【推荐1】① Climate change has a lot to do with sports.

② Climate change is the change in the world’s temperatures and weather. Temperatures are rising. This may cause more severe（恶劣）weather like heavy rainstorms and hurricanes（飓风）. Moreover, ocean levels are rising. This could cause flooding（水灾）.

③ All of this affects sports in many ways. Rising temperatures mean shorter winters. There will be less snow. This is harmful to winter sports, such as skiing.

④ The Winter Olympics are in February. But the places that host the Games are getting warmer. Researchers looked at 20 places that hosted the games before. By 2050, nine of them will be too warm for winter sports.

⑤ Some golf courses are near the ocean. Rising sea levels may flood them.

⑥ Some climate change results are happening now. The 2020 summer’s Olympics took place in Tokyo, Japan. It was too hot for some events. They had to be moved farther north. Tennis players at the 2020 Australian Open were also affected. Smoke from nearby wildfires caused some matches to be canceled.

⑦ Some people are trying to do something about the problem.

⑧ The Climate Pledge Arena in Seattle is new. It’s the first sports stadium（体育场）that promises to be “carbon-neutral（碳中和）”. This means that it won’t pollute the environment.

⑨ The owners will use renewable energy, which won’t run out. One example is wind energy. And most of the food at the field comes from local farmers. Sometimes they have too much food. So, they give it away to food banks. Besides, the stadium will give up using single-use plastics by 2024.

⑩ Climate change is a big problem. It will take teamwork to make things better.

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【推荐2】At first sight, it may seem as if starfish do not have eyes. However, you’d be mistaken for thinking that. They do have eyes, but they are placed on the end of each of their arms. Still, for a longtime, no one had a clue what they were using these eyes for.

Since starfish are generally simple animals that do not have a brain, their eyes are quite simple as well. This is why researchers doubted if these eyes could see. In 2014, researchers suggested that these eyes could form rough images (粗糙的图像) of the environment that would prevent the starfish from getting lost. As it turns out, this is true. According to newer studies, starfish use their sense of sight to navigate (确定方向) through the ocean.

The eyes allow starfish to form images that only have about 200 pixels (像素). Still, this is more than enough for them to recognize (认出) larger objects that might get in their way while they are navigating the deep waters. Since starfish are generally found around coral reefs (珊瑚礁), there is a possibility that they could wander (漫步) to the sandy beaches of the reefs and get lost. If that happened, they would probably starve because they would not be able to find food there.

Researchers managed to get an in-depth look at the eyes of starfish, and while they are constructed similarly to the eyes found in insects, the similarities stop there. The eyes of starfish have no lenses (晶状体), which is the reason that they are only able to form extremely rough images. Their field of view is not very wide, but it is enough for them to be able to recognize a coral reef in front of them. It is believed that they can see about three feet in front of them, and only during the day. Still, there is a lot to learn about the eyesight of starfish, and since they are ecologically important animals all new information about them is more than welcome.

Michael Farmer is a meteorite (陨石) hunter. What about his unusual job?

World Times (WT): What’s the hardest part of your job?

Michael Farmer: I’m always looking for new pieces of meteorite rock, so I have to travel a lot. I’ve been to about 70 countries or so. There are other problems too. It’s not allowed to take meteorite pieces from some countries. So you have to be very careful and learn the law. It’s different everywhere.

WT: Are there a lot of meteorite pieces on Earth?

Michael Farmer: Yes, there are millions, but most land in the forest, jungle, or ocean. They’re almost impossible to locate (定位). One of the best places to find pieces is in the Sahara Desert (撒哈拉沙漠) in Africa. You can see them easily in the sand. The heat also preserves (保存) the rocks well.

WT: What’s the most valuable meteorite you’ve found?

Michael Farmer: The most valuable meteorite was in Canada. Three partners and I discovered a very rare type called a pallasite (石铁陨石). It weighed 53 kilograms, and it’s around 4.5 billion years old. We sold it to the Canadian government for just under a million dollars. Now it’s in the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto. It’s a national treasure.

WT: Who else buys the rocks from you?

Michael Farmer: Museums and private collectors are always calling me. New meteorites are greatly needed, and so they sell quickly. I also sell them to a lot of scientists. They don’t have the time or money to search for these rocks. Without the help of hunters, 99 percent of these meteorites would be lost to science.

【推荐1】Do you eat grass? You may be surprised by the answer. We usually think of grass as food for animals, but humans eat grass, too.

Humans eat the seeds (种子) of the grass. Rice is a special kind of grass that has big seeds, and they taste good! There are over 100 different kinds of rice grown around the world. Over many years, humans have changed rice to have more and larger seeds, and it has become a very important food. After corn, it is the most popular seed in the world. It is the basic food for a large part of the world’s population.

How often do you eat rice? We are eating it less often than we used to. We are now eating more bread and meat instead of rice. Even though we now eat less rice. Rice is a very important part of life for many people around the world. Did you eat some rice today?   

Do you eat weeds (野草)? Maybe this once again surprises you. Often you saw people cutting in a field. They bad a big bag in one hand and a knife in the other. What were they doing? They were cutting dandelions (蒲公英).

The dandelion is one of the most useful weeds. It is really a living supermarket. The leaves of the young plant are delicious. The leaves can also be cooked. With beans they make a nice meal. All parts of the plant can be used. Roots and leaves are often used in medicines. Have you ever tasted any dandelions?

【推荐3】Most people recognize the cactus (仙人掌) plant by its sharp points. But there are other things that make the cactus plant different from other plants.

Scientists think that long ago the cactus looked much like any other plant. But, over the years they moved into hot, dry deserts. When cactuses started to grow in dry areas, they slowly began to change. Like all desert plants, cactuses had to live for long periods of time without water. Soon, their stems (茎) started to grow thicker to store water. After a good rain, cactuses are made of 90% water!

As time went by, there were other changes to the cactus plant. These changes helped the plant to live even better in dry places. The stems became thicker and thicker. Soon, chlorophyll (叶绿素) appeared in the stem.

Chlorophyll is very important to plants. People can usually find chlorophyll in a plant’s leaves. Chlorophyll gives leaves their green color. But chlorophyll has another important purpose. It creates the plant’s food. The plant’s energy to stay alive comes from chlorophyll.

After chlorophyll moved to the cactus stem, the cactus had to face a problem that the big leaves evaporated (蒸发) too much water in hot and dry areas. That made it in danger of death! Then the cactus tried to grow smaller leaves. The leaves have been changing till they become needles (刺). Now, without big leaves, chlorophyll in the stem draws sunlight and makes nourishment directly.

Some desert plants send down long roots to get water from deep inside the ground. But cactuses have a different root system. Their roots do not go deep down into the ground. Instead, they grow in all directions. The roots get water from a very large area. Even a small cactus plant may send its roots a distance of 9 to 12 meters from the area where it grows. There are scientists who study the roots of the desert cactuses. They say something surprising: if we looked at the ground under a desert where cactuses grow, it would look like a thick forest of roots!

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