1 . When 12-year-old Erica Fernandez volunteered to help clean up the beach in her new hometown, Oxnard, California, she could barely speak English. She was just a kid helping 20 adults take care of the beach. She and her family had recently arrived in California from a small town in Mexico.

Erica started going door to door in her mainly Spanish-speaking farmworker community. “I always loved the ocean,” she says, “so it made me really sad to see this beautiful beach full of trash. That’s why I decided to help.”

Erica cared too much to stay silent. Having grown up in a tiny town in the Mexican state of Michoacán, she had a strong motivation to care for nature. “We grew our own food and raised our own animals. Taking care of nature was part of survival.” She wanted to bring that same spirit to her new life in California.

As her English improved, she talked to kids in her high school about what was going on. “I didn’t know if they would listen to me. My English wasn’t good and I was only sixteen,” she says. As she nervously approached the microphone, she was informed that time was running out. One minute and thirty seconds was all she had. “I couldn’t give my prepared speech, so I just spoke from my heart.”

The result was electrifying. When Erica was finished, people stood up and broke into applause. One of the teachers said, “I’m very moved by your words, Erica. When I was your age, I was playing video games.”

Only the second person in her family to go to college, Erica wants to become an environmental lawyer so she can fight for the environment and for the rights of communities. She wants other young people to speak out when they see something wrong, even if they feel shy about it at first. “We are the future. The future is ours.”

2 . Waste not, Want not

Today, I live in Manhattan with my husband, Alex. I’m an IT specialist and Alex is a lawyer. Life’s good, but sometimes I look at the way we live it and think of Ellie, my grandmother. Her favorite saying was “Waste not, want not.”     1    . Ellie carefully folded the paper from parcels and washed glass jars to use again. Frank, my grandfather, used old socks and pullovers (套头毛衣) to protect the plants in winter. Nowadays, we go to a garden center to buy special felt for that purpose. Have we all gone mad?

Such economy seems strange, even ridiculous, in our modern throwaway society, where everything is sold in boxes.     2    , but as a selling feature to make us want to buy them. Ellie and Frank would have seen the very idea of a “gift pack” as a cheat.

    3    . The United States produces about 180 million metric tons of waste per year, 70% of which is packaging materials. The average American family uses up six trees’ worth of paper a year.     4    , they would reach to the moon and back twelve times. “We can’t go on like this,” I said to Alex. “Let’s start at home. If everybody starts at home, then this madness will stop.”

    5    . Of course, this meant that we produced a lot of waste, but I was shocked to find that this came to over six kilos per week. “Your grandma Ellie with her ‘Waste not, want not’ was really modern, wasn’t she?” “Not really,” I said. “Ellie and their neighbors were just ordinary, traditional New Englanders. We’ve all gone mad since then.”

6 . I think I lived rather sustainably last year. I composted (堆肥) fruit and vegetable scraps, ________ my own clothes and even grew food on my balcony. I grasped every chance to make ________ in my lifestyle.

I became accustomed to getting up early, which I think came with various ________. I devoted the morning hours to breathing in the flesh air. I kept my evenings ________ to meet friends, read, or connect with family, and slowly get myself ________ to rest as dusk approaches.

The biggest ________ for me was to take a walk wholeheartedly. Having spent much time staying indoors, I wanted to take a ________ kind of exercise where I could enjoy the natural scenery, rather than an intense one. Walking not only ________ me to the beautiful creatures that lived among us, but helped me to ________ my own life.

I found out how much organic waste even a small household could ________. It is reported that U. S. households waste approximately one-third of food they buy, ________ $ 240 billion per year. Although I got my composting into place, I needed to find a ________ for the plastic waste from deliveries and takeaways. ________, I was offered a door-to-door recycling service that visited every two weeks and ________ the waste.

While I’ve always been getting clothes made by the family ________, this stopped during the pandemic. Last year, as the traveling exhibitions which ________ artisans and help them sell their products came back to the city, I bought some ________ which was made into fashionable sets and dresses. I also ________ an old block-printed dress into a jumpsuit.

Thanks to my ________, I found my life was eased back into a healthy one. I’ll stick to my ________ lifestyle from now on.

8 . Natural gas, long seen as a cleaner replacement to coal and an important tool in the fight to slow global warming, can be just as harmful to the climate, a new study has concluded, unless companies can cut the leaks (泄露), since it takes as little as 0.2 percent of gas to leak to make natural gas as big a driver of climate change as coal.

The study, which involved researchers from Harvard and Duke Universities and NASA, pokes holes in the idea that natural gas is suitable energy resources to a future powered entirely by renewables, like solar and wind. “Even if gas leaks little, it’s as bad as coal,” said Deborah, the lead researcher. “It can’t be considered a good bridge, or replacement.”

When power companies generate electricity by burning natural gas instead of coal, they produce only half the amount of planet-warming CO₂. But natural gas is made up mostly of me thane (甲烷), which is, in the short term, a far more powerful planet-warming gas than CO₂, when it escapes unburned into the atmosphere. And there’s increasing evidence that methane is leaking from gas systems in far larger quantities than previously thought.

There are other balances to consider. The CO₂ produced by coal-burning power plants lasts far longer in the atmosphere than methane, whose climate effects disappear after a few decades. So focusing on methane leaks from gas systems as a way to control carbon emissions (碳排放) means the world might reduce some short-term warming, but still face a dangerous rise in average temperatures many decades into the future. That said, with the consequences of climate change already spreading around the world, controlling methane would be a way that works faster to slow warming.

“I do hope the world pays attention to this, as I fear too many remain too concentrated on simply reducing coal use, even if it results in more gas consumption,” Deborah said. “What the world requires is to move to a 100 percent renewable energy future as soon as possible.”

In early 2022, the Ministry of Water Resources in China planned to invest 800 billion yuan building water management projects during the year. But the country     1     (see) the funds reach 823 billion yuan by the end of September.

Last year, the large-scale development played a significant role in ensuring stable home fund     2     promoting employment. Over 2. 5 million workers     3     (employ) in the development, including almost 2.1 million people from rural China. People also noted the     4     (remark) growth in funds it raised for water management projects. Almost 1. 16 trillion yuan was collected across the country last year, 44 percent more than 2021. Over 203.6 billion yuan was raised     5     government bonds, roughly 1.5 times that of the previous year. Over 37.9 billion yuan was invested     6     (expand) and renovate (翻新) 529 medium and large-scale irrigated areas in 2022. Thanks to the     7     (invest), over 10,000 kilometers of irrigation channels were built or renovated.

During the rare drought in the Yangtze River Basin last year, the complete systems in many of those irrigated areas functioned     8     (efficient) in reducing the impacts of the drought and reducing losses. Such irrigated areas guaranteed water supply to 11.3 million hectares of farmland in     9     (strike) regions. Despite the drought, the basin saw     10     good harvest of grain.