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Part of the beauty of the borehole is that it requires no elaborate apparatus. A single farmer may be able to sink his own tube well and start pumping. That is why India and China are now perforated with millions of irrigation wells, each drawing on the common resource. Sometimes this resource may be huge. But even big aquifers are not immune to the laws of physics. Many places are seriously overdrawn. In those places, farmers probably have to pay something for the right to draw groundwater. But almost nowhere will the price reflect scarcity, and often there is no charge at all and no one measures how much water is being taken.
钻井抽水的一个优点是不需要使用复杂的机械设备。一个农民或许就能够自己挖掘管井开始抽水。这就是为什么在印度和中国的大地上，布满了数百万个灌溉井，每口井都在抽取人类共用的水资源。有时候这一资源可能还算丰富，但是即便是那些大的蓄水层也免不了受到物理定律的影响。许多地方抽水严重过量。在那些地方，农民或许也需要为抽取地下水而付些费用。但几乎在任何地方，他们所付的费用都不能真正反映出水的稀缺，通常，用水完全是免费的，也没有人计算究竟有多少水在被抽取。
Priced or not, water is certainly valued, and that value depends on the use to which it is harnessed. Water is used not just to grow food but to make every kind of product, from microchips to steel girders. The largest industrial purpose to which it is put is cooling in thermal power generation, but it is also used in drilling for and extracting oil, the making of petroleum products and ethanol, and the production of hydroelectricity. Some of the processes involved, such as hydro power generation, consume little water(after driving the turbines, most is returned to the river), but some, such as the techniques used to extract oil from sands, are big consumers.
无论有没有标价，水肯定是有价值的，而其价值取决于用它的用途。水不仅用来种植粮食，还用来制造从芯片到建房、架桥用的钢梁等各种产品。其工业上最大的用途是热电厂发电过程中的冷却处理，但它还用于石油勘探和开采、石油产品和乙醇的生产以及水力发电。其中有些工序，如水力发电，耗水很少（在推动涡轮机转动后，大部分水返回江河)，但是有些工序，如在沙子中开采石油所使用的技术会消耗大量的水。
