剑桥雅思4 test 1-test 4 阅读文章和翻译

在街头打工的儿童大都从事一些非技术性的重体力劳动，而且劳动时间很长，比如擦鞋、搬运货物、看车、洗车以及非正规贸易。有的儿童也可能通过乞讨或者盗窃等非法手段获取收入。与此同时，有的孩子非常自豪于自己可以养活自己和家人，有的孩子也非常喜爱他们的工作。很多孩子选择经商是因为这可以使他们获得某种程度的独立。经商比任何形式的工作受到的剥削都少，而且经商非常灵活，使得他们可以有时间参与到其它的活动中去，比如教育和家务。

街头经商互助计划

S.K.I.与拉美、非洲和印度的伙伴组织一起为流浪儿童创造了很多创新性的赚钱机会。

S.K.I.单车送货服务始于苏丹。参与者可以获得一辆自行车，他们可以用它来送包裹或者信件，而自行车的费用会从他们的收入中逐步扣除。印度的B市也实施了类似的计划。

?另一个成功的项目，擦鞋合作社，是与多米尼加共和国的Y.W.C.A.组织合作进行的。在该项目中，参与者可以得到一些钱用来购买擦鞋箱。他们也可以获得一个安全的地方用来保存他们的工具，并且得到个人储蓄方面的便利。

?赞比亚的青年技能工厂计划是与红十字会和Y.W.C.A.合作进行的。街头青少年可以获得经商方面、生活技能方面的培训和贷款，以便开始他们自己的小买卖。 经验教训

在S.K.I.和合作组织创立的项目中我们得到了以下经验教训。

?并非每个人都适合经商，对于街头青少年也是如此。比较理想的状态是，潜在参与者参加过类似项目半年以上，并且相互已经建立起了信任。

?参与者的介入对于相关项目的开展是至关重要的。当孩子在决策上扮演重要角色的时候，他们更有可能遵守和实施这些决策。

?关键的一点是，所有的贷款都应该与培训项目挂钩，这些培训项目包括基本经商技能培训和生存技能培训。

?把父母或监护人纳入到项目中来会带来很多好处。家访可以使员工有机会了解参与者住在何处，也可以对每个人的情况有更多的了解。

?小额贷款在开始阶段只能用来购买固定资产（自行车，擦鞋箱等）和建立市场摊位所需的建筑材料。随着经商者获得经验，经商活动可以逐步扩展，也可以考虑增加贷款额度。S.K.I.的贷款额度大体介于30-100美元之间。

?所有S.K.I.项目都收取贷款利息，主要是为了让经商者适应“借款付息”的理念。总的来说，利率都很低（低于银行利率）。 结论

贫穷的年轻人在寻找机会满足自身的经济需求时需要获得一些贷款协助。意识到这一点的重要性是很有必要的。用提供小额贷款的方式支持年轻人的经商梦想和抱负可以有效的帮助他们改变自己的生活。然而，我们认为，贷款必须与其他类型的支持结合起来，包括重要的生活技能培训和经商技能培训。Volcanoes

– earth shattering news

When Mount Pinatubo suddenly erupted on 9 June 1991, the power of volcanoes past and present again hit the headlines

【A】Volcanoes are the ultimate earth-moving machinery. A violent eruption can blow the top few kilometers off a mountain, scatter fine ash practically all over the globe and hurt rock fragments into the stratosphere to darken the skies a continent away. But the classic eruption – cone-shaped mountain, big bang, mushroom cloud and surges of molten lava – is only a tiny part of a global story. Volcanism, the name given to volcanic processes, really has shaped the world. Eruptions have rifted continents, raised mountain chains, constructed islands and shaped the topography of the earth. The entire ocean floor has a basement of volcanic basalt.

Volcanoes have not only made the continents, they are also thought to have made the world’s first stable atmosphere and provided all the water for the oceans, rivers and ice-caps. There are now about 600 active volcanoes. Every year they add two or three cubic kilometers of rock to the continents. Imagine a similar number of volcanoes smoking away for the last 3,500 million years. That is enough rock to explain the continental crust.

What comes out of volcanic craters is mostly gas. More than 90% of this gas is water vapour from the deep earth: enough to explain, over 3,500 million years, the water in the oceans. The rest of the gas is nitrogen, carbon dioxide, sulphur dioxide, methane, ammonia and hydrogen. The quantity of these gases, again multiplied over 3,500 million years, is enough to explain the mass of the world’s atmosphere. We are alive because volcanoes provided the soil, air and water we need.

【B】Geologists consider the earth as having a molten core, surrounded by a semi-molten mantle and a brittle, outer skin. It helps to think of a soft-boiled egg with a runny yolk, a firm but squishy white and a hard shell. If the shell is even slightly cracked during boiling, the white material bubbles out and sets like a tiny mountain chain over the crack – like an archipelago of volcanic islands such as the Hawaiian Islands. But the earth is so much bigger and the mantle below is so much halter.

Even though the mantle rocks are kept solid by overlying pressure, they can still slowly ‘flow’ like thick treacle. The flow, thought to be in the form of convection currents, is powerful enough to fracture the ‘eggshell’ of the crust into plates, and keep them bumping and grinding against each other, or even overlapping, at the rate of a few centimeters a year. These fracture zones, where the collisions occur, are where earthquakes happen. And, very often, volcanoes.

【C】These zones are lines of weakness, or hot spots. Every eruption is different, but put at its simplest, where there are weaknesses, rocks deep in the mantle, heated to 1,350℃, will start to expand and rise. As they do so, the pressure drops, and they expand and become liquid and rise more swiftly.

Sometimes it is slow: vast bubbles of magma – molten rock from the mantle – inch towards the surface, cooling slowly, to show through as granite extrusions (as on Skye, or the Great Whin Sill, the lava dyke squeezed out like toothpaste that carries part of Hadrian’s Wall in northern England).

Sometimes – as in Northern Ireland, Wales and the Karoo in South Africa – the magma rose faster, and then flowed out horizontally on to the surface in vast thick sheets. In the Deccan plateau in western India, there are more than two million cubic kilometers of lava, some of it 2,400 meters thick, formed over 500,000 years of slurping eruption.

Sometimes the magma moves very swiftly indeed. It does not have time to cool as it surges upwards. The gases trapped inside the boiling rock expand suddenly, the lava glows with heat, it begins to froth, and it explodes with tremendous force. Then the slightly cooler lava following it begins to flow over the lip of the crater. It happens on Mars, it happened on the moon, it even happens on some of the moons of Jupiter and Uranus. By studying the evidence, vulcanologists can read the force of the great blasts of the past. Is the pumice light and full of holes? The explosion was tremendous. Are the rocks heavy, with huge crystalline basalt shapes, like the Giant’s Causeway in Northern Ireland? It was a slow, gentle eruption.

The biggest eruption are deep on the mid-ocean floor, where new lava is forcing the continents apart and widening the Atlantic by perhaps five centimeters a year. Look at maps of volcanoes, earthquakes and island chains like the Philippines and Japan, and you can see the rough outlines of what are called tectonic plates – the plates which make up the earth’s crust and mantle. The most dramatic of these is the Pacific ‘ring of fire’ where there have the most violent explosions – Mount Pinatubo near Manila, Mount St Helen’s in the Rockies and El Chichón in Mexico about a decade ago, not to mention world-shaking blasts like Krakatoa in the Sunda Straits in 1883.

【D】 But volcanoes are not very predictable. That is because geological time is not like human time. During quiet periods, volcanoes cap themselves with their own lava by forming a powerful cone from the molten rocks slopping over the rim of the crater; later the lava cools slowly into a huge, hard, stable plug which blocks any further eruption until the

pressure below becomes irresistible. In the case of Mount Pinatubo, this took 600 years.

Then, sometimes, with only a small warning, the mountain blows its top. It did this at Mont Pelée in Martinique at 7.49 a.m. on 8 May, 1902. Of a town of 28,000, only two people survived. In 1815, a sudden blast removed the top 1,280 meters of Mount Tambora in Indonesia. The eruption was so fierce that dust thrown into the stratosphere darkened the skies, canceling the following summer in Europe and North America. Thousands starved as the harvest failed, after snow in June and frosts in August. Volcanoes are potentially world news, especially the quiet ones.火山---撕裂地球的消息

1991年6月9日MP火山突然爆发的时候，火山在过去和现在的威力再一次上了头条

A．火山是移动的地层体系的终极体现。强烈的火山喷发可以把几千米的山顶喷开，把灰尘颗粒抛向世界各地，把碎石抛向平流层，导致另一个大陆的天空一片黑暗。

但是比较典型的喷发—锥形山体，一声轰响，蘑菇云以及熔融岩浆的涌出—只是火山喷发的冰山一角。火山作用（我们对火山活动过程的命名）塑造了整个世界。火山喷发撕裂了大陆，抬高了山脉，筑起了岛屿并且形成了各种地貌。整个海底板块都是火山喷发形成的玄武岩。

火山不仅创造了大陆，也创造了世界上最初的稳定大气层，并且为海洋、河流和冰川提供了水源。现在世界大约有600座活火山。每年这些火山都会将地壳的岩石层增加两至三立方公里。正是这样的速度一直持续了35亿年。这足以用来解释地壳的形成。

火山口喷发出的主要是气体。这些气体的90%是来自地球深处的水汽，35亿年的水汽积累足以用来解释海洋的形成。剩下的气体是氮气、二氧化碳等气体。这些气体经过35亿年的积累，足以解释大气层的形成。我们能活着，正是因为火山提供了我们需要的土壤，空气和水。

B．地质学家认为，地球有一个处于熔融状态的内核，内核周围包裹着半熔融状态的地幔和一层脆弱的外壳。就好像一个煮熟一半的鸡蛋一样，蛋黄流淌着，蛋清坚实而粘稠，蛋壳很硬。如果在煮蛋过程中蛋壳出现了哪怕一点点裂缝，白色的蛋清都会冒出来并且在裂缝周围像山脉一样固定下来，夏威夷群岛那样的火山群岛就是这样形成的。但是地球要大的多，而地下的地幔也要热的多。

即便地幔层被来自上方的压力保持在固体状态，地幔中的物质仍然可以像蜜糖一样流动。这种流动被认为是以对流形式发生的，它的力量足以使地壳这个“蛋壳”破裂成板块，并且以每年几厘米的速度使板块间互相碰撞，摩擦甚至重叠。这些发生碰撞的破碎区域就是发生地震的地点，也经常是火山喷发的地点。

C．这些区域是脆地质带，也就是火山喷发的热点地区。每一次喷发都是不同的，但是简而言之，有脆地质带的地方，地幔深处的那些温度高达1350摄氏度的岩石就会开始膨胀并且上升。随之而来的是压力的降低，导致地幔物质进一步膨胀，变成液体并且更快速的上升。