Directions: Read the following text carefully and
then translate the underlined segments into Chinese. Your translation should be
written clearly on Answer Sheet 2.
These days, house price vertigo is more than a local or
national condition. It’s a worldwide phenomenon.
(46)The American housing boom in recent years is nothing compared with
the price run- up in countries like France, Spain, Britain, Ireland, Sweden and
Australia, even though markets in Australia and Britain have cooled in the last
year. Million-dollar two-bedroom apartments are not only a
fixture of New York, but of London, Paris and Hong Kong. In New Zealand,
housing prices rose by more than 16 percent from 2003 to 2004. In Ireland, they
rose more than 10 percent in that period. The rise in prices is
worrisome, because the international housing boom is a byproduct of
globalization. A house on a plot of ground is the most local of assets.
(47)But the financial markets that make it possible for people to
borrow money to buy a house, or speculate, are increasingly open, international
and linked. Interest rate policies in the industrialized
world tend to move in lockstep, usually led by the United States. t growing
community of affluent professionals around the world now buy second homes and
invest in housing abroad. (48)The economic links act as a
self-reinforcing network that has fueled the global surge in house prices but
would also likely magnify the pain on the way down. The ripples would extend
well beyond the housing markets. A fall in American house prices, for example,
would crimp consumer spending--and free-spending Americans have supported growth
in many export-minded nations, notably China. (49) "The real
concern is that the housing boom extends across so many countries this time,"
said Susan M. Wachter, a professor of real estate at the Wharton School of
the University of Pennsylvania. "That just raises the stakes, and the risk, when
the music stops. " The global surge in house prices is a
boom by design, largely manufactured by the world’s central banks, led by the
Federal Reserve. And it was done for good reason..(50)Faced with a falling
stock market and the collapse of the high-tech bubble, the Fed cut interest
rates sharply in 2000 to try to limit the damage to the American economy and its
trading partners. Other central banks, like the European
Central Bank, quickly followed the Fed’s lead. Higher government spending and
tax cuts were also part of the formula. Cheap credit worldwide
fueled the housing market, making mortgage payments less costly.
Homeowners refinanced their mortgages at lower rates, and the savings went
into consumer spending. They took out home-equity loans on houses of rising
value, and spent that borrowed money on cars, clothes, furniture,
restaurant meals and vacations. The higher consumer spending and the
soaring value of the home nest-egg have kept the global economy chugging
along.