最近在准备春季GRE的写作课，刊登FT上的文章，想来分享一下

To its opponents, China's Three Gorges dam on the Yangtze River is all the more tragic because it has a historical precedent.

all the more tragic[老式写法，强调非常tragic.] historical precedent 前车之覆

Built in the 1950s, the huge Sanmenxia – literally Three Gates Gorge – dam in central China is today regarded as a catastrophic failure with senior Communist party officials blaming it for many of the environmental and social problems that afflict the region.

这个句子写作的方式是将句子中的某个动词分词化,可以说Sanmenxia was built。catastrophic faliure这个搭配可以用。同时，problems that afflict the region可以说成对当地肆虐当地的环境与社会问题 

The Sino-Soviet engineering team that designed it was asked to control flooding, produce electricity and improve transport on the Yellow River – the same reasons cited for building the Three Gorges dam.

这句子的结构有很强的反讽意味，在英语行文中，本该将topic sentence放在段首，但是the same reasons cited却放在了句尾，GRE argument写作中可以用the reasons the author cited to support his recommendations are...这样的模板句子

Like the Three Gorges, the Sanmenxia project was supported by China's Communist party elite, including Mao Zedong, and was built without adequate planning for the potential negative consequences of such a radical disruption of China's second-largest river.

party elite,这个是对政治统治阶层的一种常用称呼，Plato早就认为政治不是一般人可以参与的，在Wilson总统去参加巴黎和会之前，国家之间的外交被认为是一种elite politics,有些时候对于使用程度很少的东西也可以被评价为elitic，and was built之后出现的便是我曾经指出的英语写作中最常见的结构--平行，这句话可以作为politics题目在GRE issue中关于政治决策的题目 

“This dam was really a stupid mistake,” says An Qingyuan, a former Communist party boss of Shaanxi province, the region most directly affected by the project and its aftermath. “We should consider all such projects from a scientific perspective and if it's not scientific we shouldn't do these stupid things. It was so stupid, stupid, I say.”

An Qingyuan,现在在Financial Times上面出现的次数非常平凡，而且对于时政的针砭可谓是激进大胆。而且大家可以看到party boss其实就是省委书记。its  aftermath就是指事后结果

Mr An has campaigned for years to have the dam demolished and his condemnation is echoed in the highest corridors of power, even by staunch supporters of the Three Gorges project.

An对于拆除三门峡的倡议和他对于该水利工程的批评在中共的高层the highest corridor of power，产生了影响，甚至包括对于三峡工程鼎力（staunch)的支持者

The only people who have anything good to say about Sanmenxia are low-level Communist officials in the rural areas close to the dam, who dutifully repeat the outdated party line that the dam's benefits outweigh its negative consequences – echoing present-day pronouncements on the Three Gorges dam, the world's largest hydropower project.

离大坝很近的中共基层官员是唯一对三门峡大坝有褒奖之词的人群，他们dutifully[和钱文的senior party leader blames for it..形成了鲜明的对比]重复着outdated中共路线[party line],坚持大坝的好处outweight坏处，outweight[作文比较好坏的必用单词]，但这样的语言和现在的三峡大坝建设的支持声附合一片。

[if we take a closer look, we can  see that the senior party leaders still guide the mass through propaganda and that how naive the general public is to believe the claimed benefits the Dam would bring, even seeing the all tragic result of Sanmenxia in the Yellow River.]  

“The Sanmenxia dam has brought severe disasters to the people living near the river and those disasters far outweigh any benefits that might have come from the dam at one time,” Mr An says.

An再次发话，我觉得这个是中国士大夫阶层的特性。在位的时候，他们有些人会贪污受贿，鱼肉百姓 。但是总有这个几个悲情人物，用自己的生命去捍卫一个所谓的真理。leaving their names in the immortal history is all they want.

Worsening water shortages across the region – caused in part by the Sanmenxia and other ill-advised hydropower and water transfer projects – have stoked land disputes.

 ill-advised这个词也是可以用在misled advice的场景中。当描述是否遵循别人建议的时候，都可以用这样的例子。 

As soon as the dam was completed, sediment in the murky Yellow River – known for centuries as “China's sorrow” because of its devastating floods – began to build up behind it, leading the authorities to rebuild the dam within a few years.

治标不治本，the treament is superficial, yet the disease is not cured.有些时候，即便赢得了所有的战役，但是战略上的失败可以导致最终的失利.The Dam should have been dismentled in the first place rather than re-invested with an attempt to make the best use of it.

Despite a complete reconstruction in the early 1960s, sedimentation continued and spread up river, eventually leading to the very floods it was meant to prevent and causing Mao to angrily pronounce that if the dam did not work it should be blown up. By then, more than 400,000 people had been forcefully evicted to make way for the dam and its reservoir and many were living in slum-like conditions in nearby towns.

我爱毛主席，angrily pronounce that if the dam did not work it should be blown up. relocation of people在建设大坝中是最经常发生的事情，forcefully evicted，我查了一下字典，evict[to tell someone legally that they must leave the house they are living in], 政府的每一次决定，是一部分老百姓必须付出的代价。优秀的政府，会讲这个代价降低到最小，或者将代价转于自己的身上

As the river silted up and industrial overuse reduced its flow, large areas of arable land re-emerged from the reservoir, prompting many of the peasant farmers to return to the land to eke out a living. In the mid-1980s, the government officially relocated large numbers of displaced peasants back to their ancestral homes but allocated most of them just a fraction of the land they had left more than two decades before.

“I was a teenager when the government made us leave our land and we were moved back in 1986,” says Liu Cuiying, the 60-year-old wife of a peasant farmer living in the reservoir region. “All we are asking for, still, is the land that belonged to my family. How can we survive if we can't get the land we deserve?”

In the Three Gorges region, the relocation of at least 1.3m people has led to land disputes and government crackdowns and some officials fear that, as in the case of Sanmenxia, problems will worsen as migrants struggle to adjust to new environments.

Critics of the Three Gorges project have warned that many of the Sanmenxia dam's worst environmental consequences, including sedimentation, chronic pollution and worsening floods, are likely to afflict the new project as well.

Today the Sanmenxia dam supplies electricity only sporadically and in tiny quantities, despite claims at the time of its construction that it would provide one-third of the nation's power needs.

绝佳的GRE写作例子，用于思考计划与现实的问题。sporadical=occassional，三峡也是说要发电量占到全国的1/3。

Similar claims were made for the Three Gorges dam, which senior officials said would provide one-tenth of the country's electricity supply. But as electricity demand soars and the dam's numerous flaws begin to emerge, those claims have been quietly dropped.

quietly drop这个用法很好。强弩之末。

“The world has entered a post-dam period and the Sanmenxia dam was clearly a mistake,” says Wu Xinmu, a professor at Wuhan University and a leading expert on China's water resource management.

“We should learn from the lesson of Sanmenxia and consider the long-term influence of dams rather than the short-term benefits.”

长期利益与短期利益问题