It was one of those days that the peasant fishermen on this tributary of the Amazon River dream about.
With water levels falling rapidly at the peak of the dry season, a giant school of bass, a tasty fish that fetches a good price at markets, was swimming right into the nets being cast from a dozen small canoes here. "With a bit of luck, you can make $350 on a day like this," Lauro Souza Almeida, a leader of the local fishermen's cooperative, exulted as he moved into position. "That is a fortune for people like us," he said, the equivalent of four months at the minimum wage earned by those fortunate enough to find work.
But hovering nearby was a large commercial fishing vessel, a "mother boat" equipped with large ice chests for storage and hauling more than a dozen smaller craft. The crew on board was just waiting for the remainder of the fish to move into the river's main channel, where they intended to scoop up as many as they could with their efficient gill nets.
A symbol of abundance to the rest of the world, the Amazon is experiencing a crisis of overfishing. As stocks of the most popular species diminish to worrisome levels, tensions are growing between subsistence fishermen and their commercial rivals, who are eager to enrich their bottom line and satisfy the growing appetite for fish of city-dwellers in Brazil and abroad.
In response, peasants up and down the Amazon, here in Brazil and in neighboring countries like Peru, are forming cooperatives to control fish catches and restock their rivers and lakes. But that effort, increasingly successful, has only encouraged the commercial fishing operations, as well as some of the peasants' less disciplined neighbors, to step up their depredations.
"The industrial fishing boats, the big 20- to 30-ton vessels, they have a different mentality than us artisanal fishermen, who have learned to take the protection of the environment into account," said the president of the local fishermen's union. "They want to sweep everything up with their dragnets and then move on, benefiting from our work and sacrifice and leaving us with nothing."
Topic 1 (选题一) Ever since the economist David Ricardo offered the basic theory in 1817, economic scripture has taught that open trade-free of tariffs, quotas, subsidies or other government distortions-improves the well-being of both parties. U.S. policy has implemented this doctrine with a vengeance. Why is free trade said to be universally beneficial? The answer is a doctrine called "comparative advantage".
Here's a simple analogy. If a surgeon is highly skilled both at doing operations and performing routine blood tests, it's more efficient for the surgeon to concentrate on the surgery and pay a less efficient technician to do the tests, since that allows the surgeon to make the most efficient use of her own time.
By extension, even if the United States is efficient both at inventing advanced biotechnologies and at the routine manufacture of medicines, it makes sense for the United States to let the production work migrate to countries that can make the stuff more cheaply. Americans get the benefit of the cheaper products and get to spend their resources on even more valuable pursuits, That, anyway, has always been the premise. But here Samuelson dissents. What if the lower wage country also captures the advanced industry?
If enough higher-paying jobs are lost by American workers to outsourcing, he calculates, then the gain from the cheaper prices may not compensate for the loss in U.S. purchasing power.
"Free trade is not always a win-win situation," Samuelson concludes. It is particularly a problem, he says, in a world where large countries with far lower wages, like India and China, are increasingly able to make almost any product or offer almost any service performed in the United States.
If America trades freely with them, then the powerful drag of their far lower will begin dragging down U.S. average wages. The U.S. economy may still grow, he calculates, but at a lower rate than it otherwise would have.
Topic 2 （选题二） Uganda's eagerness for genuine development is reflected in its schoolchildren's smiles and in the fact that so many children are now going to school. Since 1997, when the government began to provide universal primary education, total primary enrollment had risen from 3 million to 7.6 million in 2004. Schools have opened where none existed before, although there is some way to go in reaching the poorest areas of the country.
Uganda has also made strides in secondary and higher education, to the point that it is attracting many students from other countries. At the secondary level, enrollment is above 700,000, with the private sector providing the majority if schools. For those who want to take their education further, there are 12 private universities in addition to the four publicly funded institutions, together providing 75,000 places.
Education is seen as a vital component in the fight against poverty. The battle for better health is another, although it is one that will take longer to win in a country that carries a high burden of disease, including malaria and AIDS. Here, the solutions can only arise from a combination of international support and government determination to continue spending public money on preventive care and better public health information.
Current government plants include recruiting thousands of nurses, increasing the availability of drugs and building 200 new maternity units.
Uganda's high rate of population growth, at 3.6 percent per annum, poses a special challenge in the fight against poverty, says Finance Minister Gerald Ssendaula, who points out that the fertility rate, at 6.9 children per female, is the highest in Africa.
The government's newly revised Poverty Eradication Action Plan (PEAP) puts the "restoration of security" at the top of the current government agenda. This is because it estimates that Uganda has lost 3 percent of its gross domestic product each year that the conflict has persisted. Displaced people are not only a financial burden, they are unable to the economy.
The other core challenges identified by the revised PEAP are finding ways to keep the lowest income growing, improving the quality of education, giving people more control over the size of their families and using public resources transparently and efficiently. It is a document that other poor countries could learn from.
Mineral resources are an important part of natural resources and an important material foundation for the development of human society. China is one of the first countries in the world to develop and utilize resources.
Over the past five decades, China has made great achievements in the survey and development of its mineral resources. This has provided an important guarantee for the sustained, rapid and sound development of the Chinese economy.
The Chinese Government attaches great importance to sustainable development and the rational utilization of mineral resources. It has made sustainable development a national strategy and the protection of resources an important part of this strategy.
China is developing country with a large population and a relative shortage of resources. It depends mainly on the exploitation of its own mineral resources to meet the needs of its modernization program. Meanwhile, it has made energetic efforts to introduce foreign capital and technology to exploit its own resources, make use of foreign markets and foreign mineral resources, and strive to help its own mining enterprises and mineral products to enter the international market.
As everyone knows, birds cannot fly without wings and a person cannot walk without legs. But for Yin Xiaoxing, while birds cannot fly without wings, a person can walk even without legs!
Born in 1970 into a farmer's family in Jiangsu Province, Yin Xiaoxing suffered from polio and acute pneumonia at the age of only eight months. He survived but lost the ability to stand on his feet. Because of his disability, Xiaoxing had to give up his study after junior middle school. The burden of life seemed to be especially heavy for him. He tried to make a living by selling fruits, raising chickens and taking pains to learn traditional Chinese medicine.
At the age of 21, this young man, with a map and a compass in hand, embarked on the hard journey of traveling around China in his wheelchair.
In the last 12 years, Yin Xiaoxing traveled a total of 70,000 kilometers in his wheelchair and left his footprints in 31 provinces, municipalities and autonomous regions. During this period, he wore out four wheelchairs. He left a trail of human records including climbing more than 20 famous mountains like Mont Tai, Mount Hua and Mount Heng with his hands, crossing the 5,231-meter-high Mount Tanggula alone, traveling along the Silk Road in wheelchair, crossing the Taklimakan Desert, getting to the top of the Oriental Pearl TV Tower in Shanghai with his hands, and completing the journey from the desert to Hong Kong.
The Great Wall is a wonder of the world. Now, millions of people journey to the Great Wall each year, making its most popular sites besieged by hordes of tourists during busy seasons.
The Chinese have a long history of building walls, dating from the Warring States period. In history, about 20 walls were built, with the wall constructed during the Ming Dynasty being the longest, extending 6,700 km. China was the most technologically advanced nation in the world then, so the wall was also the most sophisticated in structure. It was built to ward off the invasion of nomads from the north.
After the establishment of the Qing Dynasty, since its founders were themselves nomads, they did not see a need to continue with wall building. Nonetheless, the Qing government did institute a law to preserve the wall, banning the removal of bricks from it. But, the impact of time and continuous wars have left the wall greatly damaged in its most accessible sections.
Over the past 10-plus years, the booming tourist industry has stimulated the Great wall's renovation project. Now, many of its sections have been or are being revamped.