【推荐1】All over the world, animals and plants are in trouble. People are trying to find ways to help them.     1    .

Adopt an animal.

Many zoos and wildlife organizations have programs that let kids donate money to help a specific endangered animal.     2    .

Don’t release fish or pets onto the wild.

    3    . Your pet is not native to where you live. Set loose, it might become an invasive species, or it might spread parasites. So keep your fish in their tank, or find them a new home but not the pond.

    4    .

Chemicals used to kill garden weeds and bugs are a big problem for animals. Maybe if you offered to pull up the weeds instead, you could help people to use fewer poisons.

Speak up!

Share what you know and speak up for the animals. Write letters! Powerful people need to know that you care and that you’re keeping an eye on them to make sure they do their jobs right and protect the planet.

Make less trash.

Pollution and plastic trash are bad for animals and nature. How can you help?

    5    .

Take your lunch in a lunchbox or reusable bag.

Bring cloth bags to the store and remind grow-ups of they forget.

【推荐3】The world itself is becoming much smaller by using modern traffic and modern communication means. Life today is much easier than it was hundreds of years ago, but it has brought new problems. One of the biggest problems is pollution. To pollute means to make things dirty. Pollution comes in many ways. We see it, smell it, drink it and even hear it.

Man has been polluting the earth. The more people, the more pollution. Many years ago, the problem was not so serious because there were not so many people. When the land was used up or the river was dirty in one place, man moved to another place. But this is no longer true.

Man is now slowly polluting the whole world.

Air pollution is still the most serious. It’s bad for all living things in the world, but it is not the only one kind of pollution. Water pollution kills our fish and pollutes our drinking water. Noise pollution makes us angry more easily.

Many countries are making rules to fight pollution. They stop people from burning coal in houses and factories in the city, and from putting dirty smoke into the air. Pollution by SO2 is now the most dangerous kind of air pollution. It is caused by heavy traffic. We are sure that if there are fewer people driving, there will be less air pollution.

The earth is our home. We must take care of it. That means keeping the land, water and air clean. And we must take care of the rise in pollution at the same time.

【推荐2】A report has warned of a "destructive" decline(减少) in freshwater fish, with nearly a third in danger of extinction(灭绝). Conservation groups said 80 species were known to have gone extinct, 16 in the last year alone.

The report said, for example, populations of migratory fish have fallen by three-quarters in the last 50 years. Over the same time period, populations of larger species, known as "megafish", have crashed by 94%. In UK waters, the sturgeon and the burbot have disappeared, salmon are disappearing and the European eel remains extremely endangered.

According to the WWF(世界自然基金会), much of the freshwater fish decline is driven by the poor state of rivers, mostly as a result of pollution. Besides, dams and waste water are also the factors. It has called on the government to restore freshwater habitats to good health through proper carrying out of existing laws, strengthening protections in the Environment Bill and championing a strong set of global targets for the recovery of nature.

Dave Tickner, from WWF, said freshwater habitats are some of the most full of life on earth, but as this report shows they are in "destructive" decline around the world. "If we are to take this government's environmental promises seriously, it must get its act together, clean up our rivers and restore our freshwater habitats to good health," said the organization's chief adviser on freshwater.

Carmen Revenga of The Nature Conservancy said freshwater fish are a diverse and unique group of species that are not only important for the healthy functioning of our rivers, lakes and wetlands, but millions of people, particularly the poor, also depend on them for their food and income.

"It's now more urgent than ever that we find the collective political will and effective cooperation with private industries, governments, NGOs(Non-Governmental Organizations) and communities, to carry out nature-based solutions that protect freshwater species, while also ensuring human needs are met," she said.

【推荐3】If humans were truly at home under the light of the moon and stars, we would go in darkness happily, the midnight world as visible to us as it is to the vast number of nocturnal (夜间活动的) species on this planet. Instead, we are diurnal creatures, with eyes adapted to living in the sun’s light. This is a basic evolutionary fact, even though most of us don’t think of ourselves as diurnal beings. Yet it’s the only way to explain what we’ve done to the night: We’ve engineered it to receive us by filling it with light.

The benefits of this kind of engineering come with consequences—called light pollution—whose effects scientists are only now beginning to study. Light pollution is largely the result of bad lighting design, which allows artificial light to shine outward and upward into the sky. Ill-designed lighting washes out the darkness of night and completely changes the light levels—and light rhythms—to which many forms of life, including ourselves, have adapted. Wherever human light spills into the natural world, some aspect of life is affected.

In most cities the sky looks as though it has been emptied of stars, leaving behind a vacant haze (霜) that mirrors our fear of the dark. We’ve grown so used to this orange haze that the original glory of an unlit night—dark enough for the planet Venus to throw shadows on Earth-is wholly beyond our experience, beyond memory almost.

We’ve lit up the night as if it were an unoccupied country, when nothing could be further from the truth. Among mammals alone, the number of nocturnal species is astonishing. Light is a powerful biological force, and on many species it acts as a magnet (磁铁). The effect is so powerful that scientists speak of songbirds and seabirds being “captured” by searchlights on land or by the light from gas flares on marine oil platforms. Migrating at night, birds tend to collide with brightly lit tall buildings.

Frogs living near brightly lit highways suffer nocturnal light levels that are as much as a million times brighter than normal, throwing nearly every aspect of their behavior out of joint, including their nighttime breeding choruses. Humans are no less trapped by light pollution than the frogs. Like most other creatures, we do need darkness. Darkness is as essential to our biological welfare, to our internal clockwork, as light itself.

Living in a glare of our own making, we have cut ourselves off from our evolutionary and cultural heritage—the light of the stars and the rhythms of day and night. In a very real sense, light pollution causes us to lose sight of our true place in the universe, to forget the scale of our being, which is best measured against the dimensions of a deep night with the Milky Way—the edge of our galaxy—arching overhead.

【推荐1】Every year on April 1, April Fools' Day is celebrated in many countries around the world. In France, it's called "Poisson d^’Avril" or "Fish of April”. In Scotland, the holiday is often called "Gowkie Day". In Iraq, the holiday is called "Kithbet Neesan” or "April Lie".

History experts say people have celebrated April Fools^’ Day for a long time. Some believe April Fools' Day comes from the ancient Romans more than two thousand years ago, which was a day of playing games and pretending to be someone else.

Others say the day for fooling began in France in 1564. when King Charles changed the yearly calendar. He moved New Year's Day from April 1 to January I Many people did not know about the change because of communication problems then. Some people continued to celebrate New Year's Day on April 1. Other people called them April Fools and played jokes on them.

In the United State, April Fools' Day is just a day of joking and playing tricks on friends. These kinds of jokes are also called pranks （恶 作 剧）.These jokes typically end in the prankster shouting “April Fools”!

Simple pranks, like telling a friend a funny lie or making prank phone calls, are still common. But major companies also get in on April Fools' Day in a much bigger way. A few years ago, on April 1, Starbucks announced it was introducing new coffee cup sizes-plenta and Micra. The very large cups, bigger than a human head, remained useful for customers even after finishing all that coffee. According to Starbucks, the cups could be used as a rain hat, a pot for plants, or a lampshade.

It did not take long for customers to catch on to the prank. More and more people use media or smartphone apps to play pranks on their friends on April Fools' Day. One very annoying smartphone app, Cat Facts, sends funny facts about cats to your friends⁵ phones every day.

【推荐2】These days, more and more Chinese people enjoy sending and receiving messages on the phone. It can help them to get the latest news and communicate with friends. But I think I should read more books besides the textbooks, the more, the better. It can open my eyes and improve my language skills. Of course, it can also help me to get good grades. Do you know how to read more and learn more? Here are some tips for you.

◆Clear your purpose for reading

Before you start reading, ask yourself why you are reading this book. Most people read for two main reasons, pleasure or knowledge. Clearing about your reading purpose can not only help you choose the books you really need to read, but also remind you why reading the book is important to you, so you will keep reading and complete the book faster.

◆Read only what you are interested in

No matter what you are reading, it is important to enjoy what you read. Your friends may tell you the books they love, but those books might not necessarily be the ones you enjoy.

◆Give up books that you don’t enjoy

You may have chosen books that you are interested in, and they are right to your purpose. But while you are reading them, there may still be some books that you don’t enjoy reading. Whenever you realize that you aren’t enjoying the book you are reading, give it up.Remember reading shouldn’t be a chore.

◆Set a reading goal

It is interesting that I read the books borrowed from libraries faster than those I buy. The reason is that the books I buy don’t have a due date! I don’t need to return those books.Having a reading goal helps you work out how much reading you need to do in a week or even a day.Before you read each book, ask yourself what time you need to complete this book.

【推荐3】The food we eat seems to have profound effects on our health. Although science has made enormous steps in making food more fit to eat, it has, at the same time, made many foods unfit to eat.

Some research has shown that perhaps eighty percent of all human illnesses are related to diet and forty percent of cancer is related to the diet as well, especially cancer of the colon. Different cultures are more likely to cause certain different illnesses because of the food that is characteristic in these cultures. That food is related to illness is not a new discovery. In 1945, about 35 years ago, government researchers realized that nitrates, commonly used to preserve color in meats, and other food additives, caused cancer. Yet, these carcinogenic additives remain in our food, and it becomes more difficult all the time to know which things on the packaging labels of processed food are helpful or harmful. The additives which we eat are not all so direct. Farmers often give penicillin to beef and living animals, and because of this, penicillin has been found in the milk of treated cow. Sometimes similar drugs are given to animals not for medical purposes, but for financial reasons. The farmers are simply trying to fatten the animals in order to obtain a higher price on the market. Although the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has tried repeatedly to control these procedures, the practices continue.