IELTS Reading – summaries, no word list
Read the following passage and complete the summary below USING NO MORE THAN THREE WORDS
One of the major reasons for Bangkok not addressing the problem of traffic and air pollution is the fact that the ………………………………… making the decisions are not supported by short-lived governments. Having said that, there has been a significant ………………..levels over the past ten years. This has been largely achieved through taxation especially with regard to ……………………… and …………………….on other vehicles. New measures have also insisted that taxis run ………………fuel and subsidies help ……….. to do this.
Bangkok reduces air pollution
Fifteen years ago Bangkok was a byword for foul air, a city where the traffic stood still, and anyone who took a local rickshaw (a tuk-tuk) risked asphyxiation. It was much like Beijing, São Paulo or Mexico City, where views are usually seen only in pictures and the atmosphere can be cut with a knife.
In Bangkok, though, a group of city officials, with notably little support from a succession of ephemeral governments, has reduced the air-pollution levels by 20-50%, despite an increase in vehicles of 40% in the past ten years alone. They have done so by imposing fiercer pollution controls on cars, raising taxes on two-stroke motorbikes and making all taxis run on (subsidised) liquefied natural gas.
Natural gas has also benefitted Delhi, whose air has become significantly fresher since 2002, when the Supreme Court ordered its buses to convert to gas. Delhi’s air is today half as polluted as it was in 1994, and recent figures suggested that Beijing’s is now dirtier. China as a whole has 16 of the world’s 20 most polluted cities. But the country is starting, with varying degrees of urgency, to realise that green investment often makes sense. First, it is coming to see that the costs of inaction are huge. According to the Economist of 3rd May 2007*, the UN believes environmental degradation robs the country of 12% of potential GDP. Second, it is increasingly persuaded that spending may pay off. The World Bank estimates, for example, that the $3.15 billion spent in China on flood control since the 1960s has averted losses of $12 billion.
In any event, China now proudly points to developments like Dongtan, just north of Shanghai, which is designed to be the world’s first sustainable city. The claims for it may be extravagant: the city will, it is said, be self-sufficient in energy and water, green with parks, silent with electric cars and utterly in harmony with nature. But the ambitions are laudable.