Добавил:
ivanov666
Опубликованный материал нарушает ваши авторские права? Сообщите нам.
Вуз:
Предмет:
Файл:English of Global Economics. Учебное пособие
.pdf
140
corporate headquarters from southern California to Las Colinas.
It cited the proximity of DFW as a “major factor” in its decision.
Dallas is far from an isolated example of airport-driven
development. When Washington Dulles International Airport opened
in 1962 in rural Virginia, it was considered a white elephant; but it
has spawned a high-tech corridor and now sits in the fastest-growing
county in the United States. Denver’s ten-year-old international
airport, about 40 miles out of town, is expected to be the centre
of a community of 500,000 people by 2025 — almost as many
people as live in Denver itself. It recently branded its surrounding
acreage as the “Aeropolitan”, as well as a marketing pitch to
businesses.
Working in the shadow of an airport has its problems. There
are height restrictions on buildings, and residents and office
workers have to put up with the noise and traffic that airports
generate. But, despite those drawbacks, more and more businesses
feel the need to be near a runway
runway взл¸тно-посадочная полоса; aerotropolis «аэротрополия» (ср.:
metropolis); to spawn создавать; proximity близость; aeropolitan относящийся к крупному аэропорту (ср.: metropolitan); marketing pitch to bu-
sinesses постоянное торговое место для фирм.
6
.
Unit Four
Ex. 10. Read the following text and speak on: (a) the traffic problems
in American fast-growing cities; (b) possible ways out of this
situation; (c) traffic problems the provinces may face in many other
countries.
The western half of America contains most of its fastest-growing
cities; but the sprawl also causes problems. One is resentment
against oversized McMansions. But the main bugbear for most
people is traffic. Can cities build around the car find a better way
to organize themselves? Consider the very different approaches
of two of the new West’s main entrep
^ts — Phoenix and Denver.
Both are growing at a staggering rate. Since 1960 the population
of the greater Phoenix area has grown from 664,000 to 3.6 million,
an average of 47% in each decade. The population of the Denver
metropolitan area has risen to 2.6 million, an increase of over
8% since 2000. Inevitably, that means snarled rush-hour traffic.
The number-crunchers at the Texas Transportation Institute
reckon that in 2003 the average commuter on Denver’s roads
suffered congestion delays of 51 hours, the 13th-worst in the
TRANSPORT AND COMMUNICATIONS
country. In Phoenix the hold-ups and traffic crawls were almost
as bad: 49 hours in 2003, or 18th-worst.
As their rankings imply, Denver and Phoenix still do relatively
well compared with many big cities on the east coast or in chaotic
California. But that does not stop their residents, many of whom
left places like Los Angeles-Long Beach or San Francisco-Oakland,
complaining about it.
Denver’s solution is the bolder. New roads, such as the 47-mile
(76 km) E-470 tollway, which opened in 2003 along the eastern
edge of the Denver region, will form a beltway — 75% complete —
to relieve congestion in the centre. By the end of next year,
the T-Rex scheme, budgeted at $1.7 billion, will have added extra
lanes along the 1—25 and 1—225 freeways.
But the main focus is light rail. T-Rex will stretch 19 miles of
new double-track light rail from the Denver city centre to the
metro region’s south-eastern border. By 2016, a $4.7 billion
project known as FasTracks will add another 119 miles of light
and commuter rail and some 18 miles of rapid transit by bus.
These new lines will curl out from Denver’s Union Station like
the legs of an octopus, linking up with existing bus services and
giving commuters a mass transit alternative to the clogged lanes
of the 1—25 or US-36.
FasTracks, say its boosters, will be the biggest “build out” of
a mass transit system since Washington, DC, began its Metro
system in 1976. The aim of FasTracks is not just to ease traffic
congestion, but to change the shape of the city. Each station will
be the centre of various commercial and residential developments;
Union Station will, in the ghastly jargon of urban planning,
become a multi-modal hub for everything from buses and heavy
rail to the “downtown circulator” that shuttles passengers around
the tourist-friendly 16th Street Mall. Instead of simply sprawling
ever farther across the mile-high plains, Denver would bring its
population closer together.
Pie in the planning sky? Sceptics foresee parking problems at
the stations. They also worry that car drivers will ignore light rail
(as in Los Angeles) and that the hoped-for offices, hotels and
apartments along the FasTracks routes just won’t happen. All the
same, 58% of metro Denver’s voters agreed to back FasTracks
with a 0.4 cent sales tax.
For Denver, this is something of a return to its past. Founded
in the 19th-century mining boom, it still has roots in the age of
141
142
rail: witness Union Station and the passenger and freight trains
that roll in and out of the city. By contrast, Phoenix lost its
passenger train service in 1996, making it possibly the world’s
largest urban centre without a rail connection for residents. It is
a car city — and seems keen to remain so.
In theory, a determined Phoenician could get just about
anywhere in the area by public transport. In practice, they made
only 12.7 bus trips each in 2002, compared with 37.1 transit trips
for the average Denverite (and 28.4 for the average American).
Phoenix’s voters, by approving a 20-year extension for the half-cent
sales tax devoted to transport, are also investing in a light-rail
system — but just 20 miles of it, to be laid by the end of 2008,
plus another 38 to be finished by 2026.
By contrast, the city’s main strategy is to lay tarmac. It plans
to add 1,328 new lane-miles to its 2,000 mile freeway system over
the next 20 years, after adding 982 new lane-miles over the past
two decades.
Who is taking the right course? At first sight, Phoenix would
seem to have public sentiment on its side. Given a choice, most
Americans, especially those in the west, prefer the car, with its
promise of comfort, f lexibility and freedom. Denver, though
smaller than Phoenix, also has the greater problem to solve:
longer rush-hours, more congestion and more wasted time and
fuel per traveller. According to the Texas Transportation Institute,
its congestion cost per peak-time traveller in Denver was $865
in 2003, compared with $831 in Phoenix.
On the other hand, the centre of Denver is already a more
vibrant place than Phoenix — and that gulf is likely to grow.
Officials in Phoenix talk bravely of new construction along
Central Avenue, which has seen no new high-rise office building
since 1991, and of linking the downtown eastward to the university
quarter in Tempe. But it looks half-hearted.
Denver’s dreams may come to nothing. But Phoenix risks
becoming a second Los Angeles — another car-choked city that
could never really bring itself to believe in public transport
Unit Four
7
.
bugbear пугало; entropôts [!ɔntrəpou] склад (для транзитных грузов);
number-cruncher сверхбыстродействующий вычислительный комплекс;
beltway кольцевая автодорога; light rail «л¸гкая» железная дорога,
«л¸гкое» наземное метро;
сторонник; multi-modal hub центр смешанного сообщения, транспорт-
óctopus спрут, осьминог; booster горячий
TRANSPORT AND COMMUNICATIONS
143
íûé óçåë; circulator транспорт, курсирующий по круговому маршру
ту; pie in the sky журавль в небе; tarmac гудронированное (гудрон
ное) шоссе.
Ex. 11. Read and discuss the following text. Try to remember similar
events which occurred in other countries.
Farmers in the mid-west are having a rotten year. First, a
drought shrunk corn ears and hurt alfalfa, though a few droplets
of August rain helped salvage soyabeans. Then came the hurricanes.
No sooner were New Orleans’s docks back up after Katrina than
Rita tore through the Gulf, battering more barges and closing
coastal waterways again.
Ports across the region are limping back to life, but slowly.
The Port of New Orleans, one of America’s busiest, is still
operating at about 30% of its normal capacity, as measured by
ship arrivals. The port at Lake Charles, a Louisiana town that is
America’s biggest export centre for bagged rice, finally got off
generator power last week. Wheat has been slow getting out of
Beaumont, a Texas port hard-hit by Rita.
Upriver, the problem is a lack of barges, which has caused
transport costs to soar. Barges are simply not available north of
St Louis. There, prices for soyabeans have dropped about $1.80,
or 27%, a bushel and corn about 70 cents (33%) a bushel since
early August.
The awful weather has exposed the other infrastructure problems
plaguing the Mississippi. America relies on its waterways to move
everything from oil and coal to chemicals and salt. Some 60%
of all grain exports go down the Mississippi. But the drought,
now several years old, has caused barges to scrape the bottom.
Missouri’s two senators wrote to the president last month to
request the Army Corps of Engineers, which handles these things,
to “release supplemental f lows” from the Missouri river into the
Mississippi. They said that barges were 20% lighter and traveling
25% slower than usual.
There is a third, even thornier matter: the run-down locks on
the upper Mississippi. Many of these date back to the New Deal.
They are too short for today’s massive tows, which consist of about
15 barges bound together (30 on the lock-less lower Mississippi).
The barges must be broken up to get through. This costs time
and money. Sometimes the locks break.
-
-
144
Before Katrina struck, the House of Representatives voted
overwhelmingly to authorise $1.8 billion to be spent to create
seven new locks, which will be double the size of the old ones.
Another $235 million would upgrade more upstream locks. More
still would be spent on river conservation. The Water Resources
Development Act is now in the Senate. Its sponsor, the senior
senator from Missouri, says that more items may be added in
response to Katrina.
All told, this would be one of America’s most expensive river
projects. Greens say it is a boondoggle that would wrongly prop
up a dying industry. Water quality would suffer, wildlife would
lose more habitat and underwater plants would be smothered —
all for saving a few dozen hours on a trip that takes a couple of
weeks. And agricultural shipping down the Mississippi has been
falling anyway: volume through the Port of South Louisiana fell
by one-fifth between 1999 and 2004.
Meanwhile, in the wake of Katrina, many mid-westerners are
worrying once again about the mighty river that sustains them.
Even in the current drought, the waters that are now squeezed
by sandbars could spill over their banks next spring. A certain
degree of f looding is expected; but many locals remember the
Great Flood of 1993, when people who lived as much as ten
miles from the river found it f lowing through their kitchens.
The Corps of Engineers recently announced that the 11 miles of
flood wall protecting St Louis are still damaged. They may not
be able to withstand another f lood as high as that of 1993.
And for the really spooked there is an even bigger worry.
During the winter of 1811—1812 the New Madrid fault zone in
southern Missouri experienced a series of earthquakes more
powerful than any in California. The shock made church bells
ring in Virginia and Boston, and the Mississippi river briefly ran
backwards. Back then, of course, the region was barely populated
(by Europeans, at any rate). Today a tremor of similar magnitude
would devastate St Louis, Memphis and everything in between
Unit Four
8
.
alfalfa [l!flfə] люцерна; to batter взламывать, плющить (металл);
barge баржа; to plague [pleig] мучить, докучать; lock øëþç; tow [tou]
буксировка; буксирный караван; boondoggle заниматься пустым, бес
смысленным делом; to prop up поддерживать; to smother [!sm
шить, подавить; Corps [k
spooked пугливый, напуганный.
ɔ:, pl kɔ:z] of Engineers инженерные войска;
ðə] çàäó
-
-
TRANSPORT AND COMMUNICATIONS
Ex. 12. Read the following text and try to think of (a) any cases of
piracy in the ocean; (b) reasons for maritime accidents mentioned
in the text or any other accidents, if you know.
There are 40,000 ships plying the oceans, most of them crewed
by the world’s poor, owned by shadowy offshore companies and
flying f lags of convenience. These ships carry almost all the raw
materials and finished products on which our land lives are built.
They embody global capital and trade, and they represent free
enterprise at its freest. Yet they extract a huge price: polluting
shipwrecks; fatal accidents; piracy; and the deadly threat of
maritime terrorism.
Speaking about the dangers inherent in the freedom of the
seas, it is necessary to point out the helplessness of American
officials who believe that a large-scale maritime terrorist attack
currently poses the most serious threat to their national security.
It is quite obvious that the US Coast Guard’s 50,000 employees
are no match for the 60,000 calls made at American ports each
year by ocean-going ships, many of which have crews from troubled
parts of the world who necessarily bypass standard immigration
procedures. These vessels are stacked high with containers whose
contents it is impossible to scan or inspect.
On the high seas the vessels face industrial-scale piracy. Gangs
of organized, armed and ruthless pirates, operating mostly in the
South China Sea (including the waters of Indonesia and the
Philippines), earn a living by hijacking entire ships, killing or
marooning their crews, and changing the vessels’ identity in
mid-ocean by renaming and repainting them while under-way.
The “phantom” ship then enters a port as a legitimate vessel and
sells its stolen cargo before picking up new freight and disappearing
again.
There are many examples of maritime accidents: several thousand
sailors who died during the 1990s alone; the wrecking of the oil
tankers Exxon Valdez and Amoco Cadiz, and the environmental
destruction that followed; the sinking of the ferry Estonia in the
Baltic with the loss of over 850 lives; and, in December 1987,
the modern world’s worst accident at sea, a fire on an overcrowded
Filipino ferry that killed 4,375 people, including 1,000 children.
In India, 183 filthy and dangerous ship-breaking yards employ
thousands of impoverished workers to dismantle around half of
the 700 ships that reach the end of their life each year.
145
146
No wonder that the ocean can descend into such chaos in
practice if the system of f lags of convenience makes tiny Panama
and land-locked Bolivia significant maritime nations, if numerous
unenforceable regulations generated by the United Nations’
International Maritime Organization, based in London, create
certain difficulties in governing the ocean and its users.
Despite such well-intentioned regulations and the wish of the
world to make the ocean a safer place, the anarchic chaos remains.
The outlaw sea — spanning three-quarters of the surface of the
globe — remains the last true wilderness on earth
to ply (the oceans) бороздить (океаны), курсировать, сновать (о судах);
to fly a flag of convenience плавать под чужим флагом; shipwrecks îá
ломки судов; inherent [in!hi
обходить; to stack складывать в штабель; to maroon 1. высаживать на
необитаемом острове 2. покидать, оставлять в безвыходном положе
нии; chaos [kei
Ex. 13. Read the following text and exchange opinions on the future
of telephony. Say whether you share the idea that the internet
really killed the phone business.
əs] õàîñ; anarchic [!nɑ:kik] анархический.
ərənt] присущий, свойственный; to bypass
The term “disruptive technology” is popular, but is widely
misused. It refers not simply to a clever new technology, but
to one that undermines an existing technology — and which
therefore makes life very difficult for the many businesses which
depend on the existing way of doing things. Twenty years ago,
the personal computer was a classic example. It swept aside an
older mainframe-based style of computing, and eventually brought
IBM, one of the world’s mightiest firms at the time, to its knees.
This week has been a coming-out party of sorts for another
disruptive technology, “voice over internet protocol” (VOIP),
which promises to be even more disruptive, and of even greater
benefit to consumers, than personal computers.
VOIP’s leading proponent is Skype, a small firm whose software
allows people to make free calls to other Skype users over the
internet, and very cheap calls to traditional telephones — all of
which spells trouble for incumbent telecoms operators. In September,
eBay, the leading online auction-house, announced that it was
buying Skype for $26 billion, plus an additional $1.5 billion if
Skype hits certain performance targets in coming years.
9
.
Unit Four
-
-
TRANSPORT AND COMMUNICATIONS
This seems a vast sum to pay for a company that has only
$60 million in revenues and has yet to turn a profit. Yet eBay
was not the only company interested in buying Skype. Perhaps
it, rather like some overexcited bidder in one of its own auctions,
has paid too much. The company says it plans to use Skype’s
technology to make it easier for buyers and sellers to communicate,
and to offer new “click to call” advertisements, but many
analysts are sceptical that eBay is the best owner of Skype.
Whatever the merits of the deal, however, the fuss over Skype in
recent weeks has highlighted the significance of VOIP, and the
enormous threat it poses to incumbent telecoms operators.
For the rise of Skype and other VOIP services means nothing
less than the death of the traditional telephone business, established
over a century ago. Skype is merely the most visible manifestation
of a dramatic shift in the telecoms industry, as voice calling
becomes just another data service delivered via high-speed
internet connections. Skype, which has over 54 million users, has
received the most attention, but other firms routing calls partially
or entirely over the internet have also signed up millions of
customers.
147
***
The ability to make free or almost-free calls over a fast internet
connection fatally undermines the existing pricing model for
telephony. “We believe that you should not have to pay for making
phone calls in future, just as you don’t pay to send e-mail”, says
Skype’s founder. That means not just the end of distance and
time-based pricing — it also means the slow death of the
trillion-dollar voice telephony market, as the marginal price of
making phone calls heads inexorably downwards.
VOIP makes possible more than just lower prices, however.
It also means that, provided you have a broadband connection,
you can choose from a number of providers of VOIP telephony
and related add-on services, such as voicemail, conference calling
or video. Many providers allow a VIOP account to be associated
with a traditional telephone number — or with multiple numbers.
So you can associate a San Francisco number, a New York number
and a London number with your computer or VOIP phone —
and then be reached via a local call by anyone in any of those
cities.
148
Furthermore, your phone (or computer) will ring wherever
you are in the world, as soon as it is plugged into the internet.
So you can take your Madrid number with you to Mumbai, or
your San Francisco number to Shanghai. Skype and other VOIP
services, in other words, are leading to lower prices, more choice
and greater f lexibility. It is great news for consumers — but
terrible for telecoms operators. What can they do?
***
As is always the case with a disruptive technology, the incumbents
it threatens are dividing into those who are trying to block the
new technology in the hope that it will simply go away, and
those who are moving to embrace it even though it undermines
their existing businesses. Since VOIP will cause revenue from voice
calls to wither away, the most vulnerable operators are those that
are most dependent on such revenue.
In particular, that means mobile operators, which have been
struggling for years to get their subscribers to spend more on data
services, but are still hugely dependent on voice. Worse, the very
“third generation” (3G) networks that are supposed to provide
future growth for these firms could now undermine them, because
such networks make mobile VOIP possible too. Least vulnerable,
by contrast, are those fixed-line operators that are now building
new neworks based on internet technology, which will enable such
firms to benefit from the greater efficiency and lower cost of
VOIP compared with traditional telephony.
These operators are taking an “if you can’t beat ’em, join
’em” approach and getting into the VOIP business. While their
voice revenues will slowly evaporate, they will then be well placed
to offer fee-based add-on services over their new networks.
Again, this is a common pattern with disruptive technologies:
forward-looking incumbents can end up giving upstart innovators
a run for their money.
It is now no longer a question of whether VOIP will wipe out
traditional telephony, but a question of how quickly it will do
so. People in the industry are already talking about that day,
perhaps only five years away, when telephony will be a free
service offered as part of a bundle of services as an incentive to
buy other things such as broadband access or pay-TV services.
VOIP, in short, is completely reshaping the telecoms landscape.
Unit Four
TRANSPORT AND COMMUNICATIONS
And that is why so many people have been making such a fuss
over Skype — a small company, yes, but one that symbolises
10
a massive shift for a trillion-dollar industry
disruptive разрушительный; mainframe-computer мэйнфрейм, большая
ЭВМ; incumbent должностное лицо; bidder участник торгов (предлага
ющий высокую цену); broadband connection широкополосная связь;
wither away снижаться.
.
Ex. 14. Debate on the following topics. Keep the conversation going in
a round table framework.
1. Transport in world economy.
2. The world’s biggest airlines and their routes (British, American,
Italian, Russian, etc.).
3. Automobile in the life of contemporary (rural, urban) dwellers.
4. City transport and its problems.
5. New projects of transport and communications systems.
6. The basic forms of communications.
7. A telecommunications system.
149
-
Соседние файлы в предмете [НЕСОРТИРОВАННОЕ]