Climate Change Requires The World’s Attention

There is little doubt that Earth     1    (get) warmer and warmer. In 2013, a lot of people were shocked by a news photo of a dead polar bear which appeared to have starved and died. This     2    (alarm) case showed how the increase in temperature had an impact     3    Earth’s ecology.

Climate scientists often mention a key climate process     4    (call) the “greenhouse effect”,     5    has two common meanings. Without the “natural” greenhouse effect, Earth could not sustain life. However, the “man-made” greenhouse effect has now become a big problem because more heat energy     6    (trap) in the atmosphere, causing Earth’s surface temperature to rise quickly.

There is strong and comprehensive evidence that the rise in temperature has led to an increase in extreme weather and     7    (nature) disasters worldwide, not only causing serious damage, but also costing human lives. Climate scientists have warned that if we do not take appropriate actions, this warming trend will     8    (probable) continue and there will be a higher price     9    (pay).

Governments need to consider making policies and taking appropriate actions and measures to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. We as individuals can also reduce our “carbon footprint”. It is our     10    (responsible) to seize every opportunity to educate everyone about global warming, along with its causes and impacts.

2 . From airplanes to apartments, most spaces are now designed with sound-absorbing materials that help decrease various sounds of everyday life. But most of the sound-absorbing materials that can cancel out human voices, traffic noise and music are made from plastic foams (泡沫) that aren’t easily recycled or degraded. Now, researchers reporting in ACS Sustainable Chemistry & Engineering have created a biodegradable film (薄膜) obtained from seaweed, which effectively absorbs sounds in this range.

Controlling and optimizing the way sound moves throughout a room is the key to creating functional spaces. Foam sound-absorbing panels are a common solution, and they come in a variety of materials and thicknesses tailored to specific sound requirements. Most of these foams, however, are made from a type of plastic material and other chemical substances that are obtained from natural oil or petrol. To avoid petrochemicals, researchers have explored more renewable sources and biodegradable sound-absorbing alternatives. But many current options are made from plant fibers that don’t effectively decrease noises in the most useful range of sound frequencies, or they are too thick or difficult to produce. So, Chindam’s team wanted to develop a biodegradable material from a plant, which would be simple to produce and could absorb a range of sounds.

The team created films of agar (琼脂), a material that comes from seaweed, along with other additives developed from plants and varied the thickness of the films. After running the materials through a battery of tests, the researchers measured how well the films reduced sound across a range of frequencies. To do this, the team created a sound tube in which a speaker is placed at one end, and the test film is fitted over the other end. Microphones in the middle of the tube measured the amount of sound sent by the speaker and the amount of sound reflected off the film. These experiments showed that the films with many small holes made with the highest concentrations of agar had the greatest sound-absorbing qualities and performed similarly to traditional sound-absorbing foams. The researchers plan to explore ways to change the agar films to give them other desirable properties, such as flame resistance, and will explore other biologically obtained film materials.

3 . Habitat loss, pesticides (农药) and climate change are threatening insect populations worldwide. In 2019, Biological Conservation reported that 40% of all insects species are declining (减少) globally and that a third of them are endangered.

And while it may sound nice to live in a world with fewer bad insects, environmental writer Oliver Milman says that human beings would be in big trouble without insects. That’s because insects play important roles in pollinating (给……授粉) plants we eat, breaking down waste in forest soil and forming the base of a food chain that other larger animals—including humans—rely upon.

“It would be an extremely terrible place to live in—and certainly not something we should ever aim for,” Milman says of an insect-free existence. “You would certainly have mass starvation and social unrest... It’d be a place where there would be smelly waste and dead bodies everywhere because insects that break down those materials would be gone.”

Milman charts the troubling decline of insects in his new book, The Insect Crisis: The Fall of the Tiny Empires That Run the World. He says that while it’s impossible to know exactly what’s happening with every insect species in the world, the overall trends are not good: The butterfly population in North America has declined quickly in the past 40 years, for example, and a U. N. assessment done in 2019 found that half a million insect species are under threat of extinction, some in the coming decades.

“The world, our surroundings, would be far quieter, far duller without insects,” he says. “When you start kind of digging down into these figures looking at the research, it’s clear that there’s something seriously wrong... There is a straight decline in most insect populations, and that spells major trouble for them but also for us.”

Are People Unique?

A considerable number of people consider other species on earth are somehow inferior to us. Throughout the history, it has always been human beings’ pride    1     we are the only species on the Planet that can speak and think. However, recent research casts doubt on that common belief.

Zuberbuhler, a psychologist at St. Andrews University, and his colleagues recorded thousands of calls made by Diana’s monkeys and noticed that the monkeys adapted their calls to change the meaning    2    (warn) one another about different situations. For example, they made a krack alarm call at the sight of tiger. However, when they merely repeated calls made by other monkeys they added an “oo”.

The researchers found that the same calls     3    (recognize) by other species, like Campbell’s monkeys.“So they are communicating across species. And since then we have found that hornbill birds can understand these calls and they too can understand all the different meanings.” said Zuberbuhler.

    4     is also surprising is that signs of intelligence have been found in birds,     5     small brains were long assumed to be a complete barrier to intelligence. However, all that is changing fast. A few years ago Irene Pepperberg of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology taught a parrot to recognize and count up to six objects,     6    couldn’t have been achieved if birds were unable to memorize things.

Last year, that was topped by Alex Kacelnik, a professor of behavioral ecology at Oxford, who discovered that crows (G49) are capable of using tools on complex orders. This was the first time that such behaviour     7     (observe) in non-humans. In an experiment seven crows successfully grabbed a piece of food     8     (place) out of reach using three different lengths of stick. Crucially, they were able to complete the task without any special training,     9    (suggest) the birds were capable of a level of abstract reasoning normally associated only with humans.

All this is powerful evidence     10    the idea that people are unique.

9 . Do you know one bird whose name is crow (乌鸦)?Here is a story about one of them. There was once a lazy crow who thought it was too much trouble to _________ food. “Caw! Caw!” he said “If someone brought me my food every day, I’d be very _________!”

One day he saw a(n) _________ pigeon flying by. “How happy and well-fed it looks ” the crow said to himself. So the crow _________ the pigeon until they came to a _________. There were some other _________ there too. Before long an old man came along and brought them a large bag of food. When the man had gone ,the crow flew over to the pigeons. “Caw!Caw!” said he. “Can I _________ you?”

“No, you can’t!” _________ the pigeons angrily. “We don’t know you.”

The crow went home feeling _________. But he suddenly had a(n) __________. “I’ll paint my __________ grey,” he said, “and then the pigeons will __________ I am one of them.” After he finished the painting, he flew off to the park and was __________ by the pigeons. The crow was so hungry that he got very excited at the food. “Caw! Caw! Give food to me!” he said loudly. __________ the pigeons found he was a crow. They flew after him and made him __________.

Sadly the crow flew to his own forest. But when his old friends, the other crows saw him they asked him to __________. They did not __________ him because of his grey-painted feathers. So the crow felt __________ than before. His own __________ did not want him, __________ the pigeons wouldn’t let him into their group.

“What looks easier isn’t always so,” the crow said to himself. “I wish I had never painted my feathers grey!”

10 . The Arctic will soon be free from ice, experts say. The change is bound (必定的) to take place, but the global warming and climate change are changing the earth’ s landscape (地形) rapidly, causing panic worldwide.

Experts say that the Arctic sea ice is melting (融化) quite faster than expected and it can affect not just the region, but Earth in general. A scientist even says that next year, or maybe the year after that, the Arctic will be free of ice.

Peter Wadhams, a scientist, said that the melting trend led to his statement. “Most people expect this year will see a record low in the Arctic’s summer sea-ice cover. Next year or the year after that, I think it will be free of ice in summer and by that I mean the central Arctic will be ice-free,” Peter Wadhams, director of the Scott Polar Institute in Cambridge, said in an interview with the Guardian. “You will be able to cross over the North Pole by ship,” Peter Wadhams added. He strongly believes that although some pieces of ice will remain, the Arctic basin may be free of sea ice in the next two years starting in the summer of 2017.

Wadhams’ study says that melting sea ice will have a great influence on the planet since the sea ice is more able to reflect (反射) sunlight compared to water that can only reflect 10% of the sunlight. Once the sea ice melts, the water can only reflect a small amount of sunlight. This means that the Earth will receive and absorb more sunlight, making the planet even hotter.

The year 2016 has already broken records of the hottest temperature ever recorded and the trend doesn’t seem to show any decrease in global warming. “It doesn’t look like the ice is healing and growing back,” Tom Wagner, NASA’ s manager for cryosphere (冰冻圈) research said in a statement.

Like Wadhams, scientists and researchers all over the world are lecturing around to educate people to help lighten global warming that has already changed the planet’s landscape.