英语美文欣赏

时间:2024.3.19

大众媒体关于全球变暖无休止的恐怖报道使我们产生了不必要的恐慌。

The continuous presentation of scary stories about global warming in the popular media makes us unnecessarily frightened.

更糟糕的是,这吓坏了我们的孩子们。 Al Gore曾对这样一个场景做过著名的描述:海平面上升20英尺之后,佛罗里达、纽约、荷兰以及上海将几乎全部被淹没于海底。 Al Gore famously depicted how a sea-level rise of 20 feet would almost completely flood Florida, New York, Holland, and Shanghai,

尽管联合国声明,这样的事情不会发生,并且预测海平面的上升幅度将小于其描述的20倍。

even though the United Nations says that such a thing will not even happen, estimating that sea levels will rise 20 times less than that.

面对这些夸张的说法,我们当中有些人认为它们都是出于好意。 When confronted with these exaggerations, some of us say that they are for a good cause,

当然,如果我们因此而更加关注如何应对气候变化的话,那自然没有什么

and surely there is no harm done if the result is that we focus

even more on tackling climate change.

这一论点是个惊人的谬误。

This argument is astonishingly wrong.

此类的夸大其词会产生诸多危害。

Such exaggerations do plenty of harm.

过度担心全球变暖意味着我们会对其他我们本可以大有作为的事情关注更少。

Worrying excessively about global warming means that we worry less about other things, where we could do so much more good. 例如:我们关注全球变暖对疟疾扩散的影响——即未来100年中染上疟疾风险的人数会有小幅增加——却没有积极地为今天5亿因为疟疾而遭受痛苦的人群提供应对疟疾的预防和治疗办法,而后者远比减少二氧化碳排放要省钱和有效得多。

We focus, for example, on global warming’s impact on malaria (疟疾)—which will put slightly more people at risk in 100 years—instead of tackling the half a billion people suffering from malaria today with prevention and treatment policies that are much cheaper and dramatically more effective than carbon

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reduction would be.

Exaggeration also wears out the public’s willingness to tackle global warming.

人们会想,如果地球注定会毁灭,我们为什么还要做这些努力呢? If the planet is doomed, people wonder, why do anything? 54%(这一比例之高,前所未有)的美国选民认为目前新闻媒体将全球变暖描述得比实际情况更加糟糕。

A record 54% of American voters now believe the news media make global warming appear worse than it really is.

大部分人现在还错误地相信全球变暖甚至并不是由人类活动所导致的。

A majority of people now believe—incorrectly—that global

英语美文欣赏

warming is not even caused by humans.

们当中,造成了不必要的惊慌。

But the worst cost of exaggeration, I believe, is the unnecessary alarm that it causes—particularly among children. 《华盛顿邮报》的一篇文章中提到,一位9岁的孩子Alyssa为动物有可能因全球变暖而大量灭绝而伤心哭泣。

An article in The Washington Post cited nine-year-old Alyssa, who cries about the possibility of mass animal extinction from

英语美文欣赏

global warming.

该报纸还报道了父母们正在寻求有效的方法以缓解他们8岁的孩子由于北极熊面临绝种而造成的困扰。

The newspaper also reported that parents are searching for “productive” outlets for their eight-year-olds obsessions(忧心忡忡) with dying polar bears.

其实他们可以做得更好,那便是教育孩子们,让他们知道,与我们平时所认定的正相反,北极熊的数量在过去的半个世纪里已经增加了一倍,甚至增加了三倍,达到了大约22 000。

They might be better off educating them and letting them know that, contrary to common belief, the global polar bear population has doubled and perhaps even quadrupled(成为四倍) over the past half century, to about 22 000.

尽管夏季的北极冰川正在消融,甚至最终会消失,北极熊是不会灭绝的。

Despite diminishing—and eventually disappearing—summer Arctic ice, polar bears will not become extinct.


第二篇:英语美文欣赏:细小如尘,高大似梁


双语美文:On Motes and Beams 细小如尘 高大似梁

It is curious that our own offenses should seem so much less heinous than the offenses of others. I suppose the reason is that we know all the circumstances that have occasioned them and so manage to excuse in ourselves what we cannot excuse in others. We turn our attention away from our own defects, and when we are forced by untoward events to consider them, find it easy to condone them. For all I know we are right to do this; they are part of us and we must accept the good and bad in ourselves together.

让人奇怪的是,和别人的过错比起来,我们自身的过错往往不是那样的可恶。我想,其原因应该是我们知晓一切导致自己犯错的情况,因此能够设法谅解自己的错误,而别人的错误却不能谅解。我们对自己的缺点不甚关注,即便是深陷困境而不得不正视它们的时候,我们也会很容易就宽恕自己。据我所知,我们这样做是正确的。缺点是我们自身的一部分,我们必须接纳自己的好和坏。

But when we come to judge others, it is not by ourselves as we really are that we judge them, but by an image that we have fomp3ed of ourselves fro which we have left out everything that offends our vanity or would discredit us in the eyes of the world. To take a trivial instance: how scornful we are when we catch someone out telling a lie; but who can say that he has never told not one, but a hundred?

但是当我们评判别人的时候,情况就不同了。我们不是通过真实的自我来评判别人,而是用一种自我形象来评判,这种自我形象完全摒弃了在任何世人眼中会伤害到自己的虚荣或者体面的东西。举一个小例子

来说:当觉察到别人说谎时,我们是多么地蔑视他啊!但是,谁能够说自从未说过谎?可能还不止一百次呢。

英语美文欣赏细小如尘高大似梁

There is not much to choose between men. They are all a hotchpotch of greatness and littleness, of virtue and vice, of nobility and baseness. Some have more strength of character, or more opportunity, and so in one direction or another give their instincts freer play, but potentially they are the same. For my part, I do not think I am any better or any worse than most people, but I know that if I set down every action in my life and every thought that has crossed my mind, the world would consider me a monster of depravity. The knowledge that these reveries are common to all men should inspire one with tolerance to oneself as well as to others. It is well also if they enable us to look upon our fellows, even the most eminent and respectable, with humor, and if they lead us to take ourselves not too seriously.

人和人之间没什么大的差别。他们皆是伟大与渺小,善良与邪恶,高尚与低俗的混合体。有的人性格比较坚毅,机会也比较多,因而达个或那个方面,能够更自由地发挥自己的禀赋,但是人类的潜能却都是相同的。至于我自己,我认为自己并不比大多数人更好或者更差,但是我知道,假如我记下我生命中每一次举动和每一个掠过我脑海的想法的话,世界就会将我视为一个邪恶的怪物。每个人都会有这样的怪念头,这样的认识应当能够启发我们宽容自己,也宽容他人。同时,假如因此我们得以用幽默的态度看待他人,即使是天下最优秀最令人尊敬的人,而且假如我们也因此不把自己看得过于重要,那是很有裨益的。

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