1 . What’s really green?

Most of us are aware that we must take care of the environment, and the majority of us take steps to save energy and reduce waste and pollution. But recently, some “green truths” have been shown to be only half true, or even completely false.     1    

Paper shopping bags are better than plastic ones.

Plastic bags cause litter and are a danger to wild animals, which mistake them for food. It takes hundreds of years for plastic to break down, but much less time for paper. Because of this, people think paper bags are the better environmental choice.

However, making a paper bag uses four times as much energy as making a plastic bag and up to three times the amount of water.     2     In fact, both kinds of bags are bad for the environment. So, take a reusable bag with you when you go shopping.

    3    

It seems like common sense: eating local food should be better for the environment, because it does not need to be transported long distances and kept cold during transport.     4     It is the production of food, not its transport, that uses most of the energy and produces most of the greenhouse gases. In some cases, local produce might have used more energy and produced more greenhouse gases than produce grown a long way away-even taking into account its transport.

It’s better to take a shower than a bath.

    5     If you spend more than eight minutes in a shower, you’ll use as much water as in a bath-about 50 litres of water. Therefore, the key is to keep your shower time as short as possible.

Environmental awareness is now part of daily life. But it’s worth checking common ideas and opinions to see what’s really green.

2 . Jackdaws (寒鸦) are the smallest member of the crow family. They often live in a crowd. Indeed, when cold weather comes, they gather in the hundreds (and sometimes thousands) every evening so that they can sleep in the same place. If you’ve ever heard jackdaws during their evening gatherings and morning departures, you’ll know they are not quiet birds. Despite being fairly low-volume during the day, they are really loud on either side of their night-time get-togethers. Why might this be?

A team of the Cornish Jackdaw Project set out to determine why jackdaws are so noisy before they depart from their sleeping spot. The team’s theory was that the morning calls might be a jackdaw version of   “voting”. The researchers suspected that each individual’s call might count as an “I’m in!”. When a certain amount of “I’m in!”s are called —and so a certain volume of noise is reached -the group might then depart as a unit.

To test this idea, the researchers artificially increased the level of calls during the jackdaws’ natural morning calls. Their expectation was that, if jackdaws really are “voting with their voice” to decide when to depart the sleeping site, artificially adding calls would make them leave earlier than they naturally would have done. Subsequent experiments confirmed their expectation. The team therefore showed that jackdaws use their calls as a sort of voting system.

You might wonder why this happens. The researchers suggest that individual jackdaws benefit from the voting system because they are less at risk of being killed and they can get more access to social information — such as where to find food.

So the loud calls of jackdaws in the morning are therefore not the pure chaos it sounds like. If you are ever being driven mad by the sound in the morning, you can find comfort in the fact that the louder they get, the sooner they will leave you in peace.

3 . Have you heard of the save soil movement? It was _________ by Sadhguru, and he started a 100-day motorcycle journey starting from London and passing through 27 nations, including Europe, Central Asia, and the Middle East.

The efforts of Sadhguru have _________ the worldwide recognition of this movement. Sadhguru traveled to various international _________ on his bike as part of his save soil movement. The world acknowledges his _________ to save soil for the upcoming generation.

The movement aims to _________ the soil crisis in every part of the earth. The world has finally realized, and attention is being paid to the horrible statistics of the land quality and soil. This movement was started to stop the soil from further damage and is now receiving encouraging _________ in every corner of our planet.

The main motive of the campaign was to bring together people from all around the world to protect the soil’s health. Sadhguru has become _________ in just a period of 3 months as his movement Save Soil has become a global phenomenon and is now under the spotlight. Sadhguru’s efforts have created _________ not only in one region but in every part of the world. The _________ recognized movement is __________ all individuals from all states to save the deterioration (恶化) of soil health for the future generation. Without healthy soil, human life is impossible, and with the __________ climate changes, spending life on planet earth can become challenging for future generations. __________, an initiative like saving soil was needed to __________ the health of our upcoming generation.

Sadhguru is also the author of the New York Times bestseller Inner Engineering: A Yogi’s Guide to Joy. He has been a(n) __________ voice and is now using his fame for a better cause. The success of the event will lay out several benefits to the world. From providing a more stable livelihood (生计) to the farmers to offering our upcoming generations healthier food and a safer and cleaner environment, healthy __________ can do it all.

4 . This past summer I set out on a journey to Canada’s Arctic. When I left I was wrapped in a blanket of uncertainty and ______.

But when I first met the group members, I knew I didn’t have anything to ______. The group was amazingly ______ and I was soon part of a big family boarding on an amazing ______!

Approaching the Arctic, I was repeatedly ______ with its unusual largeness and its beauty. There I flew over vast glaciers (冰河) and stood on the frozen Arctic Ocean, ______   polar bears walk in search of seal holes, and _______ wait for a meal.

However, I also learned the pollutants carried by ocean from far away have a negative ______ on all Arctic inhabitants. And global warming has put polar bears at ______ because a warmer climate means that they have a shorter time to ______ seals on the ice.

During the journey, I talked with some ______ scientists about the ruins of homes once ______ by the ancient Thule people. I made good friends with people from different parts of world.

The Arctic is a land of incredible beauty which ______ to be preserved. I’ve learned why it is so important to ______ it. This journey has made me more determined to try to ______ that I do not leave negative or harmful footprints on either Earth or its people.

7 . New findings suggest that when it-comes to learning, the snake may be quite a bit like humans. David Holtzman, a scientist at the University of Rochester, has found that snakes have a much greater capacity for learning than earlier studies had indicated.

Holtzman’s study challenged 24 snakes to escape from a black plastic container the size of a child’s pool. Cards mounted on the container’s walls and tape on its floor provided the snakes with visual and touchable signals to find their goal: holes in the container’s bottom that offer a dark, comfortable spot to hide.

Simply falling into a hole isn’t the only proof that the snakes are learning something, though. “Speed to find that goal is one of the measures which shows they’re learning,” Holtzman says. “On average, they take over 700 seconds to find the correct hole on the first day of training, and then go down to about 400 seconds by the fourth day of training. Some are actually very fast and find it in less than 30 seconds.”

Studies dating back to the 1950s interpreted snakes’ awkwardness with mazes(迷宫)as a poor reflection on their intelligence. “Early attempts to study snake intelligence were problematic because the studies used mazes as testing arenas(场地)-as though snakes might be expected to run through mazes in the same way mice run through mazes,” says Peter Kareiva, a professor of zoology. “Snakes do not encounter anything like mazes in nature, and they do not learn how to run mazes in laboratory conditions.”

Holtzman also found a few age-based differences in the signals the snakes use. Young snakes appear to be more adaptable and resourceful, using a variety of clues to find their way to the exit.But their elders seem to rely much more heavily on visual clues. “Actually, one of the amazing findings from our studies is that snakes do use vision in locating places,” says Holtzman. “They don’t just rely on the chemical clues picked up by sticking their tongues out, as many snake biologists assume.”

8 . Now you can have polar bears as pen friends. First you need to find one, then tranquilize it and quickly give it the necessary tools before it wakes up. It’s an awkward first encounter — how many friendships do you know that start with tranquilizers? — and admittedly a one-sided correspondence, but soon they’ll be sending messages daily.

Every morning, Jon Aars, a senior researcher at the Nowegian Polar Institute, receives a bunch of emails from several female polar bears, letting him know where they are. Each year, Aars and his colleagues fit around 70 polar bears with a tracking collar which continuously logs movement. Once a day the collar makes a satellite call, sending the last 24 hours of data back to the Institute. “Data about movement has been very important to understand how they might respond to climate change,” Aars explains.

A warming climate means a vast amount of sea ice is melting. Several seal species — polar bears’ main food — rely on sea ice, and more often than not, where sea ice can be found, so too can polar bears. But these creatures are being forced to move. “We have seen that bears are in different areas than they used to be -so much further north,” Aars explains.

The collar can also record body temperature, which can tell scientists if a bear has moved inside a habitat-an indication the animal is going to give birth. Sea ice loss is also having an impact on where polar bears are born. “Important areas that they used to go to give birth to cubs are more or less lost,” says Aars. “Bears are now swimming as far as 200 kilometers to reach an island habitat,” he adds, “something they did not need to do 20 years ago.”

Aars hopes his research could reveal how to help his pen friends hold out a little longer. “What is important for us is that all this data tells us how they will respond in the future,” he adds.

The Fanjingshan World Heritage property is located in South-West China,    1    (cover) a total area of 40,275 hectares(公顷), fully surrounded by a buffer zone of 37,239 hectares. Fanjingshan is located in a monsoonal(季风的) climatic context and    2    (be)an important source of water for the surrounding landscapes and beyond, with some 20 rivers and     3    (stream) feeding the Wujiang and Yuanjiang River systems, both of     4    run into the Yangtze River. The    5    (high) peak,Mt Fenghuangshan, has a height of 2,570 m above sea level.

Fanjingshan is an island of rock in a sea of karst and is home    6    many ancient plant and animal species which    7    (originate)in the Tertiary Period, between 65 million and 2million years ago.    8    total of 3,724 plant species have been recorded in the property,an     9    (impress) 13% of China’s total flora(植物群). Fanjingshan is the only habitat in the world for Fanjingshan Fir and Guizhou Snub-nosed Monkey, as well as 64 plant and 38 animal species that are listed as globally    10     (threaten).