剑桥雅思真题14Test4阅读Passage3原文译文

以下是小编整理的剑桥雅思14教材中，阅读Test4Passage3原文译文。希望能够作为参考资料，帮助大家练习雅思阅读哟！

Chelsea Rochman, an ecologist at the University of California, Davis, has been trying to answer a dismal question: Is everything terrible, or are things just very, very bad?

加利福尼亚大学戴维斯分校的生态学家 Chelsea Rochman 一直试图回答一个令人沮丧的问题：一切都很糟糕了吗，或者仅仅是情况变得很差？

Rochman is a member of the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis marine-debris working group, a collection of scientists who study, among other things, the growing problem of marine debris, also known as ocean trash. Plenty of studies have sounded alarm bells about the state of marine debris; in a recent paper published in the journal Ecology, Rochman and her colleagues set out to determine how many of those perceived risks are real.

Rochman 是国家生态分析与整合中心海洋废弃物工作组的一员，这个工作组由科学家组成，在众多主题中重点研究不断加剧的海洋废弃物问题，也就是海洋垃圾问题。大量研究已经为海洋垃圾问题敲响了警钟；在最近发表在《生态学》杂志上的一篇论文中，Rochman和她的同事们希望确定这些隐患中有多少是真实存在的。

Often, Rochman says, scientists will end a paper by speculating about the broader impacts of what they ’ ve found. For example, a study could show that certain seabirds eat plastic bags, and go on to warn that whole bird populations are at risk of dying out. ‘ But the truth was that nobody had yet tested those perceived threats,’ Rochman says. ‘There wasn’t a lot of information.’

Rochman 说，通常科学家们会在研究的结尾对他们的发现会造成的更广泛影响做出推断。 例如，一份研究可以说明某种海鸟误食塑料袋，并进而警示人们整个鸟群都可能面临灭绝。“但事实是没有人验证过这些潜在的威胁，”Rochman 说。“实际上信息并不充分。”

Rochman and her colleagues examined more than a hundred papers on the impacts of marine debris that were published through 2013. Within each paper, they asked what threats scientists had studied -366 perceived threats in all - and what they’d actually found.

Rochman 和她的同事们研究了 2013 年以来发表的一百多篇有关海洋垃圾影响的论文。在每篇论文中，他们探求科学家们研究了哪些威胁——总共 366 种感知到的威胁——以及他们的实际发现。

In 83 percent of cases, the perceived dangers of ocean trash were proven true. In the remaining cases, the working group found the studies had weaknesses in design and content which affected the validity of their conclusions - they lacked a control group, for example, or used faulty statistics.

在 83%的案例中，海洋垃圾的潜在危险被证明是真实的。在剩余的案例中，工作组发现这些研究在设计和内容方面存在缺陷，这些缺陷影响了研究结论的有效性——比如，它们缺少控制组，或使用了错误的统计数据。

Strikingly, Rochman says, only one well-designed study failed to find the effect it was looking for, an investigation of mussels ingesting microscopic plastic bits. The plastic moved from the mussels’ stomachs to their bloodstreams, scientists found, and stayed there for weeks - but didn’t seem to stress out the shellfish.

Roehman 说，令人吃惊的是，只有一项设计完善的研究没有发现它预期的影响，这是一项有关贻贝误食微小塑料碎片的调查。科学家发现，塑料从贻贝的胃部移动到血液中，并在那 里停留了几个星期——但似乎并没有使这一甲壳类动物受到损伤。

While mussels may be fine eating trash, though, the analysis also gave a clearer picture of the many ways that ocean debris is bothersome.

尽管贻贝误食垃圾或许没有影响，但是分析依然清楚地指出海洋垃圾在很多方面是令人烦恼的。

Within the studies they looked at, most of the proven threats came from plastic debris, rather than other materials like metal or wood. Most of the dangers also involved large pieces of debris - animals getting entangled in trash, for example, or eating it and severely injuring themselves.

在人们分析的研究中，多数已知的威胁来自塑料垃圾，而不是金属或木材等其他垃圾。多数危险同样包括大型垃圾——例如，动物被困在垃圾中或误食垃圾使自己受到严重的伤害。

But a lot of ocean debris is ‘microplastic’, or pieces smaller than five millimeters. These may be ingredients used in cosmetics and toiletries, fibers shed by synthetic clothing in the wash, or eroded remnants of larger debris. Compared to the number of studies investigating large-scale debris, Rochman’s group found little research on the effects of these tiny bits. ‘ There are a lot of open questions still for microplastic,’ Rochman says, though she notes that more papers on the subject have been published since 2013, the cutoff point for the group’s analysis.

文章来源：《试题与研究》 网址: http://www.styyjzz.cn/zonghexinwen/2020/0807/502.html