★★ Words: 303  Time: 5 mins

    People travel for a lot of reasons. Some people go to see battlefields（战场） or other historic remains（古迹）. Others are looking for culture, or simply want to have their own pictures taken in front of famous places. Most European tourists are looking for a sunny beach to lie on.
    Northern Europeans are willing to pay a lot of money for sunshine because they have so little of it. People of the cities like London, Copenhagen and Amsterdam spend much of their winter in the dark because the days are so short, and much of the rest of the year is in the rain. This is the reason why the Mediterranean area （地中海地区） has always attracted them. Every summer many people travel to Mediterranean resorts（度假胜地） and beaches for their vacation. They all come for the same reason: sun!
    The huge crowds mean lots of money for the economics（经济） of Mediterranean countries. Italy’s 30,000 hotels are booked without a break every summer. And 13 million people camp out on French beaches, parks, and roadsides. Spain’s long sandy coastline attracts more people than anywhere else. 37 million tourists visit there yearly.
But there are signs that the area is getting more tourism than it can deal with. The Mediterranean is already one of the most polluted seas on the earth. Obviously(明显地), many tourists don’t go there for clean water. They allow traffic jams（交通堵塞） and seem to like crowded beaches. They don’t even mind the pollution. No matter how dirty the water is, the coastline still looks beautiful. And as long as there is the sunshine, it’s still better to stay there than to sit in the cold rain in Berlin, London, or Oslo（奥斯陆）.