英语听力：自然百科 神奇水世界 Water-15
时间：2014-05-20 07:36:23
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（单词翻译）
They could not lose. Resistance movements started. They would take over places like this and opened the sluice1 gate allowing the water to pour back down into Owens Valley. Irregularly they dynamited2 the aqueduct. But the city rebuilt it and the game of cat and mouse continued for three more dynamite-filled years. Eventually the place calmed down with a shoot-to-kill policy in the rebellion reservoir. The city had won.
Today the Los Angeles Aqueduct is just part of a giant network of pipes and aqueducts all serving one of the world great cities.
But back in the Owens Valley, the lake is all but vanished and the river is barely a
trickle3. The story of Owens Valley is not an
isolated4 case. Today there are conflicts over water taking place all around the world.
Israel, the Palestanian, Serian, Jordan dispute access to River Jordan.
Egypt, Sudan and Ethiopia quarrel over the waters of the Nile.
On the Indus River, Indian and Pakistanian are in conflict over dams built in the river's
tributaries5. And these are only some more well known examples.
Ten thousand years ago, we lived at the whelm of the unpredictable water circle. Since then we have harnessed the power of rivers to advance our civilizations. We have extracted ground water from depths of the most unlikely places. and we have learned to redirect and store water on a massive scale. Today we have
unprecedented6 power over the planet's water.
But one thing hasn't changed: There are still only a finite amount of water on earth. It seems to me that water is the Achilles'heel of our modern civilization. It's the one resource more than another with the protential to limit our ambitions. The foudermental limits of the water circle are still there. But the lesson of history is that the most successful civilizations learn to adapt to those limits.
So the problem is more with us. And that
prospect7 may find you gloomy or like me more optimistic, but either way, at least the future is in our hand.
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