伦敦也“蜗居” London's Housing Crisis
语音:英式发音 适合泛听
语速:175词/分钟
关键词:London, housing, crisis point 
London: population seven and a half million plus and growing. And in the heart of the ever-expanding city, Fatima Bourenane and her three children. She’s a working single mother and lives in this tiny, two-bedroom government-owned flat in west London. She’s been here 14 years, nine of those on a waiting list for somewhere a little bigger.
Fatima: Always, every day is fighting, arguing in the bedroom. They don’t share: they can’t. And Nadia, she have her head problem and she sleep with me in the room. It’s too small for her, too small.
Right now in the UK, housing is at crisis point. A million extra homes are needed, and yet building is at its lowest level since the Second World War. And then there’s the credit 1)crunch, at least partly responsible for a 30% decline in house building over the last two years.
David Orr (Chief Executive, National Housing Federation): It’s an absolutely huge problem in London. We have found ourselves in this rather ridiculous position that one of the wealthiest cities in the world and the hub of the UK economy is now really struggling to be able to house all the people who want to live here.
Eric Reynolds (Urban Space Management): I think it’s desperately sad that what we are doing is 2)squeezing people into effectively rats’ nests, tiny spaces, and it’s only building up a new series of slums.
Eric Reynolds’ solution to the problem: container city in east London. He 3)converts shipping 4)crates into homes and offices, where the weekly rent is around $300.
Eric: We had to invent a way in which we could house these people, both to live and to work, at a figure that made sense to them. In other words, what they could afford to rent, and what would make sense to us to be able to build.
But without the land to build on, the problem remains. Back at Fatima’s, they’re being positive. So is there a chance to move?
David: Sadly, her chances are not great. There will be some opportunity, but there are far too many people in the position that Fatima is in, where they have reasonable accommodation but not nearly big enough to suit their needs. And there is no short-term solution to this because we don’t have enough larger family homes.
Fourteen years with the same view, and who knows for how much longer.
伦敦人口超过750万,且依然在不断增长。在这个规模持续扩大的城市中心区,住着法蒂玛·波里南和她的三个孩子。她是单身的职业母亲,他们一家就住在西伦敦这间属政府所有的两房小公寓里。她在这里已经住了14年了,其中有9年的时间里,他们一直在候选名单中,等待换一个面积稍大的住所。
法蒂玛:总是这样,卧室里每一天都上演着争吵和打架。他们没办法共用这狭小的空间,他们办不到。纳蒂尔的头有问题,所以她和我睡同一间房。这里对她来说太小了,实在是太小了。
现在在英国,住房问题已经到了紧急关头。目前紧缺一百万套房子,然而房子的兴建却处于二战以来的最低点。信贷危机又使此矛盾雪上加霜,这也在一定程度上造成过去两年住房建设下降了30%。
大卫·厄尔(全国住房联合会执行主管):这绝对是伦敦的大问题。我们处在一个相当尴尬的处境——作为全球最富裕的城市之一以及英国的经济中心,我们现在却要挣扎着解决希望在这里定居的人们的住房问题。
埃里克·雷诺兹(城市空间管理机构):我们现在只能把人们挤进老鼠窝那样的袖珍住房里,以及催生一系列的“贫民窟”。我认为这是极大的悲哀。
埃里克·雷诺兹提出了解决问题的方案:在东伦敦兴建“集装箱城”。他把货运集装箱改造成房子和办公室,月租金大约三百美元。
埃里克:我们得想办法安置这些人,无论是居住还是工作,租金都得合理,换句话说,就是能让他们租得起,同时我们也得在不亏本的前提下去兴建。
然而,没有建房子的土地,问题依然无法解决。回到法蒂玛一家,他们依然乐观。那么,他们有机会搬家吗?
大卫:很遗憾,她能搬家的可能性不大。机会总是有的,但和法蒂玛遭遇类似的人实在是太多太多了。他们的情况都很相似——住的地方还是有的,只是空间不够大。短期内没有解决这个问题的权宜之计,因为我们没有面积更大的房子,数量不够。
等待了漫长的14年,谁知道还要再等多久呢。
海水变食水不是梦 New Device to purify Seawater
语音:美式发音 适合精听
语速:150词/分钟
关键词:nanotechnology, converting seawater, drinkable water 
U.S. and South Korean researchers have demonstrated a nanotechnology-based method for converting seawater into drinking water. So far, the invention only purifies tiny amounts of water, but scientists say it 1)paves the way for low-power facilities that will be able to remove salt and other 2)contaminants from enough seawater to provide entire communities with drinkable water.
The 3)desalination process was tested on a postage-stamp-sized chip, which uses an electric 4)current to help separate electrically charged salt particles and other 5)impurities from water to make it drinkable.
Conventional, industrial-sized desalination facilities use a process called reverse 6)osmosis to filter salt and other contaminants out of seawater. But they are expensive to run and require a lot of power, which makes them a poor fit for many low-income countries, says Massachusetts Institute of Technology biotechnology professor Jongyoon Han.
Han and his colleagues have developed 7)ion concentration 8)polarization, which improves the efficiency of the filtering process by adding a small electrical charge to the salt and other impurities.
The chip removed 99% of the salt and other contaminants from samples of undrinkable water.
Han says the technology might one day be available as a personal water purification appliance or used to bring drinking water to communities by 9)scaling up the technology to create plates containing thousands of chips.
Han: And then run all of these little devices at the same time to get the flow rate at the levels of perhaps a hundred 10)milliliters per minute. That flow rate is the typical flow rate that you can get from the household water filtration devices.
Han would like to develop a way to power the devices so they can help bring water 11)in the wake of natural disasters, such as this year’s12)devastating earthquake in Haiti.
美国和韩国的研究人员展示了一种用纳米技术将海水转化成饮用水的方法。目前来说,这项新发明仅能净化少量海水。但科学家们称,该科技为将来耗电少的脱盐设备的面世铺平了道路,届时低电耗设备有望祛除大量海水中的盐分和杂质,从而为广大社区提供饮用水。
脱盐过程是在一个邮票面积大小的芯片上进行的。电流把带电盐粒子和其他杂质从海水中分离出来,从而把海水转换成饮用水。
传统工业中使用的脱盐设备采取反渗透的方式,把盐和其他杂质从海水中分离。美国麻省理工学院生物工程学教授韩俊允指出,这些设备价格昂贵,且高能耗,因此并不适用于众多低收入国家。
韩教授和他的同事开发出离子集中分离技术,为盐和杂质稍微充电,从而提高分离效率。
试验中,芯片可以祛除海水样本中99%的盐和杂质。
韩教授称,也许有一天,这项技术能运用到家庭水净化设备中,又或者制造出包含数千个这种芯片的大面板后,社区居民也能喝上经这种设备净化的水。
韩:所有这些小设备同时运作,一分钟也许能处理100毫升的水,这也是家用水滤化器的标准工作效率。
韩教授希望能为这些设备找到动力之源,这样它们就能在类似今年的海地大地震那样的重大自然灾害发生之后派上用场。
“试管婴儿”的未来 The Future of "Test Tube" Babies
语音:美式发音 适合讨论
语速:145词/分钟
关键词:IVF, similar, mental disorder 
More than 40,000 American children are born each year using assisted reproductive technologies such as 1)IVF. But what becomes of these kids as they grow up? Researchers from the East Virginia Medical School surveyed 173 young adults to find out.
They found kids 2)conceived through IVF were, overall, quite similar to other people in their early 20s, with typical rates of obesity, birth 3)defects, and cancer. In some ways they were even healthier. Just 14% were current smokers compared to 39% of young people the same age in the general population. But researchers were troubled by an unexpectedly high rate of psychological problems among those conceived via IVF. Nearly one third had been 4)diagnosed with a mental disorder, most commonly 5)ADHD or depression. The depression rate was only slightly higher than normal but the 6)odds of ADHD were more than five times greater. Researchers 7)speculate that 8)fertility issues may cause greater stress on parents, which may result in more 9)behavioral problems among the children.
在美国,每年有超过四万名婴儿依靠辅助生殖技术——例如试管而诞生。这些婴儿长大以后情况怎样呢?东弗吉尼亚医学院的研究人员调查了173名刚成年的年轻人,希望从这些曾经的“试管婴儿”身上找到答案。
调查发现,二十出头的通过试管受精的孩子总体上和其他孩子相差无几,具有相似的肥胖率、出生缺陷以及癌症病发率。在某些方面他们甚至要比普通孩子更健康。这些“试管婴儿”中,仅有14%的人是吸烟者,而普通人口中同龄的吸烟的年轻人则有39%。但研究人员同时也发现,通过试管受精的孩子患心理疾病的比率要高得多,将近三分之一的人被诊断患有精神疾病,以多动症以及抑郁症最为常见。“试管婴儿”抑郁症的病发率仅比普通小孩稍高,但多动症的发病几率就要高五倍多。研究人员猜测,不育症父母比一般父母承受更大压力,这也许会导致他们的小孩行为上出现问题。
Comments 观点参考
★ Since Louise Brown, the first “test-tube baby,” was born in 1978, IVF has added exponentially to the sum of human happiness.
★ By 2006, three million babies had been born worldwide as a result of IVF and other assisted reproduction techniques.
★ It’s said that when a 35 or 40-year-old woman delivers her first baby with the help of IVF, she may harm her own baby genetically.