英语新闻评论阅读.docxVIP

英语新闻评论阅读 1Passage 1The cost of traffic jams (The Economist 2104-11-3)FEW things unite cultures more than the frustration of sitting in a line of stationary traffic, with no discernible reason for the blockage and no end in sight. From London to Los Angeles, Berlin to Bangalore, seething anger at standstills is a common emotion felt by all drivers. The causes of traffic jams are well understood (accidents; poor infrastructure; peak hour traffic; and variable traffic speeds on congested roads). But what is the cost of all this waiting around?The Centre for Economics and Business Research, a London-based consultancy, and INRIX, a traffic-data firm, have estimated the impact of such delays on the British, French, German and American economies. To do so they measured three costs: how sitting in traffic reduces productivity of the labor force; how inflated transport costs push up the prices of goods; and the carbon-equivalent cost of the fumes that exhausts splutter out. In 2013 the expenses from congestion totaled $200 billion (0.8% of GDP) across the four countries. As road building fails to keep up with the increasing numbers of cars on the road, that figure is expected to rise to nearly $300 billion by 2030. Two-thirds of the costs incurred are the result of wasted fuel and time that could be better spent elsewhere, and the remainder from increased business expenses.But these numbers mask huge variation within countries. In America the average cost of congestion to a car-owning household is estimated to be $1,700 a year; in France it is $2,500. But traffic is so bad in Los Angeles that each resident loses around $6,000 a year twiddling their thumbs in traffic—at a total cost of $23 billion, the costs are estimated to exceed that of the whole of Britain. But these costs do not take account of the price of carbon-dioxide emissions. In total, over 15,000 kilotons of needless?CO??fumes were expelled last year—which would cost an additional $350m to offset at current marke