Flash floods hit Longcaogou of Pengzhou, Southwest China’s Sichuan Province on Saturday. Seven people     1     (kill) and eight others slightly injured. Local authorities announced on Sunday, noting that some tourists     2     were camping in the dried-up river were trapped in the flood after failing     3     (escape) in time.

More than 500     4     (rescuer) are conducting a search of valleys and rivers to find lost tourists over the weekend, said local authorities, adding that at least 15 professional rescue teams,     5     (include) mountain rescue and diving rescue teams, are taking part in the rescue work. The rescue work at the scene     6     (draw)to a close.     7     Longcaogou was hit by floods in 2015 and 2017, it has not stopped tourists from visiting the area.

Meanwhile, Longcaogou has been     8     (wide) recommended on social media platforms     9     a “new Instagram-worthy location” and a “nice holiday resort.” Many bloggers posted pictures of the valley’s beautiful scenery and their trips on     10     lifestyle-sharing platforms with captions recommending that people go there.

2 . In a series of Instagram posts this week the actress Kate Beckinsale shows her growing friendship with a fox in her mother’s London garden, encouraging him on to her lap by handfeeding him bits of ham and naming him Peepo. It’s as if Beckinsale is auditioning (试演) for alive-action of Snow White, commanding a series of forest animals at her finger tips.

Beckinsale-like pretty much one woman on every urban UK street—is a “fox feeder”. This troubles me. Not because of the old horror stories about city foxes stealing babies from their beds, but because it means that I have to accept that I’m not very cool. Foxes, on the other hand, are unbelievably cool. They were voiced in Wes Anderson’s stop-motion film Fantastic Mr Fox by the silver fox himself, George Clooney.

To be anti-fox is to be with Dahl’s boring rule-followers, Boggis, Bunce and Bean. To be pro-fox is to be with Ricky Gervais delightedly, filming Foxes partying in his Hampstead garden, or the DJ Annie Mac filming, this summer, a fox strolling into her kitchen from her London patio. The fox takes a cold glance at Mac sitting on the sofa, ignores her, then cuts her shoe before loping off out the door. It was a mint green Nike Air Force 1, retailing at about 100 a pair.

The London Wildlife Trust estimates that there are 10, 000 foxes in the capital and about half of them sleep in our garden. They have wandered into the house and learnt how to open the lock on our food waste bin by rolling it over and over down the street at 2 am until the lid swings open.

A few days ago I was at my front door late at night finding my key awkwardly when a fox walked behind me. Even though her dinner plans-the food-waste picnic hamper were right there, she seemed more interested in going to the house party without being invited. Only after I’d banged the door in her face did I feel safe. Do you still think it kind and safe to feed foxes?

Fun Facts about Pigeons

Pigeons are the most misunderstood of all creatures. Upon seeing a flock of pigeons, many people want     1     more than to run a mile in the other direction. Pigeons are commonly viewed as carriers and spreaders of disease, but that’s actually not true. People may be surprised to learn that these creatures have a number of     2     (fascinate) characteristics that should not be overlooked.

First, pigeons are highly skilled navigators (领航员). A pigeon can find its way back to its nest after     3     (transport) more than a thousand miles away from it! Because of this ability, humans     4     (use) pigeons to their advantage for centuries.

Another interesting yet not so admirable quality of pigeons is that they appear to be master procrastinators (拖延者). Scientific studies have shown that pigeons often delay the completion of a dull or troublesome task when an immediately     5     (convenient) alternative is available. Maybe pigeons could “give humans a run for their money” when it comes to putting off work!

Next, we come to the unpleasant topic of pigeon droppings. Urban dwellers are used to seeing streets     6     (litter) with these droppings. Although pigeon poo is seen as a problem in modern times, several centuries ago, it was actually considered a valuable commodity     7     its usefulness as a fertilizer.

Finally, it cannot be denied     8     intelligent creatures pigeons are. In addition to their navigation skills and excellent sense of hearing, they can distinguish between the letters of the Roman alphabet and differentiate between human faces in photographs.

So,     9     you feel disgusted upon encountering a pigeon,     10     (remember) that besides carrying little disease risk, these birds are smart creatures with many wonderful abilities.

5 . How do you teach a monkey new tricks? Labs have proved difficult places to train monkeys to respond to different sounds, but in the forests of Senegal’s Niokolo-Koba National Park, researchers were astonished how quickly one species of monkey adapted its behavior to a new sound.

Julia Fischer at the German Primate Center in Gottingen and her team flew drones over a community of green monkeys in the area, to see what they made of a new flying object in their environment. They responded instantly, making alarm calls to warn one another of the potential new threat.

The vocalizations were distant from the ones they made in response to models of leopards and snakes, but almost identical to calls made by a related species of monkey about eagles. The results suggest a hardwired response to the perception of an aerial threat and the use of that specific call.

They monkeys adapted so quickly to the mechanical noise that they began scanning the skies and making the calls even when the sound of the drone was played from the ground. The monkeys were never seen issuing alarm calls in response to birds of prey in the area, suggesting that the birds they usually see aren’t considered a threat. The drones, however, seemed to be perceived as dangerous. “It’s certainly disconnecting, unpredictable, something they’ve not seen before, so it makes sense to alert everybody,” say Fischer. She says she was “blown away” by how rapidly the monkeys appeared to learn. “The listeners are smart. It’s almost impossible to get a monkey in a lab to do an audio task. It isn’t clear why such learning is harder in a lab environment,” she says.

The study involved a year’s worth of fieldwork by a team of eight, who flew the drone about 60 meters above the monkeys. The research wasn’t without incident. Fisher had to duck inside a shelter made of palm leaves at one point, after a baboon ran to attack the leopard model she was holding.

Vervet monkeys in East Africa are related to green monkeys. They have been closely studied for the different calls they make in response to a variety of predators, including pythons, leopards, baboons and martial eagles.

The expectation for the green monkey study was that they would stay silent. come up with a new alarm call or produce one similar to the velvet monkeys’ eagle call. Fischer’s bet was on the eagle call option, and she was proved right. The vocalization appears to be highly conserved by evolution. “It teaches us about how different their vocal communication system is from ours,” says Fischer. “There is a very limited level of flexibility.”

7 . Swarm Immunity

Honeybees run vaccination programmes, too. An old saw has it that there is nothing new under the sun.     1     Work just published in the Journal of Experimental Biology by Gyan Harwood of the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, confirms that honeybees got there first. It also suggest that they run what look like the equivalent of prime-boost childhood vaccination programmes.

Being gregarious, honeybees are at constant risk of diseases sweeping through their hives. Most animals which live in crowded conditions have particularly robust immune systems, so it long puzzled entomologists that honeybees do not.     2    

Part of the answer, discovered in 2015, is that queen bees vaccinate their eggs by transferring into them, before they are laid, fragments of proteins from disease-causing pathogens.     3     But that observation raise the question of how the queen receives her antigen supply in the first place, for she subsists purely on royal jelly, a substance secreted by worked bees which are at the stage of their lives (which precedes the period that they spend flying around foraging for nectar and pollen) when they act as nurses to larvae. Dr Harwood therefore wondered if the nurses were incorporating into the royal jelly they were producing, fragments from pathogens they had consumed while eating the victuals brought to the hive by the foragers.

To test this idea, he teamed up with a group at the University of Helsinki, in Finland, led by Heli Salmela.     4     Instead of nectar, they fed the nurses on sugar-water, and for these of the hives they laced this syrup with Paenibacillus larvae, a bacterium that causes a hive-killing disease called American foulbrood.

Wildfires rage as China’s Chongqing suffers unrelenting record heat wave

From: CNN       August 23, 2022

Thousands of emergency responders are battling to     1     fast-spreading wildfires in China’s southwestern city of Chongqing amid a weeks-long, record heat wave in the region.

The fires, which have been visible at night from parts of the downtown area, have     2     forests and mountains around the mega city in recent days. On social media, residents in downtown Chongqing complained of smelling smoke inside their apartments, while others posted pictures of burning embers from the fires reaching their balconies.

Municipal authorities have not yet reported any casualties and said the fires are being kept under control, according to an update on Tuesday morning. More than 1,500 residents have been     3     to safe zones, while 5,000 firefighters, police, local officers and volunteers, and seen firefighting helicopters have been dispatched to help combat the blazes, state-run Xinhua news agency reported.

The fires in Chongqing were the result of “spontaneous combustion” mainly caused by     4     high temperatures, Bai Ye, a professor at China’s Forest and Grassland Fire Prevention and Extinguishing Research Center told state-run Beijing Daily.

The wildfires are another knock-on effect of a crippling heat wave China’s worst since 1961 -that has swept through southwestern, central and eastern parts of the country in recent weeks, with temperatures crossing 40 degrees Celsius (104 degrees Fahrenheit) in more than 100 cities.

They are also part of a global trend of wildfires that have ravaged areas from Australia to California, with scientists saying     5     global temperatures due to human-driven climate change increase the risk of these events.

China’s heat wave has also brought     6     demand for air conditioning and reductions in hydropower capacity due to drought conditions that have     7     the country’s     8     critical Yangtze River and connected waterways.

Earlier this week, Sichuan province, neighboring Chongqing, extended temporary power outages at factories in 19 of the region’s 21 cities. The power cuts will now run until at least Thursday, in a move the local government says will ensure residential power supplies. Last week, the province’s capital city Chengdu began     9     lights in subway stations in a bid to save electricity. Chongqing enacted an order for factories to suspend operations for seven days starting last Wednesday, according to state media.

On Tuesday morning, China issued a red alert heat warning, the highest of four color-coded levels, to at least 165 cities and counties across the country. Chinese authorities have     10     said more than 900 million people across the country have been affected by the heat wave this summer.