Passage Two If you live in a city in North America or Europe, you have probably never thought much about water. Whenever you need some, you turn on the tap and there it is. Millions of people in other parts of the world are not so lucky. They have trouble getting enough clean water for their basic needs. This situation may soon become common all around the world, scientists believe. In fact, they say that the lack of clean water may be one of the biggest issues in the twenty-first century. The reasons for this are clear. On the one hand. people are using more water than ever before. Over the last fifty years, the population of the world has more than doubled. On the other hand, many sources of surface water such as rivers, lakes, and streams are too polluted and unhealthy for use as drinking water. This has forced more and more people to drill wells so they can get water form underground. There are enormous amounts of water deep underground in lakes called aquifers. Until recently, scientists believed this underground water was safe from pollution. Then, in the 1980s. people in the United States began to find chemicals in their well water, and scientists took a closer look at what was happening. Weldon Spring, Missouri, for example, was the site of a bomb factory during World War Ⅱ. The factory was destroyed after the war. but poisonous chemicals remained on the ground. Very slowly, these chemicals dripped down through the ground and into the aquifer. Once they did, however, the water form that aquifer was no longer drinkable. It probably never will be drinkable again, Underground water is not renewed regularly by the rain, like lake or river water. Thus, if a harmful chemical gets into an aquifer, it will stay there for a very long time. Furthermore, it is nearly imp6ssible to remove all the water in an aquifer and clean out the pollutants. Industrial sites like Weldon Spring are one cause of underground water pollution. There are thousands of such sites in the United States alone, and many others around the world. Underground water pollution is also caused by modern farming methods, which require the use of large amounts of chemicals in the fields. And finally, yet another important cause of underground water pollution is waste. That includes solid waste thrown away in dumps and landfills, and also untreated human and animal waste. The situation is indeed very serious. Fortunately, there are many aquifers and they are very large. Only a small number have been seriously damaged so far. But if the world does not want to go thirsty in the near future, further pollution must be prevented. Around the world, governments must make real changes in industry, agriculture, and waste disposal. This passage is mainly about ______.
Section BPassage One Much of the language used to describe monetary policy, such as "steering the economy to a soft landing" or "a touch on the brakes", makes it sound like a precise science. Nothing could be further from the truth. The link between interest rates and inflation is uncertain. And there are long, variable lags before policy changes have any effect on the economy. Given all these disadvantages, central bankers seem to have had much to boast of about late. Average inflation in the big seven industrial economies fell to a mere 2.3% last year, close to Its lowest level in 30 years, before rising slightly to 2.5% this July. This is a long way below the double-digit rates which many countries experienced in the 1970s and early 1980s. It is also less than most forecasters had predicted. In late 1994 the panel of economists which The Economist polls each month said that America’s inflation rate would average 3.5 % in 1995. In fact, it fell to 2.6% in August, and is expected to average only about 3% for the year as a whole. In Britain and Japan inflation is running half a percentage below the rate predicted at the end of the last year. This is no flash in the pan; over the past couple of years, inflation has been consistently lower than expected in Britain and America. Economists have been particularly surprised by favorable inflation figures in Britain and the United States, since conventional measures suggest that both economies, esp. America’s, have little productive slack. America’s capacity utilization, for example, hit historically high levels earlier this year, and its jobless rate has fallen below most Why has inflation proved so wild7 The most thrilling explanation is, unfortunately a little defective. Some economists argue that powerful structural changes in the world have up-ended the old economic models that were based upon the historical link between growth and inflation. By saying "This is no flash in the pan" (Paragraph 3, Line 6), the author implies that