Wildfires rage as China’s Chongqing suffers unrelenting record heat wave

From: CNN       August 23, 2022

Thousands of emergency responders are battling to     1     fast-spreading wildfires in China’s southwestern city of Chongqing amid a weeks-long, record heat wave in the region.

The fires, which have been visible at night from parts of the downtown area, have     2     forests and mountains around the mega city in recent days. On social media, residents in downtown Chongqing complained of smelling smoke inside their apartments, while others posted pictures of burning embers from the fires reaching their balconies.

Municipal authorities have not yet reported any casualties and said the fires are being kept under control, according to an update on Tuesday morning. More than 1,500 residents have been     3     to safe zones, while 5,000 firefighters, police, local officers and volunteers, and seen firefighting helicopters have been dispatched to help combat the blazes, state-run Xinhua news agency reported.

The fires in Chongqing were the result of “spontaneous combustion” mainly caused by     4     high temperatures, Bai Ye, a professor at China’s Forest and Grassland Fire Prevention and Extinguishing Research Center told state-run Beijing Daily.

The wildfires are another knock-on effect of a crippling heat wave China’s worst since 1961 -that has swept through southwestern, central and eastern parts of the country in recent weeks, with temperatures crossing 40 degrees Celsius (104 degrees Fahrenheit) in more than 100 cities.

They are also part of a global trend of wildfires that have ravaged areas from Australia to California, with scientists saying     5     global temperatures due to human-driven climate change increase the risk of these events.

China’s heat wave has also brought     6     demand for air conditioning and reductions in hydropower capacity due to drought conditions that have     7     the country’s     8     critical Yangtze River and connected waterways.

Earlier this week, Sichuan province, neighboring Chongqing, extended temporary power outages at factories in 19 of the region’s 21 cities. The power cuts will now run until at least Thursday, in a move the local government says will ensure residential power supplies. Last week, the province’s capital city Chengdu began     9     lights in subway stations in a bid to save electricity. Chongqing enacted an order for factories to suspend operations for seven days starting last Wednesday, according to state media.

On Tuesday morning, China issued a red alert heat warning, the highest of four color-coded levels, to at least 165 cities and counties across the country. Chinese authorities have     10     said more than 900 million people across the country have been affected by the heat wave this summer.

The Beneficial Effects of Forest Fires

Forest fires are undoubtedly a threat. In the mid-1900s, all forest burns were considered     1    , and firefighters responded to all of these fires whether or not they were burning close to where humans lived. This     2     to forest fires was both expensive and risky. However, more     3     forest managers began to see that forest fires did have benefits. Foresters saw that forest fires were beneficial for trees and soil.

Previously, people believed that forest fires caused     4     damage to trees, however, now forest managers know that trees are the major     5     of fires. Many     6     occurring forest fires, often caused by lightning strikes, are surface fires that burn the understory — the shrubs and herbs from the forest — without damaging the trees in the overstory. In this way, the fire     7     competition from the smaller trees, allowing the larger trees to flourish. Once the understory has been burned away, the forest is less likely to burn from high-temperature fires that can do real damage to the tall trees.

In the past, it was not obvious how forest fires enriched the soil. Today, foresters understand that forest fires improve soil quality by changing the ‘litter’ — dead leaves and branches on the forest floor — to nutrient-rich soil. Normally, litter decomposes very slowly. However, fire releases the     8     in the litter immediately. This creates an increase in the amount of phosphorus and potassium which are key elements that promote tree growth.

As forest managers have leared more about the long-term effects of forest fires, they have realized that forest fires can have beneficial effects and have changed their forest management     9     to reflect this new opinion. It is now recognized that forest fires, are a natural part of forest ecosystems and are beneficial to the trees and soil. As long as fires are no     10     to homes and communities, foresters now often choose to do nothing to stop the fires.

After the earthquake, the whole city lay in     1     . Many people were died or    2    . Everything in the city was    3    . People were shocked and wondered how long the disaster would last. The army     4    teams to dig out who were trapped and bury the dead. With the strong support from the government and the     5    efforts of the city`s people, a new city was built.

The Northeast Tiger and Leopard National Park was    1     in Jilin and Heilongjiang, with     2    stretching all the way to the border and joining with Russia’s wildlife reserves. This     3    new park is nearly four times larger than the old wildlife park protecting Siberian tigers in Northeast China. Over the years, increased development in the area affected the tigers’ habitat, and it was thought that by 1998 there were only six to nine wild Siberian tigers living in the     4    region. However, a    5     on development put in place in 2015 resulted in a     6    population increase of the species, and now the area is thought to have about 35 tigers and 70 leopards. The problem, however, was that the old park was too small to support further population increases. Always     7    , Siberian tigers and leopards need large areas to hunt for food. This larger park, with a connection to Russia’s wildlife reserves across the border, should give these species the natural space they need to live in.

Alice likes cats     1     than any other animal. Although she is still young, she has experience of     2     after cats.

When she was a child, she     3     with her grandparents. At that time, her grandparents already had an old cat, about 11 years old,     4     she was only 4 years old. It was a good friend for her in her childhood. It was very     5     to her and never hurt her. One day, however, it left home and never came back again. It must be     6    . She was so sad that she was     7     for it for a long time.

Now Alice has four     8    . She takes good care of them and makes them live comfortable. But she is afraid to take her cats out of the house. She says it is too     9     for animals to go outside     10     she thinks that they must be hurt.

Honey Bees Remember Happy and Sad Times

While the brains of honey bees are tiny, the insects are capable of some surprisingly advanced thinking. A study published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society has now cast new     1     on the insect’s cognitive abilities.

A team of researchers from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign found that honey bees can remember positive and negative     2     — such as taking care of their young or fending off an enemy. These memories are stored in specific areas of their brains, according to how good or bad they are.

Scientists have long known that vertebrates — animals with tail bones — like ourselves are capable of sorting memories of pleasure and pain in     3     brain areas such as this. However, this has never been documented before in the minds of bees.

“We found that bees     4     different parts of their brain to processing social information that is either negative or positive,” Gene Robinson, an author of the study, told Newsweek. This discovery is     5    given how small their brains are; we did not expect such spatial separation of social information of different valence. Valence is a term used in psychology when discussing emotions to refer to the intrinsic (内在的) positivity or negativity of an event, object, or situation.

In the study, the researchers looked at regions of the honey bee brain that’s     6     in other invertebrates (非脊柱动物), referred to as “mushroom bodies,” which are associated with sensory processing, learning and memory. They     7     the expressions of genes following aggressive or collaborative social interactions, demonstrating that different parts of the these mushroom bodies were specially activated depending on the valence of the interaction — in other words, whether the interaction was harmful or     8    .

“These findings can help us better understand ‘biological embedding (嵌入),’ or how social information ‘gets under skin’ to affect the behavior,’ he said. “Biological embedding is an important issue in understanding health and     9     in humans.”

Furthermore, because the type of memory that the researchers documented is     10     in the brains of vertebrates, the latest findings demonstrated a link between vertebrate and invertebrate cognition despite the two animal groups diverging (分岔) in evolutionary terms around 600 million years ago.