1 . The beauty, majesty, and timelessness of a primary rainforest are indescribable. It is impossible to ________ on film, to describe in words, or to explain to those who have never had the awe-inspiring experience of standing in the heart of a primary rainforest.

Rainforests have ________ over millions of years to turn into the incredibly complex environments they are today. Rainforests represent a store of living and ________ renewable natural resources that for ages, by virtue of their richness in both animal and plant species, have ________ a wealth of resources for the survival and well-being of humankind. These resources have included basic food supplies, clothing, shelter, fuel, spices, industrial raw materials, and medicine for all those who have lived in the majesty of the forest. ________, the inner dynamics of a tropical rainforest is an intricate (错综复杂的) and fragile system. Everything is so ________ that upsetting one part can lead to unknown damage or even destruction of the whole. Sadly, it has taken only a century of human intervention to destroy what nature designed to________ forever.

The scale of human ________ on ecosystems everywhere has increased enormously in the last few decades. Since 1980 the global economy has tripled in size and the world population has increased by 30 percent. Consumption of everything on the planet has risen — at a cost of our ________. In 2001, The World Resources Institute estimated that the demand for rice, wheat, and corn is expected to grow by 40% by 2020, increasing irrigation water demands by 50% or more. They further reported that the demand for wood could double by the year 2050; ________, it is still the tropical forests of the world that supply the bulk of the world’s demand for wood.

In 1950, about 15 percent of the Earth’s land surface was covered by rainforest. Today, more than half has already gone up in ________. In fewer than fifty years, more than half of the world’s tropical rainforests have fallen ________ to fire and the chain saw, and the rate of destruction is still accelerating. Unbelievably, more than 200,000 acres of rainforest are burned every day. That is more than 150 acres lost every minute of every day, and 78 million acres lost every year! More than 20 percent of the Amazon rainforest is already gone, and much more is severely threatened as the destruction continues. It is estimated that the Amazon alone is vanishing at a rate of 20,000 square miles a year. If nothing is done to curb (抑制) this________, the entire Amazon could well be gone within fifty years.

Massive________ brings with it many ugly consequences—air and water pollution, soil erosion, malaria epidemics, the release of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere and the________ of biodiversity through extinction of plants and animals. Fewer rainforests mean less rain, less oxygen for us to breathe, and an increased threat from global warming.

2 . Now elsewhere in the world, Iceland may be spoken of, somewhat breathlessly, as western Europe's last pristine wilderness. But the truth is, once you're off the ______ track of the low-lying coastal areas where everyone lives, the roads are few, and they're all bad, ______ Iceland's natural wonders have been out of reach and unknown even to its own ________For them the land has always just been there, something that had to be dealt with and, if possible, _______—the mind-set being one of land as commodity rather than land as, well, priceless art on the scale of the " Mona Lisa".

When the opportunity arose in 2003 for the national power company to enter into a 40-year ______ with the American aluminum company Alcoa to supply hydroelectric power for a new smelter （冶炼厂）, those who had been dreaming of something like this for decades ______ the opportunity. For a long time, life here had meant little more than a hut, dark all winter, cold, no hope, children dying left and right, plagues, starvation, volcanoes erupting and destroying all vegetation and livestock, all spirit— a world ______ almost entirely around the welfare of one's sheep and, later, on how good the cod catch was. In the outlying regions, it still largely does.

Ostensibly, the Alcoa project was intended to save one of these dying regions— the remote and sparsely populated east— where the way of life had steadily ______ to a point of desperation and gloom. After fishing quotas (定额) were ______ in the early 1980s to protect fish stocks, many individual boat owners sold their allotments or gave them away, fishing rights ended up mostly in the hands of a few companies and small fishermen were virtually ______. Technological advances drained away even more jobs previously done by human hands, and the people were seeing everything they had worked for all their lives turn out to be ______ and their children move away. With the old way of life doomed, aluminum projects like this one had come to be perceived, wisely or not, as a last chance. "Smelter or death."

The contract with Alcoa would infuse the region with foreign ______, an estimated 400 jobs, and spin-off service industries. It also was a way for Iceland to develop expertise that ______ could be sold to the rest of the world and ______ an economy historically dependent on fish. “We have to live,” Halldor Asgrimsson said. Halldor, a former prime minister and longtime member of parliament from the region, was a driving ______ behind the project. “We have a right to live.”