【正文】 e city is subsiding at the rate of about half a meter every decade. You can see the consequences in the cracked cathedrals, the tilting Palace of Arts and the broken water and sewerage pipes. Every region of the world has its own variant of the water crisis story. The mining of groundwater for irrigation has lowered the water table in parts of India and Pakistan by 30 meters in the past three decades. As water goes down, the cost of pumping goes up, undermining the livelihoods of poor farmers. What is driving the global water crisis? Physical availability is part of the problem. Unlike oil or coal, water is an infinitely renewable resource, but it is available in a finite quantity. With water use increasing at twice the rate of population growth, the amount available per person is shrinking especially in some of the poorest countries. Challenging as physical scarcity may be in some countries, the real problems in water go deeper. The 20thcentury model for water management was based on a simple idea: that water is an infinitely available free resource to be exploited, dammed or diverted without reference to scarcity or sustainability. Across the world, waterbased ecological systems rivers, lakes and watersheds have been taken beyond the frontiers of ecological sustainability by policy makers who have turned a blind eye to the consequences of over exploitation. We need a new model of water management for the 21st century. What does that mean? For starters, we have to stop using water like there’s no tomorrow and that means using it more efficiently at levels that do not destroy our environment. The buzz phrase at the Mexico Water forum is integrated water resource management. What it means is that governments need to manage the private demand of different users and manage this precious resource in the public interest. 二級筆譯實(shí)務(wù) Topic 1 John Kenh Galbraith, the iconoclastic economist, teacher and diplomat, died Saturday at a hospital in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He was 97. Mr. Galbraith was one of the most widely read authors in the history of economics。 among his 33 books was The Affluent Society （ 1958） , one of those rare works that forces a nation to reexamine its values. He wrote fluidly, even on plex topics, and many of his pelling phrases among them the affluent society, conventional wisdom and countervailing power became part of the language. An imposing presence, lanky and angular at 6 feet 8 inches tall, Mr. Galbraith was consulted frequently by national leaders, and he gave advice freely, though it may have been ignored as often as it was taken. Mr. Galbraith clearly preferred taking issue with the conventional wisdom he distrusted. Mr. Galbraith, a revered lecturer for generations of Harvard students, noheless always manded attention. From the 1930s to the 1990s Mr. Galbraith helped define the terms of the national political debate, influencing both the direction of the Democratic Party and the thinking of its leaders. He tutored Adlai E. Stevenson, the Democratic nominee for president in 1952 and 1956, on Keynesian economics. He advised President John F. Kennedy （ often over lobster stew at the LockeOber restaurant in their beloved Boston） and served as his ambassador to India. Though he eventually broke with President Lyndon B. Johnson over the war in Vietnam, he helped conceive of Mr. Johnson’s Great Society progr am and wrote a major presidential address that outlined its purposes. In 1968, pursuing his opposition to the war, he helped Senator Eugene J. McCarthy seek the Democratic nomination for president. In the course of his long career, he undertook a number of government assignments, including the anization of price controls in World War II and speechwriting for Presidents Franklin D. Roosevelt, Kennedy and Johnson. He drew on his experiences in government to write three satirical novels. He took on the Harvard economics department with A Tenured Professor, ridiculing, among others, a certain outspoken character who bore no small resemblance to himself. At his death, Mr. Galbraith was the emeritus professor of economics at Harvard, where he had taught for most of his career. A popular lecturer, he treated economics as an aspect of society and culture rather than as an arcane discipline of numbers. 人事部二級筆譯（ CATTI） 實(shí)務(wù)真題及答案 英譯漢部分 The Gap Between Rich and Poor Widened in . Capital Washington . ranks first among the 40 cities with the widest gap between the poor and the rich, according to a recent report released by the . Fiscal Policy Institute on July 22nd. The top 20 percent of households in . have an average yearly ine of $186,830, 31 times that of the bottom 20 percent, which earns only $6,126 per year. The ine gap is also big in Atlanta and Miami, but the difference is not as pronounced. The report also indicates that the widening gap occurred mainly during the 1990s. Over the last decade, the average ine of the top 20 percent of households has grown 36 percent, while the average ine of the bottom 20 percent has only risen 3 percent. I believe the concentration of the middle to highine families in the . area will continue, therefore, the ine gap between rich and poor will be hard to bridge, David Garrison told the Washington Observer. Garrison is a senior researcher with the Brookings Institution, specializing in the study of the social and economic policies in the greater Washington . area. The report attributed the persistent ine gap in Washington to the area39。s special job opportunities, which attract highine households. Especially since the federal government is based in Washington ., Government agencies and other government related businesses such as lobbying firms and government contractors constantly offer highpaying jobs, which contribute to the trend of increasing highine ho