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CNN News:2020年美国GDP为20.9万亿 同比下降超过3%

2021-02-19来源:和谐英语

CARL AZUZ, cnn 10 ANCHOR: Just how much did the coronavirus pandemic impact the world biggest economy. We're going to tell you. That's what we do on cnn 10. I'm Carl Azuz. Welcome to the show. A nation's Gross Domestic Product is a good measure of its economy's health.
The GDP is the total value of all the goods and services a country produces in a certain time period. If that GDP grows from year to year, it's one sign of a growing and healthy economy. The United States has the biggest economy and GDP on the planet. How big? From the year 2020, the U.S. Commerce Department just reported that the nation's Gross Domestic Product stood at $20.9 trillion.

Here's the bad news. The year before, it was at $21.4 trillion. That's a drop of more than 3 percent from 2019 to 2020. It was greater than the decrease brought on by the Great Recession in 2009 and it represented America's worst economic decline since 1946 following the end of World War II. Guess what caused it?
If you said the coronavirus pandemic and the shutdowns related to it, you get a gold star. And the chairman of the Federal Reserve, America's Central Bank says what happens with the virus will determine what happens with the economy going forward. Some economists predict that if the vaccines prove effective, things could get back to normal later this year.
Natural immunity from those who've recovered from the disease could factor in as well. Though the U.S. Gross Domestic Product dropped from 2019 to 2020, there was a silver lining to the government's report. America's quarterly Gross Domestic Product measured only from the third quarter of last year to the fourth one grew by 4 percent and the growth had been more than 33 percent during the quarter before. So those were good signs for the second half of 2020. But all that wasn't enough to make up for what the nation lost earlier in the year.