1 . My childhood is closely associated with the Yellow River. My father ______ to take me with him on his trips to Longyangxia Reservoir. At Longyangxia, I was ______ by the beauty of nature and as a child, I wanted to stay there and ______ up with the Yellow River. Li Bai, a poet of the Tang Dynasty, praised the ______ water of the Yellow River. He saw it as coming down from heaven and ______ the people living on the banks of the river. However, in 1997, for about 330 days, not a single ______ of water from the Yellow River went into the sea. ______ are not the only punishments given by nature. A friend of my father, a university professor, is doing ______ on the Yellow River. According to him, since there is no longer enough water to ______ the mud, the river may soon change its course ______ we allow this situation to continue. This is the ______ of unbalanced growth. If we’d taken care of the vegetation in the upper and middle ______ of the river, we would still be able to ______ it as Li Bai described it.

In fact, people have begun to ______ the problem. I have seen farmers _______ trees on mountain slopes in Shanxi province. I have seen them ______ up the hillsides carrying heavy buckets of water collected several kilometers away down in the valley to ______ around the trees. These farmers are ______ helping our Yellow River, just as the river has helped them. These unsung heroes gave me the confidence that with hard work of us all, we and nature will grow together, and ______ in the future, we will be able to drink the ______ water from the Yellow River-our mother river.

3 . In a dark room, it may seem there will be little to detect in the darkness. However, a bird in the room will be able to pick up on the magnetic field(磁场)of the earth and will know which direction to fly if it is time to migrate(迁徙). A snake will detect the presence of humans in the room by sensing their radiation. Each of these creatures could all be sharing exactly the same physical space and have a totally different experience of that space.

Each animal has access to its own sensory environment — called an “umwelt”. “Umwelt” was popularized by a German biologist named Jakob von Uexküll. The word comes from the German for “environment”, but Jakob von Uexküll wasn’t using it to mean the physical environment. He meant the sensory environment, the unique set of smells, sights, sounds and textures that each animal has access to.

Humans can’t sense the faint electric fields that sharks and ducks can, or the magnetic fields that robins and sea turtles detect. Our ears can’t hear the call of rodents and hummingbirds, and our eyes can’t see the light that birds and bees can sense. Our noses can’t detect various odors(气味)that dogs would be able to smell.

So imagining the world as animals perceive it opens up a new appreciation for the everyday wonders of nature. If we think of nature as something remote and distant, accessible only to someone who can go to a national park, we lose the motivation to save and protect it.

Instead, we can go on an adventure just by thinking about the sensory world of the bird that sits on the house opposite us. Then nature would feel like something close. In that case, people will be more motivated to try and protect it. Protecting nature isn’t just about saving whales or pandas, but about protecting things that are close to us.

4 . We arrived at the cat shelter on the same day. I needed something to keep me busy outside school and decided to volunteer at the city’s cat shelter. One-year-old female cat Linni arrived that day with its mother. They were painfully shy. They’d lived for years locked in a house with no light or socialization, just an occasional bag of cat food thrown down to them after their loud complaint.

All our cats were sociable, eager to greet visitors for adoption. Linni’s mother found a new home, but Linni was terrified of everything, always hiding somewhere when I arrived for work, inside the darkness or under the furniture.

If someone tried to pet her, she’d be terrified. I’d routinely search for her at the start, leaving her food and sitting on the floor to talk to her softly. After several months, she’d sometimes appear slowly, looking at me while eating the food I’d brought. Instead of petting her, I’d talk to her as she ate and watched me. I knew that, being badly treated before, she saw her trust as a weakness or an invitation for bad people to hurt her.

I discovered she adored soft cloth. I’d offer her blankets and towels, carefully selected, at her feet. She’d bury her head in them. A mistreated child was learning there were soft and comforting things out there.

Winter came. It had been a year since Linni and I came. One day, when her head was buried in the folds of a soft woolen blanket, I tried to pet her, and she didn’t run away. I took her home to my small apartment. Gradually, we learned to trust and love each other.

A decade later, when I come home from work, she’ll be there to greet me. As a veterinary(兽医) nurse now, I specialize in cat behaviour and health. But I learned all my techniques and patience from Linni. She gave me a career.

6 . New York’s Central Park has a statue dedicated to him, and there’s even been a movie about him: a sled dog named Balto. Now he is the focus of a DNA study, 90 years after he died, to see what made the dog so famously tough (坚韧).

In 1925, this Siberian husky was part of an expedition in Alaska called the serum run, the goal of which was to bring life-saving medicine to young people that were threatened by a deadly disease in the remote town of Nome, over 600 miles away. Balto led the long-distance stretch, and wound up getting most of the honor.

After Balto’s death in 1933, his remains were preserved and put on display at the Cleveland Museum of Natural History.

“Balto’s fame and the fact that he was taxidermized gave us this cool opportunity 100 years later to see what that population of sled dogs would have looked like genetically and to compare him to modern dogs,” said Katherine Moon, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of California.

Her team took skin samples from the dog’s belly and reconstructed its genome — the complete set of genes in an organism. They compared this genetic material with that of 680 contemporary dogs from 135 breeds.

Contrary to a legend that thought that Balto was half wolf — as suggested in an animated Universal Pictures film that came out in 1995 — this analysis found no evidence he had wolf blood. It turned out Balto shared ancestors with modern day Siberian Huskies and the sled dogs of Alaska and Greenland.

Moon’s team also compared Balto’s genes with the genomes of 240 other species of mammals.

This allowed researchers to determine which DNA fragments (片段) were common across all those species and have not therefore changed over the course of millions of years of evolution. This stability suggests that these fragments of DNA are associated with important functions in the animal, and that mutations (基因突变) there could be dangerous.

The bottom line from the research was that Balto had fewer potentially dangerous mutations than modern breeds of dogs did, suggesting he was healthier.

8 . Discover Jiangsu

Known as shui xiang, or “the land of water”, China’s coastal province of Jiangsu has all the geographical advantages to give it a starring role in the epic tale of China’s ancient Maritime (海上的) Silk Road. With busy port cities, historic sites and breathtaking natural beauty, Jiangsu is the perfect place to trace the story of this remarkable trade route.

At the dawn of the Ming dynasty the city of Nanjing in Jiangsu was declared capital of China. As well as building one of the longest city walls in history, the emperor ordered the construction of vast “treasure ships” in 1403. Under the command of legendary seafarer Zheng He, the fleet embarked on seven epic ocean voyages, reaching as far as the east coast of Africa.

In Jiangsu’s port city of Nantong, goods have flowed in and out of the province by water for centuries. Today, fleets of hardy fishing boats catch yellow croaker, seabream, sea crabs and more. Beyond Lusi Port Town, a busy seascape of boats travel on the waters of Jiangsu’s coast. It’s a scene that shows how China’s historic Maritime Silk Road continues to thrive and grow to this day.

Salt was one of the commodities that played a key role in the history of trade in Jiangsu, contributing to the wealth and prosperity of the province. A major source was the tidal salt flats of Yancheng, which literally means “salt city”. This remarkable landscape also plays host to the epic migrations of rare bird species like cranes, egrets, and spoonbill sandpipers.

In the Jiangsu city of Yangzhou, a Tang-dynasty monk by the name of Jianzhen set sail to Japan to spread the teachings of Buddhism. Daming Temple, where Jianzhen lived, can still be visited today.

Centuries earlier, Buddhism first settled on Jiangsu’s shores. Kongwang Mountain in Lianyungang has some of China’s earliest examples of Buddhist art. These carvings show how the Maritime Silk Road helped spread religion across China.

9 . According to a recent study in Science, pigs are providing convincing new evidence that animals may respond emotionally to music. The finding may lead to ways to improve their welfare on farms. “It’s a really neat study that shows animals are more emotionally attuned (音感好的) to music than people think”, says Charles Snowdon, an animal behaviour expert at the University of Wisconsin.

Music is sometimes used as enrichment for animals and other captive animals. And Snowball the dancing cockatoo (凤头鹦鹉) likes to dance to the Backstreet Boys. But whether these creatures have a true emotional response to the tunes is unclear. That’s what the new study aimed to do — but with pigs. Coauthor Maria Camila Ceballos, an animal welfare scientist, says she chose these animals because they are intelligent and social, and face serious welfare challenges on factory farms.

The researchers composed music that were either consonant or dissonant. To humans, consonant music generally sounds pleasant whereas dissonance tends to sound uncomfortable. The team then filmed six litters of young pigs listening to the music, which was played in a random order with a break in between.

The researchers scored the pigs’ body language using an approach called QBA. Pieces of consonant music were linked to the pigs experiencing positive emotions, whereas the dissonant music was linked to negative emotions, the team reports this month in Scientific Reports. “So we found that, yes, music generates different emotions,” Ceballos says.

Animal welfare scientist Jun Bao from a university in China is skeptical about whether Ceballos’s team detected emotions, however. He recently found that exposure to music increases play and tail wagging in pigs, which he sees as signs of a “positive mood”. However, he says it’s not clear that pigs labeled as “happy” or “uneasy” through QBA actually experience those emotions.

Ceballos hopes the study will help researchers create welfare-improving music, tailor-made to a specific species. Bao also agrees, adding “It’s really interesting, because if it works, it would be the handiest and cheapest way to enrich their environment.”