Unit 2 Environment

Task 1 Give Vietnamese equivalents to the following.

1. Xiangshan

………………………………………

2. the Qi River

………………………………………

3. muddy catchment

………………………………………

4. irrigation

………………………………………

5. flatbed

………………………………………

6. plastic drum

………………………………………

7. fire hydrant

………………………………………

8. Harbin

………………………………………

9. fire engine

………………………………………

10.chemical plant explosion

………………………………………

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 11.toxic cocktail

………………………………………

12.the Yuexi River

………………………………………

13.contingency plan

………………………………………

14.surface water

………………………………………

15.seasonal phenomenon

………………………………………

16.woes

………………………………………

17.swell

………………………………………

18.unrest

………………………………………

19.sap

………………………………………

20.power supply

………………………………………

Task 2 Translate the following text into Vietnamese.

WATER

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The first day the water truck came to Xiangshan village, the wells had already been dry for

two months. Throughout the hills flanking the city of Chongqing and stretching south and

west into Guizhou and Sichuan provinces, parts of China this summer suffered their worst

drought in 100 years.

In Xiangshan, a tiny mountain village high above the Qi River valley 150 km south

of downtown Chongqing, residents had made do drinking from the muddy catchments in

their fields. But by Aug. 24, when the truck set out on what was starting to become a routine

delivery, those holes too were dry and Xiangshan's farmers had been forced to give up on

irrigation. Pears hung hard and blistered on the trees. Sunflowers crumpled. The bamboo

was brown.

Ao Minhong, a truck driver conscripted by the local government, was working long

days. He filled plastic drums on his flatbed from a fire hydrant hooked up to the river. The Qi

was listless that day and the liquid in the drums looked like weak tea. When he rounded a

bend into Xiangshan after an hour's climb, he was mobbed. Li Caowan, a mother of two,

worried the water wasn't clean. But she poured it into a ceramic tub in her yard anyway.

"What choice do we have?" she said. "There's nothing else to drink."

The scene was familiar. In Harbin last November, it was fire engines plying icy

streets lined with people holding buckets. Harbin's water had been contaminated with

benzene from a chemical-plant explosion. In February, the trucks were in Sichuan, where a

power plant discharged a toxic cocktail into the Yuexi River. And in September, when tap

water for 80,000 in Hunan province was cut off because it had been tainted with an arsenic

compound, the trucks saved the day once again.

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 But water isn't supposed to come on trucks. China's flair for contingency plans isn't

reassuring. Rather, it's one of a growing number of signals that when it comes to dealing

with this most basic of resources, the country is failing. Some 320 million Chinese lack

adequate access to clean drinking water. Deserts cover 27% of the country's landmass. Most

of China's surface water is unfit for human consumption, and some of that not even clean

enough for industrial use. Grain production is sliding. And the Yellow River runs dry so

often and so long that some scientists have argued that it ought to be considered a seasonal

phenomenon. "China's water shortage and pollution problems are more severe than any

other large country in the world," said Qiu Baoxing, Vice Minister of Construction, last

month, "This is a critical point in time. We are at a crossroads."

That's the optimistic take; sometimes, though, it seems more like an approaching

dead end. Already China's water woes undercut many of Beijing's most cherished

aspirations: contaminated rivers not only swell health-care costs but increasingly generate

domestic unrest. Continued droughts sap power supplies, ruin farmers and will eventually

mean competition with other nations for grain. Moreover, providing citizens with the one

precious resource that really does just fall from the sky is among the most fundamental

duties we expect developed nations to perform. If China is to continue toward its goals of

economic prosperity, social stability and stronger relations with the rest of the world, it will

need to do better—and fast.