100篇经济学人文章

Aerospace Down in flames A tragedy casts doubt on Russia’s civil-aviation renaissance 航空工业 火中坠落 一场悲剧令俄罗斯民航业的复兴蒙上阴影 了解时事的童鞋都知道，俄罗斯本月初发生了一场重大航空事故，造成41人遇难。此篇文章即为经济学人就该事件对俄罗斯飞机制造业发展所进行的梳理。 前两段说到，俄罗斯在UAC身上倾注了很大的期望，但一场事故彻底打破了这种希望。那么在事故之前，UAC有着什么样的目标呢？而它的实际情况又是否能支撑它达成那样的目标？ ① Before the accident UAC was aiming to increase its share of global revenues from civilian aircraft, from 17% in 2017 to 40% by 2025. ②The target now looks unreachable. ③Yet even beforehand Sukhoi had been making only slow progress towards it. ④The company has grabbed 20% of the global market for regional jets and secured a similar number of orders as rival aircraft from Bombardier of Canada and Embraer of Brazil, the two firms which have historically dominated the sector. ⑤But although the SuperJet is cheaper to buy, even Russian airlines were already falling out of love with it, says Tom Chruszcz of Fitch, a rating agency. ⑥The lack of a global maintenance network made servicing Sukhois more expensive, and the amount of time not in the air longer, than for the Canadian and Brazilian jets. ⑦Sanctions on Russia have crimped the availability of spare parts outside of Russia. ⑧Alexei Navalny, a former member ofAeroflot’s board turned vocal critic of Mr Putin, has previously deridedSuperJets as “always standing idle” and generating losses for the flag carrier. 第①句给出了UAC在事故之前给自己定下的目标。 本句语言点： Aim 此处是用作动词: I] to try or intend to achieve something力求达到; Share : [singular,单数] the part of something that you own or are responsible for〔某人拥有或应负担的〕一份; 此处即为UAC在全球营收中的所占份额； Revenue ：N-UNCOUNT Revenue is money that a company, organization, or government receives from people. (公司、组织或政府的) 收入； civilian aircraft 顾名思义是“民用飞机”，相对应的“军用飞机”则为military aircraft; 本句语法结构： Before the accident（时间状语） UAC（主语） was aiming（谓语） to increase its share of global revenues from civilian aircraft, from 17% in 2017 to 40% by 2025（状语）. 主干则为： UAC was aiming toincrease its share. 第②句比较简单，一针见血地指出，该目标现在看来是遥不可及了。 The target now looks unreachable. 第③句进一步指出，UAC在某些方面还是做的不错的。 本句语言点： Beforehand : ADV If you do something beforehand, you do it earlier than a particular event. 事先; 预先; 表达“事情的进展”用 make progress, 常见搭配有： Slow/steady/rapid/good/significant/littleprogress 本句语法结构 Yet（表示转折） even beforehand（状语） Sukhoi （主语）had been making （谓语）only slow progress（宾语）towards it. 主干即为： Sukhoi had beenmaking only slow progress. 第④句紧接第三句，具体描述UAC在此前怎么就进展缓慢了。 本句语言点： Grab 抓取，这里的取义也是相关的： [ VN ] to take sth for yourself, especially in a selfish or greedy way （尤指自私、贪婪地）捞取，赚取，抢占；从释义可以看出，如果采用该词，则后面的市场份额、数额、金额、占比都应该是相对较大的，此处UAC占有全球20%的支线客机市场，是个不小的份额； regional jet : 支线客机（此处建议与前文的civil aircraft统一记忆）； 支线客机：支线客机(regional aircraft)通常是指100座以下的小型客机，一般设计座位为35～100座； 干线客机 (trunk-liner)：在客流量大的城市之间的干线上飞行的民航客机叫干线客机。我国一般把100座以下航程在3000千米以内的飞机划分为支线客机，而100座以上的飞机算做干线客机。 secure 此处不是安全，而是一个动词，常常与orders搭配： ~ sth (for sb/sth)~ sb sth ( formal ) to obtain or achieve sth, especially when this means using a lot of effort （尤指经过努力）获得，取得，实现, 除了与orders搭配，还常常与deal/contract搭配，表示“订立合同、达成协议”，当然也可以有其它的用法： He secured a place for himself at law school. 他在法学院取得了学籍。 Rival 此处是名词，表示“对手”，但也可以作为修饰成分，比如： a rival bid/claim/offer 竞争投标 rival groups 竞争团体； rival gang 敌对团伙； Dominate : to control or have a lot of influence over sb/sth, especially in an unpleasant way 支配；控制；左右；影响; Sector 代表一个行业：a part of an area of activity, especially of business, trade etc〔尤指商业、贸易等领域的〕部门；行业； 本句语法结构： The company（主语） has grabbed（谓语1） 20% of the global market（宾语1） for regional jets（介词短语做后置定语） and secured（谓语2） a similar number of orders（宾语2） as rival aircraft from Bombardier of Canada and Embraer of Brazil（此处省略了have secured）, the two firms（前面2家公司的同位语） which（定从，修饰firms） have historically dominated（定从谓语） the sector（定从宾语）. 主干很简单： The company hasgrabbed 20% of the global market and secured a similar number of orders. 第⑤句来了个转折，表示Superjet这个项目发展并不好。 本句语言点： Fall in love with…爱上… “不爱了”就是这里的 fall out of love with… Rating agency 在读外刊的时候会经常碰到，指“评级机构”； 本句语法结构： But although the SuperJet is cheaper to buy（转折状语从句）, even Russian airlines（主句主语） were already falling out of love （主句谓语）with it, says Tom Chruszcz of Fitch, a rating agency（Fitch的同位语）. 主干: Russian airlineswere already falling out of love with it. 第⑥句紧跟第五句，阐述为什么Superjet会发展受阻。 本句语言点： Maintenance : ~ (of sth) the act of keeping sth in good condition by checking or repairing it regularly 维护；保养; Service 此处也是“维修、维护”的意思： [ usually passive] to examine a vehicle or machine and repair it if necessary so that it continues to work correctly 检修；维护；维修；保养，比如： We need to have the car serviced. 我们得把车送去检修一下了。 这句话主要难点在它的结构： The lack of a global maintenance network（主语） made （谓语）servicing Sukhois （宾语1）more expensive（宾语补足语）, and the amount of time not in the air（宾语2） longer（宾语补足语）, than（此处省略the amount of time not in the air） for the Canadian and Brazilian jets（比较状语）. than for the Canadian and Brazilian jets，此处省略了the amount of time not in the air，即比较的对象是“不在空中的时间”； 除了第六句提到的维修网络问题，第⑦句指出还有美国对俄罗斯的制裁也是原因之一。 本句语言点： Sanctions : [ Cusually pl. ] ~ (against sb) an official order that limits trade, contact, etc. with a particular country, in order to make it do sth, such as obeying international law 制裁; Crimp ：( NAmE informal ) to restrict the growth or development of sth 妨碍（或阻止）…的发展，比如： The dollar'srecent strength is crimping overseas sales and profits.  美元最近的坚挺削减了海外的销售和利润。 spare part 指“零部件”； 本句语法结构： Sanctions on Russia（主语） have crimped（谓语） the availability of spare parts（宾语） outside of Russia（地点状语）. 要阐述观点，总要找点权威人士说过的话，第⑧句就引用了Alexei Navalny的言论。 本句语言点： Board此处指“董事会”； Vocal 跟声音有关：telling people your opinions or protesting about sth loudly and with confidence 大声表达的；直言不讳的，比如： Foley has beenparticularly vocal in his criticism of the government. 福利批评政府时尤其直言不讳。 Critic “批评者”； Deride : [ VNV speech ] ~ sb/sth (as sth) ( formal ) to treat sb/sth as ridiculous and not worth considering seriously 嘲笑；愚弄；揶揄; Idle : ( of machines, factories, etc. 机器、工厂等 ) not in use 闲置的, 常见搭配有： to lie/stand/remain idle 闲置着； flag 有“国旗”的意思，此处代表俄罗斯； 本句语法结构： Alexei Navalny（主语）, a former member of Aeroflot’s board（同位语） turned vocal critic of Mr Putin（过去分词短语后置修饰member）, has previously derided（谓语） SuperJets（宾语）as “always standing idle” and generatinglosses for the flag carrier. 主干： Alexei Navalny has previously derided SuperJets. 本段中文：    此次空难发生前，UAC的目标是到2025年将其民用飞机在全球收入中的份额从2017年的17%提高到40%。现在看来这一目标是遥不可及了。然而，即便在这之前，苏霍伊公司朝此目标迈进的速度也很缓慢。苏霍伊公司已经占据了全球支线客机20%的市场份额，并获得了与加拿大庞巴迪公司（Bombardier）和巴西航空工业公司（Embraer）生产的竞争机型差不多数量的订单。后两家公司长期以来处于该领域主导地位。但评级机构惠誉（Fitch）的汤姆·赫鲁什奇（Tom Chruszcz）表示，尽管SuperJet的价格更便宜，但是就连俄罗斯自己的航空公司也已经不再青睐它。由于缺乏全球性的维修网络，SuperJet的维修费用高于加拿大和巴西的客机，维修停飞的时间也更长。对俄罗斯的制裁影响了俄罗斯以外地区的零部件供应。俄航前董事、后来常公开批评普京的阿列克谢·纳瓦尔尼（Alexei Navalny）此前就曾嘲讽SuperJet“永远闲着”，导致这家国家航空公司亏钱。 本段有不少长句子，只要仔细剖析一下，主干支干都很清晰，所以对长句子不可有畏难情绪哦

接上文： 《经济学人》精读46：How Elon Musk does it （part 1) Lightly Seared on the Reality Grill Of the two goals, colonising Mars and contributing to the greening of the Earth, the second sounds more plausible, not least because it is widely shared. But SpaceX is in much better shape than Tesla. The firm is privately held (Mr Musk, who has a controlling stake, says it will remain so). In 2015 Google and Fidelity invested $1bn, and subsequent filings put the firm’s value at over $21bn. SpaceX has a commitment to modular design, vertical integration and continual improvement not previously seen in the space business. The Falcon Heavy, for example, used 28 Merlin engines, all of them built from scratch at the company’s plant in California, all of them much more powerful than the Merlins that powered the first Falcon 9 in 2012.The firm’s achievements have established it as a satellite launcher and as a logistics company, with its reusable Dragon spacecraft providing supplies to the International Space Station. This business will expand when, probably sometime next year, the Dragon is certified to ferry astronauts up there, too. “殖民火星”和 让世界变得更绿一点这两个目标听起来是第二个比较容易实现，但SpaceX的企业结构比较简单，就是Mr Musk控股最多。 SpaceX的不断改进，不断发展是这个行业里从来没发生过的，它的Falcon Heavy用的是最新的发动机，都是这家公司从零开始研发的！ The innovation is continuing—which is just as well, because within a few years it may face serious competition from Blue Origin, a rocket company owned by Mr Bezos which is likely to prove more sprightly, and more ambitious than those SpaceX has faced to date. Treating the Falcon rockets as cash cows, SpaceX is moving its development efforts on to an even larger (and possibly also cheaper) launcher, known as the BFR, and a constellation of thousands of communication satellites, an undertaking that would exploit its ability to get things into space cheaply so as to provide high-speed internet access all around the world. Morgan Stanley, an investment bank, reckons that could bring the company’s value up to $50bn—though it will require mastering a new manufacturing challenge and facing new competitors. Tesla is already worth more than that: roughly $60bn. That is more or less the same value as GM, which makes 80 times as many cars. In 2004 Mr Musk took a big stake in Tesla, founded the year before, and became chairman; in 2008, when the company faced closure, he became CEO. It went public two years later and quickly became the world’s leading electric-car company; last year it produced over 100,000 vehicles. At the Model 3’s launch Mr Musk claimed that, by the end of 2017, it would be churning out 5,000 a week. sprightly: full of life and energy -- used especially to describe an older person-- a sprightly old woman of 80 constellation: a group of people or things that are similar in some way 特斯拉现在的市值大概600亿美元，和通用公司差不多，但是通用每年生产的汽车量特斯拉的80倍... It wasn’t. In fact it was nowhere near it. It made just under 2,500 Model 3s, half that promised week’s worth, in the entire fourth quarter of 2017. It now says it will hit 5,000 a week later this year; a previous claim that it would go on to 10,000 a week by the end of the year has been dropped. Meanwhile, it faces ever stiffer competition. The world’s established carmakers are getting into the electric game. Other new entrants include Alphabet, which owns Waymo, an autonomous-car firm that began as part of Google. Given all this, many think Tesla’s valuation unsustainable. Mr Musk sometimes seems to see their point. “This market cap is higher than we have any right to deserve,” he said when speaking to an audience of state governors in July 2017, soon after the company’s valuation first topped that of Ford. To reassure shareholders of Mr Musk’s commitment, in January Tesla proposed a new pay plan that ties all his earnings to strict milestones for revenues, annual profits (of which, so far, it has made none at all) and market capitalisation. The last of these sets a target of $650bn by 2028. That is roughly the current value of the world’s largest ten carmakers combined. stiff: difficult, strict, or severe-- stiff competition 特斯拉接下来将会面临着巨大的竞争，更多的企业进入电力汽车这块业务，其中最出名的就是Google 母公司的无人驾驶汽车，Waymo 所以连Mr Musk都承认现在的市值有点过高... To accomplish such rapid growth—all but unheard of in a company its size—Tesla has to become more than just the successful mass-market car company it still isn’t. It has to become an industry in and of itself, providing better, battery-powered alternatives to the internal-combustion engine wherever it is found, from lawnmowers to juggernauts, and also selling battery-storage systems to consumers and utilities on a huge scale. Why should anyone believe such hubris?One argument is that electric vehicles, designed and built the Tesla way, are both better and potentially much more profitable than the alternatives. A recent tear-down analysis by McKinsey, a consultancy, concluded that electric cars designed from scratch are much better (for example, on range and interior room) than those that are modified versions of petrol-fired cars and still made on existing production lines. And by keeping a great deal of its cars’ engineering in-house, as SpaceX does with its rockets, Tesla may stand to be much more profitable than its current competitors. Jeffrey Osborne of Cowen, an investment bank, calculates that 80% of the value of a Tesla is created in its manufacturing plant in Fremont, some three to four times the share for a typical passenger car. juggernaut: a very large, heavy truck-- called alson juggernaut lorry hubris: a great or foolish amount of pride or confidence 特斯拉这种生产电力汽车的模式，被认为比其他对手更有潜力，而且能有更大的利润。麦肯锡的研究分析表明，电力汽车研发从零开始比较好，比在原有的汽油汽车上改动来的更容易... What is more, electric-car factories could be a lot more productive than those for internal-combustion engines; whereas a conventional car has about 2,000 components in its drive chain, a Model S has fewer than 20. Mr Musk says that these advantages mean he can create a “machine that makes machines” qualitatively better than anyone else’s.But the so-far-pitiful production of the Model 3 suggests that, at best, that machine is proving hard to bed in. It also means Tesla is not getting the revenues it based its spending plans on. The “gigafactory”, a battery plant in which Tesla and Panasonic are investing $5bn, also has its problems. The investment is based on the idea that Tesla needs economies of scale in its battery business only achievable in a factory that is highly automated and utterly huge. Mr Musk says the gigafactory—near the town of Sparks, Nevada—will be, by footprint, the biggest building in the world. 传统汽车在驾驶链上有2000个零部件，而Model S 只有20个不到！ Mr Musk说他们的优势就是“我们有能制造这些部件的机器”， 但是从他们Model 3的产能来看，那个机器不太好用哦，还有那个他和松下一起投资的“电池工厂” 也有问题...  Romit Shah of Nomura/Instinet, a bank, estimates that in late 2014, when the gigafactory was announced, global battery demand for electric vehicles was about 12 gigawatt-hours a year. Nomura thinks the gigafactory alone will have 40GWh of capacity by the end of this year. In 2016 Tesla bought SolarCity, a solar-power and home-energy-storage firm that Mr Musk had helped two of his cousins set up, for $2.6bn. One of the reasons was to soak up some of this huge supply of batteries. (Another was that SolarCity was drowning in debt; the bail-out of the CEO’s side-gig was controversial, but Tesla shareholders ended up backing it by a large margin.) Storage, not cars, may be the biggest market for batteries long-term: it was not an accident that the company changed its name from Tesla Motors to just Tesla last year. Getting the gigafactory up to its promised speed and scale is vital to Mr Musk’s plans. It has proved frustratingly difficult. A visit to Sparks late last year found J.B. Straubel, a co-founder of Tesla and now its chief technical officer, completely consumed with the automation efforts: “Ramping up such a complicated machine,” he says,“on this unprecedented timescale, has never been done before.” Last October Mr Musk tweeted that the project was in “Production hell, ~8th circle”. "电池工厂“的产能实在过剩，但在2016年特斯拉还把Solar-city买了，一个原因是它巨大的电池供应量，另外一个原因这家公司也负债重重（是Mr Musk帮助他的两个表兄成立的公司） 能量存储应该是将来的一个巨大发展机会，所以这就是为什么特斯拉把名字从"特斯拉汽车”改成了“特斯拉”。 总结： Musk 在下一盘很大的棋，很佩服他的能力！ -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Results Lexile®Measure: 1300L - 1400L Mean Sentence Length: 20.40 Mean Log Word Frequency: 3.27 Word Count: 1200 这篇文章的蓝思值是在1300-1400L， 专八阅读题的难度也就这个，是经济学人里比较难的，不太好读！ 使用kindle断断续续地读《经济学人》三年，发现从一开始磕磕碰碰到现在比较顺畅地读完，进步很大，推荐购买！ 点击这里可以去亚马逊官网购买~