7. Переведите следующие тексты. Текст 1

The Role of the UN

The UN today is both more and less than its founders antici­pated. It is less because, from the close of World War II to the end of the 1980s, the rivalry between the United States and the USSR exposed the weakness of great-power unanimity in matters of peace and security. It is more because the rapid breakup of colonial em­pires from the 1940s to the 1970s created a void in the structure of international relations that the UN, in many areas, was able to fill.

Even during the period of superpower rivalry, the UN helped ease East-West tensions. Through its peacekeeping operations, for example, it was able to insulate certain areas of tension from direct great-power intervention. The UN also established several commit­tees on disarmament and was involved in negotiating treaties to ban nuclear weapons in outer space and the development of biological weapons. The International Atomic Energy Agency has helped to control the proliferation of nuclear weapons by inspecting nuclear installations to monitor their use. Major arms-control measures, however, such as the Partial Test Ban Treaty (1963), the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (1968), the Strategic Arms Limitation talks (SALT) of 1972 and 1979, and the Strategic Arms Reduction treaties (START) of 1991 and 1993 were achieved through direct negotiations between the super powers.

Beyond providing peacekeeping forces, the UN has played a wider role in the transition to statehood in a few critical areas. It has been a major forum through which newly independent states have begun to participate in international relations, giving them op­portunities to represent their interests outside their immediate re­gions, to join coalitions of nations with similar interests, and to es­cape the limited relationships of their earlier colonial connections. One problem facing the UN today is the feeling in some Western nations that it has become an instrument of the developing coun­tries and thus is no longer a viable forum for fruitful negotiations.

The United Nations is not a world government; rather, it is a very flexible instrument through which nations can cooperate to solve their mutual problems. Whether they do cooperate and use the UN creatively depends on how both their governments and their peoples view relations with others and how they envision their place in the future of humankind.

Текст 2

Ethanol and Water

Officials in Tampa, Florida, got a surprise recently when a local firm building the state's first ethanol-production factory put in a request for 400,000 gallons (1.5m litres) a day of city water. The request by Envirofuels would make the facility one of the city's top ten water consumers overnight, and the company plans to double its size. Florida is suffering from a prolonged drought. Rivers and lakes are at record lows and residents wonder where the extra water will come from.

They are not alone. A backlash against the federally financed bio-fuels boom is growing around the country, and "water could be the Achilles heel" of ethanol, said a report by the Minneapolis-based Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy.

The number of ethanol factories has almost tripled in the past eight years from 50 to about 140. A further 60 or so are under con­struction. In 2007 President George Bush signed legislation requir­ing a fivefold increase in biofuels production, to 36 billion gallons by 2022.

This is controversial for several reasons. There are doubts about how green ethanol really is (some say the production process uses almost as much energy as it produces). Some argue that using farm­land for ethanol pushes up food prices internationally (world wheat prices rose 25 per cent this week alone, perhaps as a side-effect of America's ethanol programme). But one of the least-known but big­gest worries is ethanol's extravagant use of water.

A typical ethanol factory producing 50m gallons of biofuels a year needs about 500 gallons of water a minute. Most of that goes into the boiling and cooling process, which is similar to making beer. Some water is lost through evaporation in the cooling tower and in waste discharge.

The good news is that ethanol plants are becoming more effi­cient. They now use about half as much water per gallon of ethanol as they did a decade ago. New technology might be able to halve the amount of water again, says Mike Fatigati, vice president of Delta-T Corp, a Virginia company which has designed a system that does not discharge any waste water. But others are sceptical. Per­haps ethanol just isn't as bio-friendly as it looks.