英语听力：自然百科 圣河之旅 Yangtze 长江—20（在线收听）

It generates vast amounts of hydroelectricity, equivalent of more than half a dozen nuclear power stations. It's longer than 25 football pitches and higher than a 40-story building. Since the 1950s, the Chinese have built more than 22,000 large dams, but this is by far the largest. The government here says it's an engineering miracle. Critics say it's unstable and unprecedented environmental disaster. Mao Zedong, the founder of Communist China, championed the dam, partly because deadly floods here regularly claimed tens of thousands of lives, and partly because he wanted to prove to the Chinese people that he had the right to rule.-In China, there's something called Mandate of Heaven, and this is the idea for centuries that Chinese leaders' role with the acceptance and Mandate of Heaven's, of the gods, of spirit god of ancestors. And any threat to that mandate, any challenge to that mandate can come from inside an earthquake or a flood, because it suggests that the spirit will be somehow unhappy with the leaders in the real physical world.