【时事聚焦】世界博览会第一次在中国举行，也是首次在一个发展中国家举办，因此发生在上海的2010世博会在人类历史上便具有了非同寻常的意义。下面的原版文章为我们提供了某种独特的观察视角，其略带辛辣的笔触也为大家翻开了一些鲜为人知的内幕故事。

China’s Gigantic Future: Inside the Shanghai World Expo

Billed as bigger than the Beijing Olympics, the latest and largest world’s fair doesn’t disappoint when it comes to scale, in every mind-boggling respect. The Shanghai World Expo 2010, which opened May 1, cost an estimated $55 billion (some sources say up to $95 billion) to get off the ground.

It sits on 2 square miles of prime Shanghai real estate, straddling the Huangpu River, making it the biggest world’s fair in the 159-year history of such events. More than 18,000 families and 270 factories were moved to make room for the expo, the construction of which stretched over seven years — all for an event lasting six months.

No Pavilion of the Future worth its salt would be complete without sci-fi space imagery. Here’s the official expo mascot, Haibao, clad in a space suit and breathing apparatus. The pavilion exhibits ideas about future cities, including one in space for Haibao to suit up in.

Britain’s Seed Cathedral: The United Kingdom scores the award for the coolest and weirdest pavilion, one that combines beauty with a hint of space-alien menace. This is not a Photoshop artifact, but what the building actually looks like. Called the Seed Cathedral, the pavilion is clad in 60,000 acrylic rods containing plant seeds collected during a biodiversity project. Like most other structures in the expo, the British pavilion will be torn down after the fair closes. That seems a terrible waste. Couldn’t these be left for future generations?

Greening of the Fair: The expo makes attempts to earn sustainability brownie points: Expo visitors are ferried around in electric buses running on supercapacitor engines, and buildings are cooled by gas-fueled air conditioning. Here, an overhead walkway runs for miles in the middle of the expo, with electric vehicles that ferry passengers around on it for 10 yuan (about $1.50).

On Guard: Shanghai and the expo itself are crawling with security staff. Police, army and civilians in uniform are everywhere. All are infallibly polite and helpful, but the heavy security presence can be unnerving.

Traditional Technology: It’s not all high-tech at the expo: Some traditional technologies are on display here, too. Sculptor James Rickard of the Maori Arts and Crafts Institute in Rotorua, New Zealand, carves a portal out of a tree trunk for his country’s pavilion at the expo.

Future Shanghai: The city of Shanghai will benefit for years from the expo, thanks to the billions spent on infrastructure: Six new subway lines were constructed, along with several roads and other civic works. And the city has been spruced up, even though some of the new stuff is already starting to look frayed in places, and is of dubious taste. Using reams of blinking LEDs for street lighting may save energy, but clashes horribly with the pretty architecture of old Shanghai.

【热点话题】分析认为，上海世博会无论在多大意义上获得成功，都将引发人们关于各类话题的诸多探讨及争议。