英語聽力：自然百科 China's Amazing Flowers 繁花似錦的中國

China has more plants than anywhere else in the temperate regions of the world. In fact, it has almost twice as many kinds of plants as there are in the United States which is about the same size and about three times as many as there are in Europe. It’s a very wonderful wealth of plant species, many of which have contributed to our gardens, like rhododendrons, and azaleas, and forsythias, to our cultivated plants like soybeans.

The reason that there’re so many plants in China is that they've survived there better. If you go back fifteen million years into the past, you find much the same kinds of plants and the animals in the United States, Europe and China. They've survived in the warm temperate to subtropical forests that stretch right across the middle of China.

In those forests of China we have surviving species like gingko, the maidenhair tree which has been in cultivation in Europe and North America since the 17th century. A wonderful relic in those forests is the dove tree, Davidia. It’s called the dove tree because the fluttering bracts that hang down from the clusters of flowers look like doves flying.

Another example is the dawn red wood, metasequoia, which was described as a fossil in 1941. Forty million years ago, it was the commonest forest tree in Western North America, now it’s completely wiped out there, but it survives as about 6,000 individuals in China.

The western half of China in the interior of Asia consists of very tough deserts. In the harsh landscape of Tibet there exist a whole series of herbs, sedges, grasses, saussurea, primroses that are found only there. Some groups of plants, like sorseria for example, have their buds protected against the low temperatures, they keep on growing.

Another reason that there’re so many kinds of plants in China is that unlike the United States or Europe, there’s real tropical forest in the south tropical rain forests in southern Yunnan, and in that tropical forest, there are many species that come up from the south. They give the province of Yunnan about as many species, one state of China, and in fact about as many species as there are in the United States and Canada combined, about 15,000 kinds of plants. And it’s the melding of all of those regions, the survival of species from the past and the creation of many new species by the forces in evolution and the diverse topography of China that’s produced so much variety, so wonderfully pleasing and exciting to see.

China is doing the best that it can to save its biological diversity including its floral heritage. Chinese officials are very concerned with this, but it’s very difficult to meet the needs of 1.3 billion people to allow them to consume more, to give them things that they want like automobiles and other imports from the west and still to preserve the natural landscape or even the quality of the air, the water. They’re fighting that battle, a battle with which we are all familiar well, but they're going to have to do a great deal more in the future as we all are.