2 . The number of people     1     (suffer) from water shortages will leap to three billion in 25 years from 600 million now     2     urgent action is taken, experts told an annual water conference in Sweden Tuesday.

Some 1.2 billion people already lack access     3     safe water and the number will rise to 2.3 billion by 2025     4     huge investment to improve supply, Ismail Serageldin, Vice President of the World Bank, told reporters.

Serageldin said that the cost of providing universal water access by 2015 was Enormous-between $31 billion and $35 billion a year. Obviously, the poorest developing countries were unlikely to get this money, even through international aid.

“The question of when you run out of water depends on     5     you are—the areas which     6     (face) with the most serious shortages are Africa, the Middle East and parts of South Asia,” said Serageldin.

Irrigation in developing countries was the main problem, with 80-90 percent of the water     7     (intend) for agriculture used inefficiently. If the methods of irrigation were improved, there would be enough water for human and industrial use, he said. Poor people in the developing world paid on average 12 times more per liter of water than     8     in developed countries.

4 . For those who travel to East Africa, a visit would be incomplete without buying beads (珠子), which first arrived there around 1000 AD. From 1480 onwards, the mass export of beads from Europe to East Africa started. By the late 19^th century huge quantities of beads were being used as trade goods. Although beads were readily available, the Maasai did not develop an interest in them for quite some time. The Iltalala age-set, who were fighters from 1881 until 1905, were the first to use larger numbers of beads to decorate themselves.

An age-set is an institutionalized (约定俗成的) stage in life which is shared by people that are in the same age-category. The age-sets have names and their members used to paint their bodies to distinguish themselves. When they were prohibited from carrying their weapons in public, the Maasai instead began to wear beaded ornaments (饰物).

Beadwork can tell you several things about the wearer. Specific ornaments and colours indicate whether the person is Maasai or from another ethnic (部落的) group. Different Maasai groups also use certain beads and colour combinations to indicate their connection with others. Finally, a person’s beadwork reflects his or her position in life. The belt of a young woman is different from that of a young man, and an unmarried girl’s earrings are different from those of a married woman.

Within those cultural rules, beadwork fashion changes all the time. Each new generation develops a particular style, including certain materials, colour placements and symbols that unite and identify them. Competing age-sets have often chosen to include symbols of adopted technology. For instance, the Iseuri age-set chose the telegraph pole as their symbol, as a reference to the speed of communication between fighters and their friends. The next major age-set, the Ilkitoip, carried on this theme by adding a large button eye on top of the telegraph pole to symbolise the blue light of a police car.

Tourists are often quite surprised when they find out that Maasai beads are from Europe. They would like African beadwork to be “authentic” (真正的). And it’s true that some ornaments have more cultural meanings than others. Nowadays, Maasai beadwork forms an ever-changing, multi-cultural area of exchange of materials and ideas between Africa and Europe.

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