专业英语八级模拟试卷902

Nicole: Mark, I am truly impressed with how successful the Earth Day Groceries Project has been. How did this all come about? Mark: I got an Internet account in 1993 from NASA — that was very exciting — and got on some educational discussion lists. I tried this project at my schools: borrowing grocery bags from the local supermarket with the agreement that the kids would decorate them and bring them back, and the store would distribute them to customers on Earth Day, April 22. It would be an environmental education project where the students were actually empowered as teachers to educate their community on the importance of Earth Day and of protecting their environment and so on. And they did that through the artwork that they put on each grocery bag. It was a huge hit. I involved most of the school the next year. And, after that, I wanted to share it even more. The Internet was just starting with discussion lists for educators, and so I sent this invitation out to Ednet and Kidsphere in 1994. I received responses from 43 schools, mostly in the U.S. and Canada. There were about 15, 000 bags decorated just through this one little announcement! I was just blown away. The power of this medium is something! That summer I began building our school website. And for the first 4 years of the project, the Earth Day Groceries Project was part of that site. It continued to grow. I established it with its own domain name several years ago, and 2 years ago, I set it up as a nonprofit organization. I still run it myself, but we do have a board. The reason for doing that is that it became a very big project in terms of the amount of time required. Nicole: Looking at the website, it’s clear that a lot of time and effort went into the project. How did you develop the skills you needed to construct the site? Mark: There were no books on HTML (hypertext mark-up language, the tagging system used to create most webpages) published when I started working on the school website. Basically, I went to a few websites, and I looked at the source of the webpages. I learned how to copy and paste, put my own information in, and look at the page locally. That’s how I learned how HTML worked. Then I found a very simple HTML editor and learned a little bit more. So, I was self-taught, and trial and error was one of the first ways that I got started. Nicole: How have things changed since then? Mark: Now there are a lot of books, and terrific online resources and courses. The opportunities to learn are all over the place. The biggest challenge for teachers is finding the time to do it. That’s the biggest challenge for me —just finding the time to keep my skills. Nicole: Jean, introducing computers into the classroom seems like a somewhat unlikely thing for an art teacher to do. What prompted you to do it? Jean: I started constructing webpages a couple of years ago, and just continued to develop with it. Being an art teacher, I like doing anything visual, and doing webpages became a way for me to become visually and “artically“ challenged. Nicole: What were your goals for your students when you started to participate in the project? Jean: I just wanted them to come up with a message and make a picture that related to the message — those are the most important things. Nicole: How did you help them to achieve those goals? Jean: I would introduce the lesson by talking about recycling, ecology, the environment, and ways that we can improve the environment. We’d talk about what Earth Day is — the whole meaning behind it. From an art standpoint, we would talk about the graphics: What is the best way to design the product to get interest in it? We would talk about advertising, too — the message in the advertising, whether through the words or the pictures. And then we’d talk about how to design it. The one thing I tell my students is not to get too wordy, because if they get too wordy, people aren’t going to read it. Keep it simple. And the kids really take it from there. I do not believe in saying no to them, because it is their imagination — as long as they are working within the themes of the earth, Earth Day, recycling, and ecology. And they seem to catch on pretty quickly. This is the end of the FIRST interview. Questions 1 to 5 are based on what you have just heard. Question One Which of the following statements is TRUE about the Earth Day Groceries Project? Question Two How was the Project received when Mark first sent his invitation? Question Three How did Mark learn the skills he needed to construct his website? Question Four What subject does Jean teach? Question Five Which of the following statements about Jean is NOT true? It was inspired by a friend of Mark’s who works at NASA. It is the name of an online education discussion list. It was started by a local supermarket. It is an environmental education project.

(I = Interviewer; C=Charles Andrews) I: With me today is Charles Andrews from Wisconsin University. Welcome! Charles. C: Thank you. I: Charles, you recently started a large research study on training in small businesses. What made you focus on small businesses? After all, most of your experience has been with the huge multinational Cleantex. And in fact you eventually ran their training department, didn’t you? C: Well, you are partly right. You see, when I joined the university a year ago they wanted me to start a training program for small businesses. I’d just sold my own small business, which I’d started when I left Cleantex. The 8 years I ran my own business taught me more about training than all my years with Cleantex. But I felt I couldn’t base a training program on my experience alone. So I decided to do research first. I: And how much training did you find in most small companies? Can they afford to do much training? C: Well, firstly small businesses are often accused of not doing enough training. But that is the opinion of big businesses of course. It’s true that the government is encouraging small firms to increase their training budgets. They’re trying to introduce financial assistance for this. But I have to say I find lots of training going on. The real problem is that most small businesses don’t always know how much training they’re providing or how much it’s actually costing them. I: But surely businesses have budgets and training records. C: Unfortunately most small companies don’t set aside a specific training budget. It’s not that they don’t want to spend the money but that they operate differently. You see, things change very quickly in small firms and it’s impossible to predict the training needs. An employee can be moved to a new project very suddenly and then training has to be organized within days. And most small businesses prefer to use their experienced staff to do any training on the job. I: Did you manage to work out the costs of training? C: Well, it took time to work out the indirect costs. You see, most small business managers don’t include these costs in their calculations. Most of them keep records of obvious expenses, like, many expenses like external courses, travel, training manual, and videos, etc. But not many firms have specific training accounts and they don’t include the time managers spend on training, waste of materials, lost of productivity and so on. I spent hours with company accountants trying to see where these hidden costs were. I: How much are small firms spending on training? C: More than half of the businesses I surveyed spent at least 1% of their annual salary bill on training. And some of these spent up to 5% of their pay roll. In fact smaller firms are investing on average over 10% more on training per employee than larger firms. I: How good is that training? C: As I said, small firms usually get an experienced employee to show new staff how to do that job. This can be useful if the person is carefully selected and well-trained himself. But it’s not really enough. The trainee needs to do the job with the experienced employee on hand for guidance and feedback. This gets trainees much better skills than any packaged courses. I: And has your study helped you plan new courses for small businesses? C: Definitely. I now understand what they want and how they want it delivered. I now know that small firms were only investing in training if it immediately helped their enterprise. But most formal training focuses on long-term business needs. Most small businesses can’t plan far ahead. They want direct results from training in skills they need now. New technologies and IT skills are identified as a priority by all the firms I surveyed. I: What is the first course the university offers small businesses? C: Up till now most of short courses for companies in general have dealt with helping businesses grow. These aren’t really appropriate for small companies as growth can be very risky for them. They obviously need to grow but they’re afraid of fast growth. I’m going to start with courses on IT and software the small companies are likely to require because of the business growth to come later. And they’ll need to be changed to make them more relevant to small businesses. I: Well, I wish you every success with the course. This is the end of the SECOND interview. Questions 6 to 10 are based on what you have just heard. Question Six In his research, what did Charles Andrews find about training in small firms? Question Seven What do many small firms NOT include, when calculating the cost of in-house training? Question Eight What do the majority of small firms spend on training? Question Nine What does Charles Andrews think that the best training involves? Question Ten Above all else, what training courses do small businesses want? They spend too little on training. They set aside a specific training budget. They receive state subsidies for training. They are unaware of their training expenses.

I have a plan that will raise wages, lower prices, increase the nation’s stock of scientists and engineers, and maybe even create the next Google. Better yet, this plan won’t cost the government a dime. In fact, it will save a lot of money. But few politicians want to touch it. Here’s the plan: More immigration—a pathway to legal status for undocumented immigrants, and a recognition that immigration policy is economic policy, and needs to be thought of as such. See what I meant about politicians not liking it? Economists will tell you that immigrants raise wages for the average native-born worker. They’ll tell you that they make things cheaper for us to buy here, and that if we didn’t have immigrants for some of these jobs, the jobs would move to other countries. They’ll tell you that we should allow for much more highly skilled immigration, because that’s about as close to a free lunch as you’re likely to find. They’ll tell you that the people who should most want a path to legal status for undocumented immigrants are the low-income workers who are most opposed to such plans. And about all this, the economists are right. There are also noneconomic considerations, of course. Integrating cultures and nationalities is difficult. Undocumented immigrants raise issues of law and fairness. Border security is important. Those questions are important. They’re just not the subject of this column. The mistake we make when thinking about the effect immigrants have on our wages, says Giovanni Peri, an economist at the University of California at Davis who has studied the issue extensively, is we imagine an economy where the number of jobs is fixed. Then, if one immigrant comes in, he takes one of those jobs or forces a worker to accept a lower wage. But that’s not how our economy works. With more labor—particularly more labor of different kinds—the economy grows larger. It produces more stuff. There are more workers buying things and that increases the total number of jobs. We understand perfectly well that Europe is in trouble because its low birth rates mean fewer workers and that means less economic growth. We ourselves worry that we’re not graduating enough scientists and engineers. But the economy doesn’t care if it gets workers through birth rates or green cards. In fact, there’s a sense in which green cards are superior. Economists separate new workers into two categories: Those who “substitute“ for existing labor—we’re both construction workers, and the boss can easily swap you out for me; and those who “complement“ existing labor—you’re a construction engineer and I’m a construction worker. Immigrants, more so than U.S.-born workers, tend to be in the second category, as the jobs you want to give to someone who doesn’t speak English very well and doesn’t have many skills are different from the jobs you give to people who are fluent and have more skills. But that’s only half of their benefit. “Living standards are a function of two things, “ says Michael Greenstone, director of the Hamilton Project, which is hosting a Washington conference on the economics of immigration next week. “They’re a function of our wages and the prices of the goods we purchase.“ And immigrants reduce the prices of those goods. Patricia Cortes, an economist at the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business, found that immigrants lowered the prices in “immigrant-intensive industries“ like housekeeping and gardening by about 10 percent. So our wages go up and the prices of the things we want to buy go down. We should remember, though, that the average worker isn’t every worker. A study by Harvard economists George Borjas and Lawrence Katz found that although immigrants raised native wages overall, they slightly hurt the 8 percent of workers without a high-school education and those with a college education. A subsequent study by Peri looked harder at the ways immigrant labor differed from native labor and found that all groups of workers saw a benefit from immigrants—though unskilled workers saw less of a benefit than highly skilled workers. And unskilled workers face even tougher competition from undocumented immigrants who, because their status is so tenuous, will accept pay beneath the minimum wage. And they are unlikely to complain about safety regulations or work conditions. That takes unskilled immigrants from being a bit cheaper than unskilled natives and makes them a lot cheaper—which makes employers likelier to hire them for jobs that native workers could do better. This suggests, first, that American workers would be better off if we figured out a way to take the 12 million undocumented immigrants and give them legal status, and second, that we might want to give them more direct help if we’re going to increase immigration. Both are possible—just politically difficult. Our immigration policy should be primarily oriented around our national goals. And one goal is to have the world’s most innovative and dynamic economy. It’s never going to be the case that each and every one of the planet’s most talented individuals is bom on American soil. But those born elsewhere could be lured here. People like living here. We should be leveraging that advantage, mercilessly roaming the globe, finding the most talented people and attracting them to our country. When we have the best talent, we have the best innovations. That’s how we landed Google, Intel, and the atomic bomb. Immigrants are about twice as likely as native-born Americans to start a small business, and they’re 30 percent more likely to apply for a patent.

The FDA may rescind its approval of Avastin, a colon-cancer drug. If the summer of 2009 was the season of “death panels“, as the debate over health-care reform exploded, this is the season of “17.5k dead women a year“. That’s the body count scaremongers are predicting if the Food and Drug Administration rescinds its provisional approval of the drug Avastin for metastatic breast cancer, a decision expected by year’s end. Although the move has nothing to do with the new health-care law, uncertainty about “Obama-care“ has given opponents an opening to terrify people about what’s coming—like bureaucrats rationing health care to save money. The reality is far different and, for those who care more about helping cancer patients than about scoring political points, much sadder. That’s because in 2008, when the FDA gave “fast track“ approval for Avastin in breast cancer that has metastasized—usually to the lungs, bones, liver, or brain—it was conditional on the manufacturer, Genentech, running additional clinical trials of the drug’s safety and efficacy. There was a good reason for that. Avastin is an angiogenesis inhibitor, a class of cancer drugs that have not lived up to their hype: although they stop one mechanism by which malignant cells grow blood vessels to sustain them, the cells often activate a different mechanism and go on proliferating. Although Avastin does extend the lives of patients with metastatic colorectal and kidney cancer, and remains FDA-approved for those uses, the new studies show it does not work the same miracle against metastatic breast cancer (MBC). Instead, Avastin increased what’s called progression-free survival (how long before cancer spreads or grows) by about one to three weeks, depending on which chemo agent it was paired with. But it did not keep women alive any longer than chemo alone. To some advocates, progression-free survival without an increase in overall survival is still welcome, since it suggests patients have a better quality of life during their last months. But it’s hard to make that case for Avastin. Not only did it not keep women alive, but it also caused hypertension, hemorrhaging, bowel perforations, and other side effects. “It seems as if the drug’s toxicity cancels out any benefit, “ cancer surgeon David Gorski of the Karmanos Cancer Institute told me. Perforated bowels do not equal a better quality of life. These dismal results are what led an FDA panel to vote 12-1 in July to rescind the conditional approval of Avastin for MBC. Critics of health-care reform, predictably, saw nefarious motives—in particular, evidence that Obamacare will ration expensive drugs. (Avastin costs some $88, 000 a year, though few patients live that long.) The Wall Street Journal editorialized about the “Avastin mugging“, and Sen. David Vitter accused the FDA of “assigning a value to a day of a person’s life“. If Avastin did extend lives for, let’s say, $10, 000 a day, Vitter might have a case. But it doesn’t extend life at all. That makes allegations like the 17, 500 dead women (from a right-wing blog) “utter demagoguery of the most vile and despicable sort, “ Gorski wrote on the blog Science-Based Medicine. There are stories galore of women with metastatic breast cancer who are alive “because of Avastin“. Indeed, patients have been flooding the airwaves and blogosphere with claims that Avastin helped them. But the only way to tell whether Avastin deserves the credit for keeping patients alive is through large studies. “There are always patients who live longer than average, “ biostatistician Donald Berry of the MD Anderson Cancer Center told me. “They attribute it to the treatment; people love to make attributions.“ But when the proportion of patients alive at any given time in a study is the same whether they are receiving Avastin or not—as the two large trials found—then crediting Avastin is “very likely wrong“. “That some women did live longer on Avastin, “ Berry explained, “may simply reflect the natural heterogeneity of the disease and say nothing about the therapy.“ Doctors can keep prescribing Avastin for metastatic breast cancer off-label, though insurers will not pay for it. Some activists welcome that. There is “no evidence of clinical benefit from Avastin, yet there is harm, “ says Fran Visco, president of the National Breast Cancer Coalition. “We need to demand more of treatment before we unleash it on the public.“ Science-based medicine isn’t always pretty. But it’s better than politics-based medicine, which is what some critics of the Avastin decision are practicing—and much better than deluding ourselves into thinking something works when it doesn’t.

Mummies capture our imaginations and our hearts. Full of secrets and magic, they were once people who lived and loved, just as we do today. I believe we should honor these ancient dead and let them rest in peace. There are some secrets of the pharaohs, however, that can be revealed only by studying their mummies. By carrying out CT scans of King Tutankhamun’s mummy, we were able in 2005 to show that he did not die from a blow to the head, as many people believed. Our analysis revealed that a hole in the back of his skull had been made during the mummification process. The study also showed that Tutankhamun died when he was only 19—perhaps soon after he suffered a fracture to his left leg. But there are mysteries surrounding Tutankhamun that even a CT scanner cannot reveal. Now we have probed even deeper into his mummy and returned with extraordinary revelations about his life, his birth, and his death. Ten years after ascending the throne, Tutankhamun is dead, leaving no heirs to succeed him. He is hastily buried in a small tomb, designed originally for a private person rather than a king. In a backlash against Akhenaten’s heresy, his successors manage to delete from history nearly all traces of the Amarna kings, including Tutankhamun. Ironically, this attempt to erase his memory preserved Tutankhamun for all time. Less than a century after his death, the location of his tomb had been forgotten. Hidden from robbers by structures built directly above, it remained virtually untouched until its discovery in 1922. More than 5, 000 artifacts were found inside the tomb. But the archaeological record has so far failed to illuminate the young king’s most intimate family relationships. Who were his mother and father? What became of his widow, Ankhesenamun? Are the two mummified fetuses found in his tomb King Tutankhamun’s own prematurely born children, or tokens of purity to accompany him into the afterlife? To answer these questions, we decided to analyze Tutankhamun’s DNA, along with that of ten other mummies suspected to be members of his immediate family. In the past I had been against genetic studies of royal mummies. The chance of obtaining workable samples while avoiding contamination from modern DNA seemed too small to justify disturbing these sacred remains. But in 2008 several geneticists convinced me that the field had advanced far enough to give us a good chance of getting useful results. We set up two state-of-the-art DNA-sequencing labs, one in the basement of the Egyptian Museum in Cairo and the other at the Faculty of Medicine at Cairo University. The research would be led by Egyptian scientists: Yehia Gad and Somaia Ismail from the National Research Center in Cairo. We also decided to carry out CT scans of all the mummies, under the direction of Ashraf Selim and Sahar Saleem of the Faculty of Medicine at Cairo University. Three international experts served as consultants: Carsten Pusch of the Eberhard Karls University of Tubingen, Germany; Albert Zink of the EURAC-Institute for Mummies and the Iceman in Bolzano, Italy; and Paul Gostner of the Central Hospital Bolzano. The identities of four of the mummies were known. These included Tutankhamun himself, still in his tomb in the Valley of the Kings, and three mummies on display at the Egyptian Museum: Amenhotep III, and Yuya and Tuyu, the parents of Amenhotep Ill’s great queen, Tiye. Among the unidentified mummies was a male found in a mysterious tomb in the Valley of the Kings known as KV55. Archaeological and textual evidence suggested this mummy was most likely Akhenaten or Smenkhkare. Our search for Tutankhamun’s mother and wife focused on four unidentified females. Two of these, nicknamed the “Elder Lady“ and the “Younger Lady“, had been discovered in 1898, unwrapped and casually laid on the floor of a side chamber in the tomb of Amenhotep II (KV35), evidently hidden there by priests after the end of the New Kingdom, around 1000 B.C. The other two anonymous females were from a small tomb (KV21) in the Valley of the Kings. The architecture of this tomb suggests a date in the 18th dynasty, and both mummies hold their left fist against their chest in what is generally interpreted as a queenly pose. Finally, we would attempt to obtain DNA from the fetuses in Tutankhamun’s tomb—not a promising prospect given the extremely poor condition of these mummies. But if we succeeded, we might be able to fill in the missing pieces to a royal puzzle extending over five generations. To obtain workable samples, the geneticists extracted tissue from several different locations in each mummy, always from deep within the bone, where there was no chance the specimen would be contaminated by the DNA of previous archaeologists—or of the Egyptian priests who had performed the mummification. Extreme care was also taken to avoid any contamination by the researchers themselves. After the samples were extracted, the DNA had to be separated from unwanted substances, including the unguents and resins the priests had used to preserve the bodies. Since the embalming material varied with each mummy, so did the steps needed to purify the DNA. In each case the fragile material could be destroyed at every step.

It was said by Sir George Bernard Shaw that “England and America are two countries separated by the same language.“ My first personal experience of this was when I worked as a camp counsellor for two months in 2000 in a Summer Camp run by the Boy Scouts of America, as part of an international leader exchange scheme. Before I went, all the participants in the scheme were given a short list of words that are in common use in the UK which Americans would either be confused by or would even offend them. I memorized the words and thought “I’ll cope“. When I finally arrived in the States three months later, I realized that perhaps a lifetime of watching American television was not adequate preparation for appreciating and coping with the differences between American and British speech. In the first hour of arriving at the camp I was exposed to High School American English, Black American English and American English spoken by Joe Public, all every different to each other. Needless to say, I did cope in the end. The Americans I met were very welcoming and helpful, and I found they were patient with me when I made a social faux pas when I used an inappropriate word or phrase. Upon my return I began to wonder whether anyone had documented the differences between American and British English. I found several books on the subject but often these were written in a dry and academic way. I felt that I could do better and use my sense of humor and personal experiences to help people from both sides of Atlantic to communicate more effectively when they meet. My research into the subject led me to several conclusions. Firstly, American English and British English are covering thanks to increased transatlantic travel and the media. The movement of slang words is mostly eastwards, though a few words from the UK have been adopted by the Ivy league fraternities. This convergent trend is a recent one dating from the emergence of Hollywood as the predominant film making center in the world and also from the Second World War when large numbers of American GIs were stationed in the UK. This trend was consolidated by the advent of television. Before then, it was thought that American English and British English would diverge as the two languages evolved. In 1789, Noah Webster, in whose name American dictionaries are still published to this day, stated that: “Numerous local causes, such as a new country, new associations of people, new combinations of ideas in the arts and some intercourse with tribes wholly unknown in Europe will introduce new words into the American tongue.“ He was right, but his next statement has since been proved to be incorrect. “These causes will produce in the course of time a language in North America as different from the modern Dutch, Danish and Swedish are from the German or from one another.“ Secondly, there are some generalizations that can be made about American and British English which can reveal the nature of the two nations and their peoples. British speech tends to be less general, and directed more, in nuances of meaning, attendant murmurings and pauses, carries a wealth of shared assumptions and attitudes. In other words, the British are preoccupied with their social status within society and speak and act accordingly to fit into the social class they aspire to. This is particularly evident when talking to someone from “the middle class“ when he points out that he is “upper middle class“ rather than “middle class“ or “lower middle class“. American speech tends to be influenced by the over-heated language of much of the media, which is designed to attach an impression of exciting activity to passive, if sometimes insignificant events. Yet, curiously, really violent activity and life-changing events are hidden in blind antiseptic tones that serve to disguise the reality. British people tend to understatement whereas Americans towards hyperbole. A Briton might respond to a suggestion with a word such as “Terrific!“ only if he is expressing rapturous enthusiasm, whereas an American might use the word merely to signify polite assent. Thirdly, the American language had less regard than the British for grammatical form, and will happily bulldoze its way across distinctions rather than steer a path between them. American English will casually use one form of a word for another, for example turning nouns into verbs or verbs and nouns into adjectives. I do hope what I have said will be of some help for the people on both sides of the Atlantic when they meet and communicate.

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Demography is the statistical study of human populations. It can be a general science that can be applied to any kind of dynamic population, that is, one that changed 【S1】______ over the time or space. It encompasses the study of the 【S2】______ size, structure and distribution of populations, and spatial or temporal changes in them in response to birth, death, migration and ageing. Human demography is the most well known of discipline demography, and typically what people refer when using 【S3】______ the term demography. Demographic analysis can be applied to whole societies or to groups defined by criterion such as 【S4】______ education, nationality, religion and ethnicity. In academia, demography is often regarded as a branch of either economy 【S5】______ or sociology. Formal demography limits its object of study to the measurement of population processes, when the 【S6】______ more broad field of social demography studies also analyze the relationships between economic, social, cultural and biological processes influencing on a population. 【S7】______ Ibn Khaldun (1332-1406) is regarded as the “father of demography“ for his economic analysis of social organization which produced the first scientific and theoretical work on population, development, and group dynamics. At the end of the 18th century, Thomas Malthus concluded that, if unchecked, populations would be subject to exponential growth. He feared that population growth would intend to 【S8】______ outstrip growth in food production, leading to ever increased 【S9】______ famine and poverty; he is seen as the intellectual father of ideas of overpopulation and the limits for growth. Later 【S10】______ more sophisticated and realistic models were presented by Benjamin Gompertz and Verhulst.

你知道中国最有名的人是谁? 提起此人，人人皆晓，处处闻名。他姓差，名不多，是各省各县各村人氏。你一定见过他，一定听过别人谈起他。差不多先生的名字天天挂在大家的口头，因为他是中国全国人的代表。差不多先生的相貌和你和我都差不多。他有一双眼睛，但看的不很清楚；有两只耳朵，但听的不很分明；有鼻子和嘴，但他对于气味和口味都不很讲究。他的脑子也不小，但他的记性却不很精明，他的思想也不很细密。他常常说： “凡事只要差不多，就好了。何必太精明呢?” 他小的时候，他妈叫他去买红糖，他买了白糖回来。他妈骂他，他摇摇头说： “红糖白糖不是差不多吗?”

Following are a graph showing the water consumption in different regions in 2000 and predicting increase in 2050, and an excerpt offering suggestions for proper water consumption in the future. Read them carefully and write an essay of no less than 300 words, in which you should: 1. summarize the ideas in both materials; 2. make suggestions on how China should use its water resources. Graph [*] - OECD: The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) is an international economic organisation of 34 countries, founded in 1961 to stimulate economic progress and world trade. - The BRICS members (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) are all developing or newlv industrialized countries, but they are distinguished by their large, fast-growing economies and significant influence on regional and global affairs. Excerpt The Future of Water Requires a Sustainable Path (http://growingblue.com/) To be able to adequately feed and support the world’s growing population, our global economy needs to continue to grow. Water is critical to future growth. But it can also become the major limiting factor to growth. For instance, businesses in water-scarce areas are already at risk, and so investors are increasingly taking water supply into consideration during their decision-making processes. Given today’s approach to water management, there is only so much growth that can be sustained. Gains in efficiency and productivity in water management and utilization can reduce these risks and enable higher levels of sustainable growth, but how much higher? How far-reaching do those gains have to be? The answers lie in examining current demand and supply pressures and looking at trends within each. Demand pressures include population growth and an increase in water-intensive diets as a portion of the population moves into increasingly higher water-consumption behaviors. Demand pressures also include growing urban, domestic and industrial water usage. Climate change plays a role by creating additional water demand for agriculture and for reservoir replenishment. In nearly every one of these categories, trends are moving in the exact opposite direction necessary to sustain future growth. Taken together, these trends create “water stress.“ And the resulting ecosystem pressures along with economic and political conflict only exacerbate that stress. Marks will be awarded for content relevance, content sufficiency, organization and language quality. Failure to follow the above instructions may result in a loss of marks.