1 . There exist a great variety of national parks that are representative of the different regions of the world. To reveal and maintain the great diversity of the interactions between humans and their environment, and to protect living cultures and preserve the traces (痕迹) of those which have disappeared, these sites have been included in the World Heritage List.

Lushan National Park, China

Mount Lushan, in Jiangxi, is one of the spiritual centres of Chinese civilization. Buddhist and Taoist temples, along with landmarks of Confucianism blend (融合) effortlessly into a strikingly beautiful landscape which has inspired countless artists who developed the aesthetic (美的) approach to nature found in Chinese culture. Special attention has been placed on protecting the cultural heritages and their settings as a whole.

Dinosaur Provincial Park, Canada

In addition to its particularly beautiful scenery, Dinosaur Provincial Park — located at the heart of the province of Alberta’s badlands — contains some of the most important fossil discoveries ever made from the “Age of Reptiles”, in particular about 35 species of dinosaur, dating back some 75 million years. These fossils are valuable materials for scientists to study the history of the earth.

Kaziranga National Park, India

In the heart of Assam, this park is one of the last areas in eastern India undisturbed by a human presence. It is inhabited by the world’s largest population of one-horned rhinoceroses, as well as many mammals, including tigers, elephants, panthers and bears, and thousands of birds.

Komodo National Park, Indonesia

These volcanic islands are inhabited by a population of around 5,700 giant lizards, whose appearance and attacking behaviour have led to them being called “Komodo dragons”. They exist nowhere else in the world and are of great interest to scientists studying the theory of evolution.

3 . Dormice (睡鼠), which prefer to sleep in the holes of old trees, are losing their tree holes. Centuries of wood harvesting have exterminated many of dormice from countries such as Poland, Belarus, Latvia, and Lithuania. But one temporary solution is helping.

“We have to keep this connection between dormice and the forest,” says Tadas Bujanauskas, senior ecologist at Lithuania’s Neris Regional Park, “because if we let this go, it’s hard to get back.” Neris Regional Park’s dormouse nest box and conservation program began in 2005 as part of a sustainable forestry certification with the Forest Stewardship Council, based in Bonn, Germany. So far, park staff have installed 250 nest boxes throughout the park’s dense, old-growth oak forests.

A dormouse nest box resembles a standard birdhouse tied to a tree trunk. There’s enough space between the trunk and the entrance hole for the rodents, such as rabbits, to move in and out of their artificial lairs (巢穴), but so little that it’s difficult for predators such as owls to attack.

Best of all, nest boxes bring the previously mysterious creatures within reach for scientists. By placing cameras in nest boxes, researchers can check in on the animal whenever they want. As a result, they’ve logged all kinds of ecological data, such as sex, weight, birth rates, and diet of the houses’ inhabitants.

In addition to monitoring nest boxes, Bujanauskas and his colleagues seek out and protect individual trees that could provide habitat for dormice and other species in the future.

The U.K. has placed more than 26,000 nest boxes over 30 years to boost their hazel dormice population, which has fallen by 51 percent since 2000, according to Ian White, the dormouse training officer for the nonprofit People’s Trust For Endangered Species.

“Dormice are cute and they’re a nice animal to work with,” White says, “if we get the habitat right for them, it can actually benefit a broad range of other species.”

Already famous at home, now China’s wandering elephants are becoming international stars. Major global media are recording     1     group more than yearlong, 500-kilometer walk from their home in a wildlife reserve in mountainous southwest Yunnan province to the outskirts of the provincial capital of Kunming.

The fifteen elephants     2     (catch) at night trotting(疾走) down urban streets by security cameras over the past months, followed by those     3     (seek)to minimize damage and keep both elephants and people out of harm’s way.     4     no animals or people have been hurt, reports put damage to crops at more than $1 million.

    5     exactly motivated them to make the epic journey remains a mystery, although they appear to be especially attracted to corn, tropical fruit and other crops, tasty and     6    (plenty) and easy to obtain in the lush tropical region. Others have speculated their leader may be simply lost.

Asian elephants, the continent’s largest land animal, are     7     decline overall. Habitat loss and resulting human-wildlife conflict     8     (be) their biggest threats. Elephants are given the top level of protection in China, allowing their numbers to       9     (steady) increase even as their natural habitat shrinks, and requiring farmers and others     10    (exercise) maximum restraint when encountering them.

8 . In the far North, fire season usually doesn’t start until June, when snow has melted away and summer lightning storms sweep into the region. So scientist Sander Veraverbeke was confused when in May of 2016 he saw little patches of fire on some satellite images from Alaska and the Northwest Territories.

“I was like, what the hell is going on?” says Veraverbeke, an Earth scientist at the Vrije Universiteit of Amsterdam in the Netherlands.

What he saw on the satellite images were “zombie fires,” remains of burns from the previous year that somehow stayed alive, smoldering underground, through the long, cold winter.

Zombie fires aren’t an entirely new phenomenon in the Arctic; fire managers have noted occasional flare-ups in past decades. But Veraverbeke’s team found that their occurrences are tightly linked to climate change, happening more often after hot, long summers with lots of fire and suggesting that these still-rare events could become more frequent.

“The sheer fact that this is happening is evidence for how quickly the region is changing,” he says.

Like all forests, the wooded stretches of the Arctic sometimes catch on fire. But unlike many forests in the mid-latitudes, which thrive on or even require fire to preserve their health, Arctic forests have evolved to burn only infrequently.

Climate change is reshaping that mode. In the first decade of the new millennium, fires burned 50 percent more acreage each year in the Arctic, on average, than any decade in the 1900s. Between 2010 and 2020, burned acreage continued to creep up, particularly in Alaska, which had its second worst fire year ever in 2015 and another bad one in 2019. Scientists have found that fire frequency today is higher than at any time since the formation of boreal (北极的) forests some 3,000 years ago, and potentially higher than at any point in the last 10,000 years.

10 . An argument will break down if one of the premises is not true or if the conclusion does not logically follow from them. For example, consider this argument:

The deer population in our state should be preserved. During the hunting season hundreds of deer are killed. Therefore, the hunting season should be discontinued.

To challenge this argument, the state’s wildlife commission might agree with both the major and minor premises but question whether the conclusion follows logically from them. True, the deer population should be preserved; true, deer are killed during the hunting season. However, in a state where deer have no natural enemies, herds become too large for the natural forest vegetation to support them. The overpopulated herds eat the leaves of the young trees, killing the trees, before dying of starvation themselves. The commission might conclude, therefore, that a limited hunting season helps preserve a healthier and more stable population of deer.

People who already agree with you need no persuasion, although a well-argued case for their own point of view is always welcome. But indifferent and doubting people will tend to resist your argument because they have minds of their own. To convince them, you will need to refute(驳斥)opposing arguments.

To give up a position that seems reasonable, the arguer has to see that there is an even more reasonable one. In addition to presenting your own case, review the chief arguments of the other side and explain what you think is wrong with them.

It is the best way to deal with the other side. Often it is useful to summarize the opposing position. Sometimes a better plan is to anticipate objections as you develop your detailed reasons for your argument. Wherever you decide to deal with opposing arguments, do your best to refute them.

As you refute opposition arguments, try to establish common ground with readers who at first do not agree with your views. If you can show that you share their values, they may be able to switch to your position without giving up what they feel is important. For example, to persuade people emotionally opposed to shooting helpless deer, a state wildlife commission would have to show that it too cares about preserving deer and does not want them to die needlessly. Having established these values in common, the commission might be able to persuade people that a carefully controlled hunting season is good for the deer population because it prevents starvation caused by over-population. However, if those opposed to hunting want to persuade the commission to ban the hunting season, they would need to show that the commission could achieve its goals by some other means, such as expanding the deer preserve or allowing the deer and the food supply to come into a natural balance.