96年 - 96 地方政府特種考試_三等_新聞（選試英文）：新聞英文#37534

科目：新聞英文 | 年份：96年 | 選擇題數：0 | 申論題數：4

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一、 WASHINGTON (AP) — Remember biology class where you learned that children inherit one copy of a gene from mom and a second from dad? There's a twist: Some of those genes arrive switched off, so there is no backup if the other copy goes bad, making you more vulnerable to disorders from obesity to cancer.                Duke University scientists now have identified these "silenced genes," creating the first map of this unique group of about 200 genes believed to play a profound role in people's health.
        More intriguing, the work marks an important step in studying how our environment — food, stress, pollution — interacts with genes to help determine why some people get sick and others do not.
二、 U.S. Senator Trent Lott’s sudden decision to retire from public office has Washington’s lobbying industry salivating at the prospect that the Mississippi lawmaker may join the millionaire’s row on K Street. That’s where more and more congressional alumni have been hanging their backslapper’s shingle to lobby old buddies. Mr. Lott’s planned departure — conveniently ahead of the new two-year wait before a retired senator can lobby — is shedding light on Capitol Hill’s quasi-aristocracy of ex-incumbents who never return home and stay close by to work politics from its more lucrative shadow world. 
        By last count, the lobbying ranks include 37 former senators and 158 graduates of the House, with fresh enlistments expected from the dozens of current members planning to quit before the expected watershed election next year. 
       It’s important to shine a light on lobbying, more than to belabor this inevitable calling. The Senate, in fact, voted to require more lobbyist disclosure this year and to double its one-year moratorium before alumni can lobby.
三、 A decade ago, James A. Thomson was the first to isolate human embryonic stem cells. Last week, he announced one of the great scientific breakthroughs since the discovery of DNA: an embryo-free way to produce genetically matched stem cells.
        Even a scientist who cares not a whit about the morality of embryo destruction will adopt this technique because it is so simple and powerful. 
       The embryonic stem cell debate is over. This allows a bit of reflection on the storm that has raged ever since the August 2001 announcement of President Bush's stem cell policy. The verdict is clear: Rarely has a president — so vilified for a moral stance — been so thoroughly vindicated.
四、 Hydrocarbon fuels (chiefly coal, oil and natural gas) were first used to create energy at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, as mankind began to run short of traditional fuels like wood and whale oil. The new fuels contained more latent energy than any previously discovered, but they also came with a flaw: the carbon emissions that are an unavoidable by-product of their combustion. 
        These gases build up in the planet’s atmosphere, where they act like the panes of glass on a greenhouse, allowing the sun’s warmth in but not back out. As heat that would ordinarily radiate off into space is instead reflected once again toward the planet’s surface, temperatures begin to rise and the globe begins to warm. 
         Two of the sharpest spears created by global warming — flooding and drought — account for more than half the world’s deaths from natural disaster. Nations whose land lies close to sea level, like the Netherlands, Bangladesh and Indonesia, are at great risk, as are locations where natural barriers against water have been degraded by man. Scientists believe that Hurricane Katrina would have packed a far less devastating punch if the wetlands that buffer New Orleans from the Gulf of Mexico had not been removed by imprudent levee-building and oil and gas development.