that very minor alterations in spending allocations -- as little as $US5 -- may be enough to produce real gains in happiness on a given day," Dunn said.

研究人员日前称，金钱可以买到快乐，但前提是你得把钱花在别人身上。

英国哥伦比亚大学和哈佛商学院的研究小组发现，每天只需为别人花5美元，就能大大提升快乐感。

研究人员对630多名美国人所做的实验表明，即使实验对象认为为自己花钱会更快乐，但实际结果显示，他们为别人花钱时其实更加快乐。

英国哥伦比亚大学的心理学家伊丽莎白•杜恩说：“我们试图证明‘人们的花钱方式与挣钱多少至少同等重要’。”

研究人员让600名志愿者评价自己的总体幸福感，报告年收入以及详细的月支出情况，包括应付账单、为自己及他人购买礼物支出以及慈善捐献。

杜恩在一份声明中说：“无论他们挣多少钱，为别人花更多钱的人称自己的快乐感增强，而为自己花较多钱的人则没有这种感受。”

杜恩的研究小组还对波士顿一家公司的16名员工领到年终奖之前和之后的情况进行了调查，年终奖金额从3000美元到8000美元不等。

研究人员在研究报告中提到：“这些员工领到奖金后，将较多钱花在别人身上的人快乐感更强，他们支配这笔钱的方式比奖金本身的多少对快乐感的影响更大。”该研究报告在《科学》期刊中发表。

研究人员向志愿者们分发了5美元至20美元金额不等的钱，并向其中一半人说明了该如何花这些钱。结果发现，将钱用于别人或其它事情的人感到更快乐。

杜恩说：“这些研究结果表明，每天只需稍稍改变支出分配——哪怕为别人花5美元，就能得到更多快乐。”

Vocabulary:

annual profit-sharing bonus:年终奖金

prosocial:prosocial behavior occurs when someone acts to help another person, particularly when they have no goal other than to help a fellow human.(亲社会的;为他人着想的)

BEC商务英语阅读材料：回眸一零

Fears that the Chinese economy is overheating mounted after official figures revealed that it grew faster than expected at the end of last year and inflation remained above target.

Southern Guangdong province, home to China’s biggest regional economy, added to concerns by announcing a 26 per cent rise in its minimum wage.

The national economy grew at an annual rate of 9.8 per cent in the final quarter of 2010, and by 10.3 per cent for the entire year.

Consumer price inflation fell to 4.6 per cent in December, after reaching a more than two-year high of 5.1 per cent the previous month.

But analysts said prices would accelerate strongly in the first quarter of this year, complicating efforts to cool the economy without triggering a sharp slowdown. For the whole year, consumer prices rose 3.3 per cent, above Beijing’s target of 3 per cent. Food prices were the main culprit, increasing 7.2 per cent.

“The growth figures will encourage Beijing to act more decisively on taming inflation, which means more interest rate hikes are just around the corner,” said Qu Hongbin, an economist at HSBC. The Shanghai Composite, China’s benchmark stock market index, dropped 2.9 per cent on Thursday amid fears of monetary tightening.

Inflation, labour shortages and a series of strikes in major industrial areas last year have led to minimum wage increases across China. This month the Beijing municipal government increased minimum wages by 21 per cent. Officials hope higher wages will increase domestic consumption and help China become less reliant on low-cost manufacturing, exports and investment for growth.

Geoffrey Crothall of the China Labour Bulletin, a Hong Kong-based advocacy group, said the wage hike might not be enough to ease the labour shortages in Guangdong province, which accounts for much of the global production of everything from mobile phones to sports shoes.

Faced with rising inflation, Beijing has raised the amount banks must hold on reserve seven times over the past year, and increased interest rates twice in the fourth quarter. These attempts to rein-in loose monetary conditions have only been partially successful.

To get around tighter lending quotas, Chinese banks moved trillions of renminbi in loans off their balance sheets last year, repackaging them as wealth management products.

On Thursday, the Chinese banking regulator ordered banks to bring an estimated Rmb1,660bn ($252bn) of off- balance sheet lending back on to their books this year. Government attempts to manage liquidity have been further complicated by non-bank lending, which authorities have great difficulty quantifying.

According to a central bank survey, total non-bank lending amounted to about Rmb240bn last year, equivalent to 5.6 per cent of total lending. But central bank officials told the Financial Times that the true scale of informal and underground lending was likely much larger.

Learning to learn:

第一段开篇点题，只用了一句话，就说明了下文要涉及的话题。见到这样的长句我们要学来为我所用哦，分析一下这句话的主干，请用Fears that…开头早一句话。

Language Points:

1. inflation 通货膨胀 2. culprit 主要原因，罪魁祸首

Oral Topic:

What are the advantages and disadvantages of raising wages for your employees?

此题为BEC考试口试task2部分模拟

译文参考：

各方对于中国经济正出现过热现象的担忧有所加剧。此前官方数据显示，中国经济去年末的增速快于预期，而通胀仍高于目标水平。

中国最大的经济省份——广东省宣布将其最低工资标准提高26%，更是加剧了人们的忧虑。

中国经济2010年第四季度同比增长9.8%，全年增长10.3%。

12月消费者价格指数(CPI)为4.6%，较11月5.1%的逾两年高位有所回落。

但分析师们表示，中国消费价格将在今年首季强劲加速上涨，使政府给经济降温而又不至引发急剧减速的努力变得更加棘手。全年而言，消费价格上涨3.3%，高于北京方面制定的3%的目标水平。食品价格上涨7.2%，是推动通胀上扬的主要因素。

“这些增长数据将鼓励北京方面采取更果断行动制伏通胀，这意味着更多加息即将出台，”汇丰(HSBC)经济学家屈宏斌表示。中国基准股指——上证综指周四下滑2.9%，市场担心中国将收紧货币政策。

通胀、劳动力短缺和去年在几个工业重镇发生的一系列罢工，已导致中国各地纷纷提高最低工资标准。本月，北京市政府将最低工资提高21%。官员们希望，较高的工资将增加国内消费，有助于中国在增长方面减轻对低成本制造、出口和投资的依赖。

位于中国香港的维权集团中国劳工通讯(China Labour Bulletin)的杰弗里•克罗塞尔(Geoffrey Crothall)表示，加薪也许不足以缓解广东省的劳动力短缺。从手机到运动鞋，广东省在许多产品的全球生产中占据了相当大的比重。

面对不断上升的通胀，北京方面过去一年已7次上调银行存款准备金率，并在第四季度两次加息。这些措施旨在收敛宽松的货币政策条件，但仅在一定程度上取得了成功。

为了避开收紧后的放贷指标，中国各银行去年将上万亿元人民币的贷款转出自己的资产负债表，将其重新打包成理财产品。

周四，中国银监会责令各银行今年将估计为1.66万亿元人民币(合2520亿美元)的表外放贷转回表内。旨在管理流动性的政府努力，还因非银行放贷变得更为复杂，政府在量化非银行放贷方面遇到极大困难。

根据中国央行的一项调查，去年非银行放贷达到大约2400亿元人民币，相当于总放贷额的5.6%。但央行官员对英国《金融时报》表示，非正式和地下放贷的真实规模可能要大得多