The Amazon Rainforest亚马孙雨林

张祖平

The Amazon Rainforest is the Worlds Largest Rainforest. It has some 390 billion trees， which adds up to half the total of the worlds surviving rainforests and 16，000 different species2 of trees.

亚马孙雨林是世界第一大雨林，有大约3900亿棵树，总计占全球仅存的雨林面积的一半，树木种类达16000种。

More than half the Amazon Basins3 1.4 billion acres4 are in Brazil， including thousands of miles of the Amazon River， the worlds largest river by volume5 6.9 million cubic6 meters.

亚马孙盆地占地14亿英亩，一半多位于巴西，包括长数千英里，流量690万立方米的世界第一大河——亚马孙河。

The Amazon is home to 1 in 10 of the worlds known species， 20 percent of the worlds bird species， 40，000 plant species and trees which are very important to limiting greenhouse gases.

亞马孙雨林是全球十分之一的已知物种，全球五分之一种类的鸟类、以及40000种植物和对限制温室效应至关重要的树木的家园。

The forest serves as a big filter7， sucking in and storing CO2 from the atmosphere， about 2.2 billion tons a year， according to a study， providing a very important weapon in the battle against pollution and global warming.

这片森林是一个巨大的过滤器，吸收、储存大气中的二氧化碳。研究表明，亚马孙每年吸收22亿吨的二氧化碳，为抵抗污染和全球变暖提供了一项重要武器。

Its reported that deforestation8 destroys a big area of the Amazon as large as the size of Delaware every year. The biggest causes are stock farming （80 percent of the destroyed land）. Progress has been made in recent years to reduce deforestation， but there are concerns that the current political instability9 could undo all that.

据报道，采伐森林每年毁坏一大片亚马孙森林，面积相当于美国的特拉华州。罪魁祸首是畜牧业（占百分之八十的被伐林地）。近年来，减少采伐有所进展，但是，人们担心，政局不稳可能会让这些前功尽弃。