Английский язык. Устный последовательный перевод. Учебное пособие

УДК 81.111 (075.8) ББК 81.2 Англ — 923

С 90

Учебно-методическое пособие издается по решению Редакционноиздательского совета Санкт-Петербургского культурологического общества.

Рецензенты: старший преподаватель

Вершинина Т. Г.;

кандидат филологических наук, доцент

А. В. Демина

Суртаева А. В.

C 90 Английский язык. Устный последовательный перевод. Уч. - метод пособие. / А. В. Суртаева;— СПб.: Изд-во «СПбКО», 2009. — 92 с.

ISBN 978-5-903983-155

Учебно-методическое пособие предназначено для студентов лингвистических отделений гуманитарных вузов.Цель учебно-методического пособия заключается в формировании и развитии навыков устного перевода, усвоении лексики по основным разделам программы обучения.

УДК 81.111 (075.8) ББК 81.2 Англ — 923

ISBN 978-5-903983-155

©Суртаева А. В., 2009

©ООО «Издательство СПбКО», 2009

СОДЕРЖАНИЕ

UNIT 1. Environmental problems

Task 1. Background reading

Read the text and give Russian equivalents to the underlined

expressions

The Kyoto Protocol

The Kyoto Protocol is an international agreement, negotiated in December 1997, by which industrialized nations have committed to making substantial reductions in their emissions of greenhouse gases by 2012. More than 160 countries have committed to the agreement.

The first observation that human activities contribute to the greenhouse effect was made one hundred years ago by а Swedish scientist Svante Arrhenius. Since the late 1950s, measurements made at one of the Observatories in Hawaii have recorded an increase in carbon dioxide concentrations within the atmosphere.

Efforts to obtain international agreement on human contributions to global greenhouse gases began many decades ago. In 1979, the World Meteorological Office, the United Nations Environment Programme, and the International Council for Science held the first World Climate Conference in Geneva to address the question of the potential role of human sources of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases in inducing global climate changes. In 1988, the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel of Climate Change (IPCC) established three scientific working groups to study the problem. Based on their information, the IPCC has concluded that there is evidence that emissions from human sources are enhancing the greenhouse effect.

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In response to the first report by the IPCC in 1990, the United Nations General Assembly launched a negotiating process to establish an agreement among industrialized nations to act to reduce their emissions of greenhouse gases. In 1992, the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change was adopted. The nations who signed the convention agreed to develop national measures of greenhouse gas emissions, establish national programs to reduce emissions, and mitigate climate change. The Convention also required that the developed countries and countries with economies in transition, reduce their greenhouse gas emissions to their 1990 levels by the end of 2000, although this was expressed as a voluntary rather than a binding commitment. The convention came into force in 1994 after 50 countries ratified the agreement; by 2003, 190 nations, including the United States joined the convention.

During the 1990s, concerns grew that industrialized nations would not reach the emissions targets agreed upon in the 1992 Climate Change Framework; therefore, members of the Kyoto Protocol began to develop a new agreement that included legally binding, rather than voluntary, commitments. Negotiations for this new agreement began in 1995, culminating in a session held in Kyoto, Japan in December 1997.

There were significant disagreements among the parties at Kyoto and a final agreement was reached only on the last day. The most serious disagreement was that a number of large developing nations, including China and India, refused to be included in making binding commitments to reduce emissions. Other issues included planting forests and other greenhouse gas and carbon-removal methods rather than on reducing emissions in order to meet their targets.

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An agreement was finally reached, committing industrialized countries to legally binding reductions in greenhouse emissions between 2008 and 2012. The agreement, called the Kyoto Protocol, went into effect on February 16, 2005, ninety days after Russian ratification and ten years after initial negotiations began. It also includes provisions to permit emissions among nations and clean development mechanisms, which encourages industrialized nations to transfer technology to developing countries that would reduce emissions.

Although the United States signed the Kyoto Protocol, the treaty has not been ratified by the U.S. Senate. Ratifying the Kyoto Protocol would require the U.S. to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 7 percent below its 1990 levels by 2012. In July 1999, the US Senators Byrd and Hagel stated that the Senate would not ratify the Protocol unless rapidly developing countries such as China were included in its requirements to reduce greenhouse gases. The Clinton Administration announced it would not send the treaty to the Senate for ratification.

Controversy over the Kyoto Protocol continued to erupt in the Hague, Netherlands in November 2000. Discussion was supposed to center around issues left unresolved at Kyoto, however the talks collapsed when the U.S. and European countries disagreed over the amount of credits that countries could receive from emissions.

The current Bush Administration has also rejected the Kyoto Protocol as being too costly for the U.S. economy, and has proposed its own climate change initiative which calls for voluntary reductions in emissions, tax credits for emissions reductions, and increased research and development for new energy technologies. Many individual states

– primarily in the Northeast and the West – have also begun to adopt their own climate change policies.

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•In 1986, a much worse disaster struck Russia's Chernobyl nuclear power plant. In this incident, a large amount of radiation escaped from the reactor. Hundreds of thousands of people were exposed to the radiation. Several dozens died within a few days. In the years to come, thousands more may die of cancersinducedbytheradiation.

•Nuclear reactors also have waste disposal problems. Reactors produce nuclear waste products which emit dangerous radiation. Because they could kill people who touch them, they cannot be thrown away like ordinary garbage. Currently, many nuclear wastes are stored inspecialcoolingpoolsatthenuclearreactors.

•The United States plans to move its nuclear waste to a remote undergrounddumpbytheyear2010.

•In 1957, at a dump site in Russia's Ural Mountains, several hundred miles from Moscow, buried nuclear wastes mysteriously exploded,killingdozensofpeople.

•Nuclearreactorsonlylastforaboutfortytofiftyyears.

TheFuture ofNuclearEnergy

Somepeoplethinkthatnuclearenergyisheretostayandwemust learn to live with it. Others say that we should get rid of all nuclear weaponsandpowerplants.Bothsideshavetheircasesasthereareadvantages and disadvantages to nuclear energy. Still others have opin-

ionsthatfallsomewhereinbetween.

Task 3.  Consecutive interpreting skills

Answer the questions:

Whatdoyouknowaboutnuclearpower?Whatkindofpowerisit? WhatistheIAEA?

Isnuclearpowersafefortheecology?

Whataretheadvantagesofusingnuclearpower?thedisadvantages?

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