In Venice, it is not uncommon to see tourists carry suitcases through waist-high water, or sit at tables in Piazza San Marco     1     their swimsuits. Pictures of Venice in the most dramatic flooding are really alarming.

We are used to thinking of Venice as a city in danger, a glorious relic of human creativity that is about to sink any day suddenly the end looks     2     (close). However, as climate change makes extreme weather more frequent, Venice looks less like a victim of the sea and more like an old survivor     3     can teach the rest of the world now to live with wafer.

People barely notice     4     smartly the art treasures of Venice are kept on the upper floors of palaces and museums, even on a dry summer day. It is also needless to worry about all the art in churches     5     no other city has such a sharp awareness of protecting itself from water.

In their art, the people of Venice are as happy on water as on land. Vittore Carpaccio's painting Hunting on the Lagoon shows young Venetians standing easily balanced in low-sided boats     6     (shoot) arrows at water birds. In a Gentile Bellini's painting, priests swim in the canal searching for a lost relic. Titian portrays ashot woman     7     (bathe) in open water in his painting. Hunting and fishing, swimming and showing. Venetians always know how to enjoy water.

The palaces     8     (build) in Venice are also good examples of the prevention of flood.     9     has its living spaces on upper floors, often with a courtyard on the ground floor that     10     (drain) water instantly.

3 . The ocean bottom - a region nearly 2.5 times greater than the total land area of the Earth - is a vast frontier that even today is largely unexplored and uncharted. Until about a century ago, the deep-ocean floor was completely inaccessible, hidden beneath waters averaging over 36, 000 meters deep. In complete darkness and subjected to intense pressures hundreds of times greater than at the Earth's surface, the deep-ocean bottom is an unfriendly environment to humans, in some ways as forbidding and remote as outer space.

Although researchers have taken samples of deep-ocean rocks and sediments (沉淀物) for over a century now, the first detailed global investigation of the ocean bottom did not actually start until 1968, with the beginning of the National Science Foundation's Deep Sea Drilling Project (DSDP) . Using techniques first developed for the offshore oil and gas industry, the DSDP's drill ship, the Glomar Challenger, was able to maintain a steady position on the ocean's surface and drill in very deep waters, pulling out samples of sediment and rock from the ocean floor.

The Glomar Challenger completed 96 voyages in a 15-year research program that ended in November 1983. During this time, the vessel logged 600, 000 kilometers and took almost 20, 000 core samples of seabed sediments and rocks at 624 drilling sites around the world. The Glomar Challenger's core samples have allowed geologists to reconstruct what the planet looked like hundreds of millions of years ago and to calculate what it will probably look like millions of years in the future. Today, largely on the strength of evidence gathered during the Glomar Challenger's voyages, nearly all earth scientists agree on the theories of plate tectonics (板块构造学说) and continental drift that explain many of the geological processes that have come to shape the Earth.

The cores of sediment drilled by the Glomar Challenger have also produced information critical to understanding the world's past climates. Deep-ocean sediments provide a climatic record that stretches back for hundreds of millions of years, because they are largely isolated from the mechanical erosion (侵蚀) and the intense chemical and biological activity that rapidly destroy much land-based evidence of past climates. This record has already provided insights into the patterns and causes of past climatic change—information that may be used to predict future climates.

Sneakers (运动鞋) Made from Old Chewing Gum

Dutch fashion and shoe label Explicit Wear is hoping to solve one of life’s sticky situations—the annoyance of stepping in waste chewing gum on the pavement—while helping to keep Amsterdam’s city streets clean. The brand has partnered with local marketing organization Iamsterdam and sustainability firm Gumdrop     1    (create) a   limited edition sneaker for adults made from recycled gum collected from   the city’s pavements.

Chewing gum causes an incredibly serious ecological problem,    2    it is made from plastics that do not biodegrade ( 生物降解). It’s also the second     3    (common) form of roadside litter, after cigarette ends. An incredible 3.3 million pounds of gum are incorrectly thrown away on the sidewalks each year,    4    (cost) the city millions of dollars to clean up. Gumdrop plans to collect waste gum from the streets of Amsterdam, clean them, and turn them into Gum-Tec, the material that forms the base of the shoe.

The waste gum will be put to good use to make stylish kicks,    5    will also raise awareness for the anti-littering cause.    6    (price) at around $332, the shoes will come into the market sometime next month.

Available for preorder now, the new Gumshoe sneakers—offered in both a bubblegum pink and a black/red colorway—     7     (feature) long-lasting rubber outsoles (鞋子外底)   shaped   from   recyclable   compounds produced by Gumdrop, 20 percent of which are made from gum.

Nearly 2.2 pounds of gum     8    (use) in every four pairs of shoes. A map of Amsterdam is made into the bottom of the soles to remind people of the littering problem. Even better, the sneakers actually still smell like bubblegum,    9    the annoying stickiness. Just as good as any sneaker with a rubber sole, the Gumshoes help   get chewing gum off our streets and keep the dangerously non-biodegradable substance out of our eco-system.

To help spread their sustainability message,    10    Gumshoe’s creators are hoping to do is to expand their project to other major cities around the world.

6 . Space exploration has always been the province of _________: The human imagination readily soars where human ingenuity (创造力) _________ to follow. A Voyage to the Moon, often cited as the first science fiction story, was written by Cyrano de Bergerac in 1649. Cyrano was dead and buried for a good three centuries before the first manned rockets started to fly.

In 1961, when President Kennedy declared that America would send a man to the moon by the decade’s end, those words, too, had a dreamlike quality. They resonated (共鸣) with _________ and ambition in much the same way as the most famous _________ speech of all, delivered by Martin Luther King Jr. two years later. By the end of the decade, both visions had yielded concrete results and _________ American society. And yet in many ways the two dreams ended up in _________ with each other. The fight for racial and economic equality is intensely pragmatic (讲求实用的) and immediate in its impact. The urge to explore space is just the opposite .It is figuratively and literally otherworldly(超现实的) in its _________.

When the dust settled, the space dreamers lost out. There was no grand follow-up to the Apollo missions. The technologically compromised space shuttle program has just come to an end, with no _________. The perpetual(不断的) argument is that _________ are tight, that we have more pressing problems here on Earth. Amid the current concerns about the federal deficit(赤字), reaching toward the stars seems a dispensable luxury-- __________ saving one-thousandth of a single year’s budget would solve our problems.

But human ingenuity struggles on. NASA is developing a series of robotic probes that will get the most bang for a buck. They will serve as modern Magellans, __________ out the solar system for whatever explorers follow, whether man or machine. On the flip side, companies like Virgin Galactic are plotting a bottom-up attack on the space dream by making it a reality to the public. Private spaceflight could lie within reach of rich civilians in a few years. Another decade or two and it could go __________.

The space dreamers end up __________ all of us-- not just because of the way they expand human knowledge, or because of the spin-off technologies they produce, but because the two types of dreams feed off each other. Both Martin Luther King and John Kennedy appealed to the idea that humans can go beyond what were once considered inherent __________. Today we face seeming challenges in energy, the environment, health care. Tomorrow we will transcend(超越) these as well, and the dreamers will deserve a lot of the credit. The more evidence we collect that our species is __________ of greatness, the more we will actually achieve it.

8 . WE COMBAT ANIMAL DISEASES TOGETHER!

We want to prevent serious animal diseases such as foot and mouth disease, classical swine fever and African swine fever from spreading to Finland. These and other animal diseases can be transmitted from one country to another by animals or by meat and dairy products even if they are packed for personal consumption or intended as gifts. Travelers like you play an important role in preventing the spread of animal diseases.

Don’t bring meat, meat products, milk and dairy products from non-EU countries to Finland!

A ban on personal imports applies to meat and dairy products brought into Finland by travelers or ordered and sent through the post. The ban applies to food stuffs intended for personal consumption or as gifts and to pet food. If you have food products of animal origin with you, throw them in a waste container in the point of entry or contact Customs!

Bringing meat-containing products as presents and for personal use from an EU country to Finland

At the moment, there are EU countries with cases of African swine fever. In those countries there are restriction areas and, as a rule, pork and wild bear meat or products containing these meats may not be imported from these areas into Finland. Import is allowed only under very strict criteria controlled by local authorities. However, the sales of these meat products within the country may be allowed. In the EU, the disease has been detected in Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Belgium and Italy (Sardinia), for instance. It is difficult for travelers to know and prove from which area meat products originate and whether the products on sale meet all criteria. This is the reason why we recommend that people avoid importing any meat products containing pork or wild bear meat as presents or for personal use from countries with African swine fever.

PLEASE NOTE! Never leave any food waste or leftover in the environment or places where they may be eaten by wildlife. Never give food waste or leftover to production animals or to pet pigs.

Thank you for helping us to prevent the spread of animal diseases. We wish you a pleasant journey!

9 . Escaping predators (食肉动物), digestion and other animal activities—including those of humans—require oxygen. But that essential ingredient is no longer so easy for marine life to obtain, several new studies reveal.

In the past decade ocean oxygen levels have taken a dive—an alarming trend that is linked to climate change, says Andreas Oschlies, an oceanographer at the Helmholtz Center for Ocean Research in Germany, whose team tracks ocean oxygen levels worldwide. “We were surprised by the intensity of the changes we saw, how rapidly oxygen is going down in the ocean and how large the effects on marine ecosystems are,” he says. It is no surprise to scientists that warming oceans are losing oxygen, but the scale of the drop calls for urgent attention. Oxygen levels in some tropical (热带的) regions have dropped by an astonishing 40 percent in the last 50 years, some recent studies reveal. Levels have dropped less significantly elsewhere, with an average loss of 2 percent globally.

A warming ocean loses oxygen for two reasons: First, the warmer a liquid becomes, the less gas it can hold. That is why carbonated drinks go flat faster when left in the sun. Second, as polar sea ice melts, it forms a layer of water above colder, more salty sea waters. This process creates a sort of lid that can keep currents from mixing surface water down to deeper depths. And because all oxygen enters the surface, less mixing means less of it at depth.

Ocean animals large and small, however, respond to even slight changes in oxygen by seeking refuge in higher oxygen zones or by adjusting behavior, Oschlies and others in his field have found. These adjustments can expose animals to new predators or force them into food-scarce regions. Climate change already poses serious problems for marine life, such as ocean acidification, but deoxygenation is the most pressing issue facing sea animals today, Oschlies says. After all, he says, “they all have to breathe.”

Aside from food web problems, animals face various other physiological challenges as their bodies adjust to lower oxygen levels. Chinese shrimp (虾) move their tails less vigorously to preserve energy in lower oxygen environments. Some creatures, such as jellyfishes, are more tolerant of low oxygen than others are. But all animals will feel the impact of deoxygenation because they all have evolved their oxygen capacity for a reason, says Oschlies. “Any drop in oxygen is going to damage survivability and performance,” he says.