第一部分 英译汉

 

Passage 1

Can we have our fish and eat it, too? An unusual collaboration of marine ecologists and fisheries management scientists says the answer may be yes.

In a research paper published in the journal science, the two groups, long at odds with each other, offer a global assessment of the world’s saltwater fish and their environments. Their conclusions are at once gloomy and upbeat – over-fishing continues to threaten many species, but a combination of steps can turn things around.

Because antagonism between ecologists and fisheries management experts has been intense, many familiar with the study say the most important factor is that it was done at all. They say they hope the study will inspire similar collaborations between scientist whose focus is safely exploiting specific natural resources and those interested mainly in conserving them. “This paper starts to bridge that gap.”

The collaboration began in 2006 when Boris Worm, a marine ecologist at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, and other scientists made an alarming prediction: if current trends continue, by 2048 over-fishing will have destroyed most commercially important populations of saltwater fish.

Ecologists applauded the work. But among fisheries management scientists, reactions ranged from skepticism to fury over what many called an alarmist report. Among the most prominent critics was Ray Hilborn, a professor of aquatic and fishery sciences at the university of Washington in Seattle. Yet the disagreement did not play out in a typical scientific fashion with, as Dr. Hilborn put it, “researchers firing critical papers back and forth.” Instead, he and Dr. worm found themselves debating the issue on National Public Radio.

“We started talking and found more common ground than we had expected,” Dr. Worm said. Dr. Hilborn recalled thinking that Dr. Worm “actually seemed like a reasonable person.” The two decided to work together on the issue.

Because the new paper represents the views of both camps, its conclusions are likely to be influential. Getting a strong statement from those communities that there is more to agree on than to disagree on helps build confidence.

（无参考译文）

Passage 2

When in Australia recently, I visited a eucalyptus forest that was once the scene of an appalling wildfire. Perhaps naively, I had expected to find that many trees had been killed. They hadn’t. They had blackened bark, but were otherwise looking rather well, many of them wreathed in new young leaves. This prompted me to consider fire and the role it plays as a force of nature.

Fossil charcoals tell us that wildfires have been part of life on the earth for as long as there have been plants on land. Fire was here long before such plants as grasses; it predated the first flowers. And without wanting to get mystical about it, fire is, in many respects, a kind of animal, albeit an ethereal one. Like any animal, it consumes oxygen. Like a sheep, it eats plants. Sometimes, it merely nibbles a few leaves; sometimes it kills grown trees. Sometimes it is more deadly and destructive than a swarm of locusts.

The shape-shifting nature of fire makes it hard to study. Some fires are infernally hot; others, relatively cool. Some stay at ground level; others climb trees. Moreover, fire is much more likely to appear in some parts of the world than in others. Satellite images of the earth show that wildfires are rare in, say, Northern Europe, and common in parts of Central Africa and Australia.

Once a fire gets started, many factors contribute to how it will behave. The weather obviously has a huge effect: winds can fan flames, rains can quench them. The lie of the land matters, too: fire runs uphill more readily than it goes down. But another crucial factor is what type of plants the fire has to eat.

It’s common knowledge that plants regularly exposed to fire tend to have features that help them cope with it, such as thick bark, or seeds that only grow after being exposed to intense heat or smoke.

 

（无参考译文）