GUANGZHOU — At least 25 people have been confirmed dead after Super Typhoon Usagi made landfall in China’s Guangdong Province on Sunday evening, according to the provincial flood control headquarters.
“Electricity and water supply were cut off in the Huilai County, Jieyang City, and houses were collapsed as wind speeds at the center exceeded 180 km per hour on Sunday afternoon,” said Li Feng, a border police officer of the city.
Intercity trains between Guangzhou, Shenzhen and Zhuhai were suspended (暂停) at 6 pm and nearly 50 trains, including those along the high-speed lines to Beijing, Shenzhen and Hong Kong, would be suspended until Tuesday, according to the Guangzhou Railway Corporation.
At a Xiecheng gas station on National Road 324near Shanwei City, where at least 13 of the 25 victims were killed, winds were strong enough to blow cars off the road and all traffic was stopped. Resident Li Huolong said he was on his way home in Shanwei when the back window of his car was broken by the wind. Educational authorities in 14 cities ordered schools to suspend classes on Sunday, a school day in China because of the three-day Mid-Autumn Festival which just ended. More than 47000 fishing boats were in harbor, with nearly 20000 fishermen kept on shore. All beaches in the province have been closed.
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Most people all over the world travel by road. In a city in Italy, however, waterways makeup the primary commuting routes. The city of Venice is best known for its canals. Unfortunately, this beautiful city of flat-bottomed boats (Gondolas), and churches is sinking and sinking fast.
Known as the “Queen of the Adriatic”, Venice is situated on more than one hundred islands formed by canals between the mouths of the Po and Piave Rivers. And even the bits of firm ground have rather boggy foundations and all these are slowly getting eroded (腐蚀).
The existing groundwater table and the global climate changes that have raised sea levels by several inches, are proving its disaster for the city. As sea ice melts and water levels rise, floods in Venice are getting from bad to worse. And buildings are already feeling the impact of this phenomenon, with their foundations literally being shaken. Take one of the most famous landmarks of Venice for example, the St. Mark’s Basilica, now leans slightly to the left.
Experts warn that the city may sink an additional eight inches in the next 50 years. Many scared residents have already started to move to drier regions in Italy’s mainland. To deal with the flood threat, a group of Venetians, called the New Venice Consortium, has come up with “Project Moses”—a dam project named after the biblical figure, Moses. The idea is to place underwater gates at different points where the Adriatic Sea enters the lagoon (环礁湖). When the water is low, the gates will remain open and as the water rises, the gates will close, preventing the seawater from flooding Venice. However, some people disagree with this idea. Environ mentalists point out that the gates would have to remain closed most of the time and seawater will not be able to move in and out of Venice. As a result the lagoon water will become stagnant (停滞的), harming the fish and plants that live there. Until a viable (可实施的) solution is found out, Venice, it seems, would continue to be threatened by floods.
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Beaver or Polar Bear?
Beaver or polar bear? This is the question Canadians face as they rethink how they want to present themselves to the rest of the world?
It all started when a Conservative senator, Nicole Eaton, called for the replacement of the beaver as Canada’s official symbol. The beaver has represented the country since 1975. “A country’s symbols can change over time as long as they show the spirit of the people and the nation,” she told Reuters.
The debate that followed “has set fur flying across the country,” according to the BBC.
A stone beaver now sits on top of the entrance to the Canadian Parliament and appears on Canadian coins.
Supporters of the beaver say the animal is modest and hardworking. Glynnis Hood of the University of Alberta told the Canadian daily newspaper the National Post that beavers are like Canadians, representing “tenacity, intelligence and an ability to survive even the harshest climates.”
Others say the beaver played an important part in the history of Canada. In the 18th century, fashionable Europeans wore clothes made of beaver fur. Explorers went into the Canadian wilderness to find the fur. At the same time, they discovered more of their country. One member of Parliament from the province Manitoba told the BBC that removing the beaver would ignore its historical impact.
However, supporters of the polar bear believe it is a strong and powerful creature. It represents courage and pride, they say. Polar bears are at the top of the food chain. Beavers, on the other hand, are vegetarians. What is more, they are beaten by birds of prey like the eagle. And which country uses the eagle as its national symbol? Canada’s powerful neighbour, the USA.
BBC reporter Lorraine Mallinder called this an issue of “What does being Canadian mean?”
“No wonder so many Canadians are turning to the polar bear,” she wrote. “They are fed up with being seen as a weak people nation.”
However, the debate is still under way.
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Many of us might not give a second thought to dropping a small piece of litter. After all, if it is so small, it cannot possibly be that harmful, can it? In today's world, the answer is certainly “Yes it can!” With the growing use of plastic bags and the rising number of smokers, there is more litter being produced than ever before.
Although cigarette butts are small, they are bad for the environment. Worldwide, about 4.3 trillion cigarette butts are littered every year. As well as spoiling the beauty of the environment, they contain poisonous chemicals. These find their way into the water supply where they affect water quality and endanger plants and animals. Cigarette butts can take up to 25 years to break down, and the poisonous chemicals add up to a large amount with so many littered. So, if people want to smoke, they should cope with the butts properly in a rubbish bin.
Plastic bags are another common form of litter that is dangerous to the environment. They are easily blown by wind and float in water, so they can travel long distances. They find their way to rivers, parks, beaches, and oceans, killing many birds, mammals, fish, and sea animals each year worldwide. They can last for hundreds of years in the environment. We should not let plastic bags become litter. We should use fewer plastic bags, and reuse and recycle what we have already used. One way to reduce the use of plastic bags is to charge for them. Shops used to give plastic bags for free. But in some countries, including China, customers are now charged for each bag. Some shops also have a “bag-for-life” scheme. They sell stronger bags that can be reused, and they replace them for free if the bags ever break.
Waste is a big problem for the environment, so we need to do something. Not littering at all or cleaning up “small waste” saves money spent on getting rid of litter properly. However, it would be better not to smoke or use plastic bags at all.
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Is It Possible to be Green and Fashionable?
Despite the huge numbers of people who care about the environment and love clothes, there is a basic conflict about being green and being fashionable. This is because the fashion industry depends on a constant stream of ever-changing trends, which means you have to keep consuming. However, buying a lot of things that you don’t need, in this case new clothes, is harmful to the environment. Even so, there are still some measures you can take to achieve both goals.
Firstly, rather than basing your choice of clothes on whatever the fashion industry says you should, choose your own look. If you do this, you’ll look a lot more like an individual, and probably more genuinely stylish. It does not require any sense of style to copy the looks in glossy magazines. It does require some to develop your own. You’ll find that because your clothes aren’t going in and out of fashion every week, you’ll buy fewer and this helps the environment.
Some people think that another way of achieving this is to buy only natural fabrics, like cotton. But actually the production of some plant-based fabrics involves the use of enormous quantities of pesticides. In fact, cotton is an especially dirty crop, with methods used in its cultivation which can wreck the local environment. If you want to avoid adding to soil and water pollution in this manner, simply opt for organic fabrics.
While we’re on the subject of the materials, here’s a word of warning. Try to avoid buying clothes made from animal products, especially fur. Not only will this have the effect of reducing animal suffering, it will also reduce your environmental footprint; animal products have a larger impact than plant products because they consume more resources.
In the end, what you wear is your choice and no-one would suggest that this should not be a free choice. But we hope that, having read this, you will be fully aware of the impact your choices may have on the health of our planet.
The Useful Bean
Do you know what the common factor in bee food, vinyl plastic, and tofu is? It is the soybean. Some part of the soybean is used in these products as well as many other edible（可以食用的）and nonedible products.
The soybean is also considered to be one of the multipurpose and hardy plants. It can grow in low-quality soil. Throughout the life of the plant, a release of nutrients throughout plant roots makes soil more fertile. Soybeans are also very high in protein. With its hardiness, soil benefits, high-protein content, and various uses, some people believe the soybean will become the greatest weapon against world hunger.
There are three standard procedures taken from the soybean plant—oil, protein, and whole soybeans. Oil is used for edible purposes such as cooking oil and salad dressing. Industries make nonedible use of soybean oil by adding to antistatic sprays, printer ink, and shampoo. One significant nonedible use of soybean oil is the making of vinyl plastics. Vinyl is used to make everything from credit cards and garden hoses to computer parts.
Protein from the soybean is also used in edible and nonedible products. Edible uses for the protein include baby foods and hypoallergenic milk. Even animals benefit: bee food and fish food contain protein from the soybean. Some industries use the protein for nonedible purposes such as cosmetics, adhesives, yarn, and water-based paints.
Items made using whole soybeans are the most commonly recognized product of the soybean plant. Whole soybeans are used to make food for people and animals. Grocery stores carry a variety of foods made with whole soybeans. Some of these items are pancake flour, coffee, soymilk, soy sauce and tofu.
As the versatility（多用途）and hardiness of this bean gains popularity, more uses of soybean products will certainly be discovered.
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Pollution is the price we pay for an overpopulated, over industrialized planet. When you come to think about it, there are only four ways you can deal with rubbish: dump it, burn it, turn it into something you can use again, attempt to produce less of it. We keep trying all four methods, but the quantity of rubbish we produce worldwide threatens to overwhelm us. Rubbish, however, is only part of the problem of polluting our planet. There is an even more hidden kind of pollution that particularly affects urban areas and invades our daily lives,and that is noise.
A recent survey of the effects of noise revealed a large number of sources of noise that we really dislike: Lawn mowers whining on a summer's day, late-night parties in apartment blocks, noisy neighbors, vehicles of all kinds, especially large container trucks thundering through quiet village, planes and helicopters flying overhead, large radios carried round in public places and played at maximum volume. To our surprise, dogs' barking incessantly in the night rated the highest form of noise pollution on a scale ranging from one to seven.
New technology has also made its own contribution to noise. A lot of people object to mobile phones, especially when they are used in public places like restaurants or on public transport. Loud conversations on mobile phones invade our thoughts or interrupt the pleasure of meeting friends for a quiet chat.
The noise pollution survey revealed an amusing old fashioned source of noise. It turned out to be snoring (打鼾)! Men were found to be the worst offenders. It was revealed that 20% of men in their mid-thirties snore. This figure rises to a staggering 60% of men in their sixties. Against these figures, it was found that only 5% of women snore regularly, while the rest are constantly woken or kept awake by their trumpeting partners.
Whatever the source of noise, one thing is certain: silence, it seems, has become a golden memory.
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Could goats become our new best friends?
In a new paper in the journal Biology Letters, researchers from QMUL's School of Biological and Chemical Sciences found that goats respond to people by gazing at them when facing a problem they cannot solve alone, and their responses change depending on the person's behaviour.
To investigate, the team trained goats to remove a lid from a box to receive a reward. They made the reward inaccessible and recorded their reaction. In the test, the goats redirected their gaze frequently between the inaccessible reward and human experimenters. They also gazed towards a forward facing person earlier, more often and for longer compared to when the person was facing away.
The results provide strong evidence for complex communication between humans and goats, which were domesticated primarily for agricultural production, and show similarities with animals bred to become pets or working animals, such as dogs and horses.
The research indicates that the domestication of animals has a much broader impact on our knowledge about human-animal relationship than previously believed. For example, it's thought that the capacity of dogs to be aware of information from humans is the result of changes to the brain from becoming a companion animal through domestication.
“Goats were the first livestock species to be domesticated, about 10,000 years ago,” said lead author Dr Alan McElligott from the School's Department of Biological and Experimental Psychology.
From our research, we know that many domesticated animals for agricultural production are smarter than their reputation suggests, and these results show how they can communicate and interact with their human handlers just as pets or working animals.
The researchers hope the study will lead to a better understanding of how skilled livestock are in their ability to solve problems and interact with humans. They also wish that an improvement in animal welfare would be reached ultimately.
Bears and humans often meet in National Parks. Although campers and hikers are warned not to fed the bears, many people ignore these warning and feed the beasts anyway. When bears are used to people's food, problems soon arise.
Bears like to cat a large variety of things, both meat and vegetable. Without human assistance, bears live nicely on roots, twigs, leaves of trees, insects and small animals. With people around, the bears’ tastes quickly expand to in-chide sandwiches, hot dogs, hamburgers, and anything else they can temp humans into giving up.
Bears often develop clever strategics for getting people to let go their food supplies. More often than not, an unsuspecting hiker has taken off his or her pack for a rest only to have a bear charge out of the woods, grab the pack and quickly disappear into the underbrush with it. Hanging the pack on a tree branch won't help. Bears have been known to climb up, jump off, and catch the pack on the way down. One mother bear stretched up with her baby on her shoulders to reach a pack stored on a pole. Many bears threaten people into giving up their supplies. Although a bear is unlikely to attack a person and would probably run away if screamed at, few people are willing to do so. Most people drop the pack and run the other way. This, of course, delights the bear.
In some places, the Park Service installed some metal barrels with lids to help campers keep their supplies safe from bears. Although the bears were unable to open these containers, the effort was less than successful. Most campers, unable to tell the metal drums from rubbish cans, never used them for the intended purpose.
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In the past two hundred years, people have caused many kinds of animals to die out. People keep building houses and factories in fields and woods. As they spread over the land, they destroy animals’ homes. If animals can’t find a place to live, they die out. Sixteen kinds of Hawaiian birds have become extinct for this reason. Other animals, such as the Florida Key deer, may soon die out because they are losing their homes. Hunters have caused some animals to become extinct, too. In the last century, hunters killed all the passenger pigeons in North America and most of the buffaloes（水牛）.
Pollution is killing many animals today, too. As rivers become polluted, fish are poisoned. Many die. Birds that eat the poisoned fish can’t lay strong, healthy eggs. New birds aren’t born. So far, no animals have become extinct because of pollution. But some, such as the bald eagle （白头鹫）and the brown pelican（鹈鹕）, have become rare and may die out.
Scientists think that some animals become extinct because of changes in climate. The places where they live become hotter or cooler, drier or wetter. The food that they eat cannot grow there anymore. If the animals can’t learn to eat something else, they die. Dinosaurs （恐龙）may have died out for this reason.
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