The Qinghai Lake National Nature Reserve in northwest China’s Qinghai Province has updated     1     (it) list of protected wildlife, adding 10 species     2     the previous total of 72, according to a report by the Xinhua News Agency. The updated list, which was revised by experts,     3     (include) 82 species of protected wildlife. The number of national first-level protected animals has increased from 19 to 22. Meanwhile, the number of second-level nationally protected animals has increased from 53 to 60.     4     (addition), the number of wild plants under national protection has reached 12 species. According to the report, the     5     (revise) of the wildlife list focused on optimizing (优化)     6     adjusting the bird list. Species with uncertain records were removed from the original list and new species that have been monitored in recent years were added, increasing the total number of bird species from 232 to 281.

First     7     (found) in 1975, the Qinghai Lake National Nature Reserve is located in the northeast of the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau,     8     (cover) the entire water area of the Qinghai Lake and the islands, beaches and wetlands,     9     birds breed and nest. The reserve is the     10     (early) of its kind in China to be listed in the List of Wetlands of International Importance in 1992, according to UNESCO.

As a country     1     has a long history of producing great writers, Ireland’s rural beauty has     2     great influence on people and traditions. Its beautiful rural scenery stirs your every sense,     3     (make) people unwilling to leave. The peaceful landscape, along with the rolling mountains,     4     (be) a grand visual feast. The waves and seabirds play music by the sea.     5     (bathe) in sunshine on a quiet morning, you can breathe in the scent of the flowers. Tasting a glass of wine and     6     (tradition) food is essential. All these lead to the formation of traditional     7     (custom) in Ireland, music, dancing and dining     8     (include). If you’re lucky to introduce     9     (you) to a friendly face, you will get an opportunity to experience local culture and traditions     10     person.

5 . Students at the Calhoun School in New York City have much more than a roof over their heads. They have a rooftop garden, with lush grass, colorful flowers and fragrant herbs. “Green roofs” are sprouting up all over, from schools to city skyscrapers. And roofs aren’t the only things going green. Architects are finding all sorts of new ways to build buildings that are easier on the environment. These schools, homes, and offices are called “green buildings”.

Normally it takes a lot of energy to run appliances. Too often, that energy comes from burning fossil fuels. So green buildings are designed to do all these things with much less energy. An energy-smart building starts with thick walls. A layer of insulation (隔热材料) traps air to stop heat from passing through. That keeps heat inside in the winter, and keeps heat outside in the summer. This saves energy for heating and cooling.

Heat pumps are another power-saving way to stay comfortable. A ground heat pump moves heat through pipes that run through the ground next to the building. A few feet under the ground, the temperature stays around 10℃ all year round. Water flowing around the pipes helps heat the building in winter and cool it in summer.

Another way to build green is to use recycled materials. That saves the cost and pollution of manufacturing something new. In the Chicago Center for Green Technology, the ceiling tiles (瓷砖) are made of pressed newspaper. The bathroom floors are tiled with recycled glass, and the stall walls are recycled plastic. Builders have found many creative ways to re-use old materials.

As more people become concerned about climate change, more buildings are going green. Green buildings produce less of the gases that warm the planet. City planners like green buildings because they save money. And they are healthier for the people who work and live inside. But you don’t need to build a whole new building. Simple changes like shading windows and planting trees can make any home greener—and a better Earth home for us all.

7 . Atmospheric (大气层的) rivers are long and narrow bands of water vapor (水蒸气) in Earth’s atmosphere, which are called “large rivers in the sky”. These rivers form over warm ocean waters. They are huge. They can be 930 miles long and one-third that wide.

Like real rivers, they carry huge amounts of water. These large streams of small water drops are blown by wind over land. When that happens, the water vapor cools down and condenses (凝结). Atmospheric rivers can be good. They bring water to dry areas. However, they can cause huge, fast-moving storms. Some cause snowfalls that bury towns. They are also the main cause of floods on the U.S. West Coast.

Atmospheric rivers are hard to predict. But scientists are working to change that. Marty Ralph, a scientist who works at the University of California, directs the Center for Western Weather and Water Extremes (CW3E). They created the first computer model to predict atmospheric rivers on the U.S. West Coast. This model uses a program that runs on a computer to create a model of a real-world event. CW3E also studies atmospheric rivers using planes. Pilots drop instruments into atmospheric rivers to collect information like temperature and wind speed, which helps with forecasting.

Will climate change affect atmospheric rivers? Climate change happens naturally over a long period of time. But today, it is largely caused by human activities and is causing the Earth to warm, which affects atmospheric rivers.

Atmospheric rivers are pushed by the wind. Those winds are driven by the temperature differences between the poles and the equator (赤道). But the poles are also warming faster than areas near the equator. That makes the temperature difference between the areas smaller. This can make winds weaker.

Climate change might not cause more atmospheric rivers. But there may be very, very wet seasons and very, very dry seasons. Such a seesaw in rainfall could make it harder to manage what water there is.

We have three lovely dogs. On the National Day of one year, we drove to my mother’s home for     1     holiday. We brought all three dogs     2     us so that they wouldn’t be alone back home when neighbors’ fireworks (烟花) went off. They were all     3     (terrible) afraid of fireworks.

When night fell that day, we had the dogs     4     (lock) in the laundry room of my mother’s house, and we went to the lake to set off fireworks. My mother’s house was far away from the place     5     we would light the fireworks. So we thought the noise might not     6     (notice) by dogs.

After enjoying the fireworks, we went back to the house     7     (check) on the dogs. Try to imagine our     8     (shock) faces when we saw a huge mouse hole in the laundry-room door. The dogs were all lying there, looking very innocent (无辜的) .

Now all these years later, the three dogs are gone, and all we have are     9     (memory) of them. But none is as memorable as how they celebrated this holiday by     10     (cut) through that laundry-room door with their teeth.

9 . In April 2022, the revised law on wildlife protection has adjusted measures for the regulation of wildlife populations in detail. “Graded, categorized management of wild animals bred in captivity (人工饲养)” is what the adjusted law offers, . “Three-haves” species—species that are thought to have “special ecological, scientific, or social significance”—is a case in point.

Concerns have been raised by a few civil society organizations that this will weaken conservation efforts, promote the growth of the wildlife breeding industry, and make it easier for illegally hunted animals to be mislabeled as captive-bred. However, some scholars believe that by making conservation management more case-by-case and less universal, the adjusted law improves regulation efficiency.

The existing law on wildlife protection was created in 1988 and since then had seen three amendments and a revision. According to Yue Zhongming, a member of the Legislative Affairs Commission of the National People’s Congress (NPC) Standing Committee, the revised law has helped step up the protection of wild animals and their habitats and strengthen the rescue and breeding of endangered wildlife. Yue added that it has also played an active role in preserving biodiversity and pushing forward with ecological conservation in China.

Ran Jingcheng, head of the wildlife and forest plant management station in southwest China’s Guizhou Province, pointed out in his article that strengthening the management of wild animals is not as simple as banning artificial (人工的) breeding. In his view, artificial breeding of wild animals has significance in the protection of endangered species and the adjustment of rural industrial structure.

It is necessary to establish the principle of combining key protection and universal protection, and to include all types of wild animals with conservation value within the scope (范围) of legal protection.

10 . Any schoolchild knows that a whale breathes through its blowhole. Fewer know that a blowhole is a nostril (鼻孔) slightly changed by evolution into a form more useful for a mammal that spends its life at sea. And only a dedicated expert would know that while toothed whales, such as sperm whales, have one hole, baleen (鲸须) whales, such as humpback and Rice whales, have two.

Even among the baleen whales, the placing of those nostrils differs. In some species they are close together. In others, they are much further apart. In a paper published in Biology Letters Conor Ryan, a marine biologist at the Scottish Association for Marine Science, suggests why that might be. Having two nostrils, he argues, helps whales smell in stereo (立体空间).

Many types of baleen whales eat tiny animals known as zooplankton (浮游动物), which they catch by filtering (过滤) them from seawater using the sheets of fibrous baleen that have replaced teeth in their mouths. But to eat something you first have to find it. Toothed whales do not hunt by scent. In fact, the olfactory bulb—the part of the brain that processes smell—is absent in such creatures. But baleen whales still have olfactory bulbs, which suggests smell remains important. And scent can indeed give zooplankton away. Zooplankton like to eat other tiny creatures called phytoplankton (浮游植物). When these are under attack, they release a special gas called dimethyl sulphide, which in turn attracts baleen whales.

Most animals have stereoscopic senses. Having two eyes, for instance, allows an animal to compare the images from each in order to perceive depth. Having two ears lets them locate the direction from which a sound is coming. Dr Ryan theorized that paired blowholes might bring baleen whales the same sorts of benefits.

The farther apart the sensory organs are, the more information can be extracted by the animal that bears them. The researchers used drones to photograph the nostrils of 143 whales belonging to 14 different species. Sure enough, baleen whales that often eat zooplankton, such as the North Atlantic right whale, have nostrils that are farther apart than do those, such as humpback whales, that eat zooplankton occasionally. Besides allowing them to breathe, it seems that some whales use their blowholes to determine in which direction dinner lies.