第一篇
Death of a Farm 出处:http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/01/opinion/01sun2.html(2010.08.01)
Farms go out of business for many reasons, but few farms do merely because the soil has failed. That is the miracle of farming. If you care for the soil, it will last — and yield — nearly forever. America is such a young country that we have barely tested that. For most of our history, there has been new land to farm, and we still farm as though there always will be.
Still, there are some very old farms out there. The oldest is the Tuttle farm, near Dover, N.H., which is also one of the oldest business enterprises in America. It made the news last week because its owner — a lineal descendant of John Tuttle, the original settler — has decided to go out of business. It was founded in 1632. I hear its sweet corn is legendary.
The year 1632 is unimaginably distant. In 1632, Galileo was still publishing, and John Locke was born. There were perhaps 10,000 colonists in all of America, only a few hundred of them in New Hampshire. The Tuttle acres, then, would have seemed almost as surrounded as they do in 2010, but by forest instead of highways and houses.
It was a precarious operation at the start — as all farming was in the new colonies—and it became precarious enough again in these past few years to peter out at last. The land is protected by a conservation easement so it can’t be developed, but no one knows whether the next owner will farm it.
In a letter on their Web site, the Tuttles cite “exhaustion of resources” as the reason to sell the farm. The exhausted resources they list include bodies, minds, hearts, imagination, equipment, machinery and finances. They do not mention soil, which has been renewed and redeemed repeatedly. It’s as though the parishioners of the First Parish Church in nearby Dover — erected nearly 200 years later, in 1829 — had rebuilt the structure on the same spot every few years.
It is too simple to say, as the Tuttles have, that the recession killed a farm that had survived for nearly 400 years. What killed it was the economic structure of food production. Each year it has become harder for family farms to compete with industrial scale agriculture — heavily subsidized by the government — underselling them at every turn. In a system committed to the health of farms and their integration with local communities, the result would have been different. In 1632, and for many years after, the Tuttle farm was a necessity. In 2010, it is suddenly superfluous, or so we like to pretend.
第二篇Global Youth Unemployment Reaches New High
出处:http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/12/business/global/12youth.html小改动一点点,基本不差。(2010.08.12)
PARIS — Youth unemployment across the world has climbed to a new high and is likely to climb further this year, a United Nations agency said Thursday, while warning of a “lost generation” as more young people give up the search for work.
The agency, the International Labor Organization, said in a report that of some 620 million young people ages 15 to 24 in the work force, about 81 million were unemployed at the end of 2009 — the highest level in two decades of record-keeping by the organization, which is based in Geneva.
The youth unemployment rate increased to 13 percent in 2009 from 11.9 percent in the last assessment in 2007.
“There’s never been an increase of this magnitude — both in terms of the rate and the level — since we’ve been tracking the data,” said Steven Kapsos, an economist with the organization. The agency forecast that the global youth unemployment rate would continue to increase through 2010, to 13.1 percent, as the effects of the economic downturn continue. It should then decline to 12.7 percent in 2011.
The agency’s 2010 report found that unemployment has hit young people harder than adults during the financial crisis, from which most economies are only just emerging, and that recovery of the job market for young men and women will lag behind that of adults. The impact of the crisis also has been felt in shorter hours and reduced wages for those who maintain salaried employment.
In some especially strained European countries, including Spain and Britain, many young people have become discouraged and given up the job hunt, it said. The trend will have “significant consequences for young people,” as more and more join the ranks of the already unemployed, it said. That has the potential to create a “ ‘lost generation’ comprised of young people who have dropped out of the labor market, having lost all hope of being able to work for a decent living.”
The report said that young people in developing economies are more vulnerable to precarious employment and poverty.
About 152 million young people, or a quarter of all the young workers in the world, are employed but remain in extreme poverty in households surviving on less than $1.25 a person a day in 2008, the report said.
“The number of young people stuck in working poverty grows, and the cycle of working poverty persists,” the agency’s director-general, Juan Somavia, said.
Young women still have more difficulty than young men in finding work, the report added. The female youth unemployment rate in 2009 stood at 13.2 percent, compared with the male rate of 12.9 percent. The gap of 0.3 percentage point was the same as in 2007.
The report studied the German, British, Spanish and Estonian labor markets and found that Germany had been most successful in bringing down long-term youth unemployment. In Spain and Britain, increases in unemployment were particularly pronounced for those with lower education levels.
Data from Eurostat, the European Union’s statistical agency, show Spain had a jobless rate of 40.5 percent in May for people under 25. That was the highest level among the 27 members of the European Union, far greater than the 9.4 percent in Germany in May and 19.7 percent in Britain in March.
2011年5月CATTI二级笔译翻译实务中译英
第一篇。
(出处:09年 胡锦涛在亚太经合组织工商领导人峰会上题为《坚定合作信心 振兴世界经济》演讲)
60年来特别是改革开放30年来,中国取得了举世瞩目的发展成就,经济实力和综合国力显著增强,各项社会事业全面进步,人民生活从温饱不足发展到总体小康,中国社会迸发出前所未有的活力和创造力。
同时,我们清醒地认识到,中国仍然是世界上最大的发展中国家,中国在发展进程中遇到的矛盾和问题无论规模还是复杂性都世所罕见。要全面建成惠及十几亿人口的更高水平的小康社会,进而基本实现现代化、实现全体人民共同富裕,还有很长的路要走。
我们将继续从本国国情出发,坚持中国特色社会主义道路,坚持改革开放,推动科学发展,促进社会和谐,全面推进经济建设、政治建设、文化建设、社会建设以及生态文明建设,全力做到发展为了人民、发展依靠人民、发展成果由人民共享。
第二篇
(出处:http://www.gov.cn/jrzg/2010-02/16/content_1535844.htm)
非物质文化遗产是民族文化的精华、民族智慧的结晶。我国有56个民族,各民族在长期的历史发展进程中创造了丰富多彩的非物质文化遗产。
改革开放以来,由于工业化和城市化的加速,人们的生产生活方式发生了重大变化,也使非物质文化遗产赖以生存的环境不同程度地遭到破坏。
作为一种鲜活的文化,非物质文化遗产是民众生活的重要组成部分,在当代仍然散发着独特的光彩和魅力,仍然是传承文化、推动社会发展的不竭动力,是文化创新的基础和源泉。
因此,抢救和保护那些处于濒危和生存困境中的非物质文化遗产,已成为时代赋予我们的非常紧迫的历史任务。
文化生态保护区是以保护非物质文化遗产为核心、对历史积淀丰厚、存续状态良好、具有鲜明地域文化特色和价值的文化形态进行整体性保护,以促进经济社会全面协调可持续发展而划定的特定区域。