1 . Local authorities and firefighters in the United States are always on the lookout for new and creative methods to help control wildfires. Especially during the hot and dry summer months, thousands of wildfires cause damage to forests every year. The city of West Sacramento in North California has found a creative secret weapon to help deal with this phenomenon: goats.

These friendly animals have been assisting the city with wildfire prevention and fire risks by eating weeds, dry grass and dead trees. When the goats eat the things that are likely to catch fire, they prevent the problem from happening.

Wildfires occur naturally when dry plants are ignited(点燃)by the sun’s heat and catch on fire. However, most wildfires are caused by human carelessness, including unattended campfires, cigarettes and other flammable objects. The best strategy to battle the fires and minimize the damage is to attempt to remove the fuel that enables the spread of the flames, in this case the dry weeds, trees and plants. If the things that are most likely to catch fire are gone, the fire is less likely to spread.

The love able goats are able to reach difficult areas that people are not able to access. About 400 of these goats can clear two acres per day. They even fertilize(使肥沃)the area, a natural and free side effect of eating all those dry plants. Firefighters and government officials cannot be happier with the results.

“For us, the combination of turning to goats for help with the quick fire response is an effective method of keeping our neighbors safe from disastrous wildfires,“said assistant Fire Chief Khari Helae.” With climate change and the fact that our vegetation is being affected because of climate change, it’s necessary to focus on our fuel reduction program.”

Lego: One Step Closer to Being Sustainable

The Lego Group is one step closer to reaching its goal of making all its products from sustainable materials by 2030.

The Danish toymaker revealed a prototype (雏形) brick made from     1     plastic. In a news release, Lego said the PET plastic from     2     bottles makes up the first brick to meet the company’s “strict quality and safety requirements.” One way the company     3     safety is by sourcing materials from suppliers that use processes approved by the US Food & Drug Administration and European Food Safety Authority.

“The biggest     4     on our sustainability journey is rethinking and innovating new materials that are as long-lasting, strong and high quality as our existing bricks—and fit with LEGO elements made over the past 60 years,” Lego Group Vice President of Environmental Responsibility Tim Brooks said. “With this prototype we’re able to    5     the progress we’re making to the public.”

It will be “some time” before bricks made from used materials can be     6    , Lego said. The company will continue to test and develop the PET formulation (配方) and decide whether to move to the     7     production phase, which is expected to take at least a year. One factor the company is testing is how the material can be     8    .

“Experimentation and failing is an important part of learning and     9    . Just as kids build, unbuild and rebuild with LEGO bricks at home, we’re doing the same in our lab,” Brooks said.

The move follows last year’s announcement that the company was making a $400 million investment over three years into sustainability     10    . It included phasing out the single-use plastic bags from its boxes and instead using recyclable paper for its packaging.

3 . The process by which rich land becomes desert is called desertification(沙漠化).     1    The U. N. says up to 45 percent of Africa’s land is impacted by desertification, worse than any other continent.

Africa’s Great Green Wall is a project to build an 8000-kilometer-long forest across 11 of the continent’s countries. The project is meant to contain the growing Sahara Desert and fight climate change.     2    They include limited political support, lack of money, weak organizational structures, and not enough consideration for the environment. Just 4 million hectares of land have been turned into forest since the work on the Great Green Wall began 15 years ago.     3    

Launched in 2007, the project aims to plant a forest from Senegal on the Atlantic Ocean in western Africa to Eritrea, Ethiopia and Djibouti in the east.     4     It could also reduce levels of climate-related migration in the area and capture hundreds of millions of tons of carbon dioxide from the air.

    5    They say some progress has been made in recent years in the east of the continent. For example, efforts in Eritrea and Sudan have resulted in nearly 140, 000 hectares of newly planted forest.

The U. N. desertification agency says the project will need to plant an average of 8. 2 million hectares yearly to reach its goal of 100 million hectares by 2030.

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.

7 . An earthquake happens when two plates rub together. The earth plates travel in different directions and at a different speed. If one plate is slowly forced underneath the other，pressure(压力)builds up until the plates break apart. This process(过程)causes the ground to move. It is an earth-quake. In other words，earthquakes are the shaking of the earth’s surface caused by the earth’s rocky outer layer as a result of the energy stored within the earth. The strain within the rocks is suddenly released(释放).

The damage an earthquake causes depends on where it is and when it is happening. If an unpopulated region is struck, there will be low loss of life or property(财产). If it hits a large city，there may be many injuries and much destruction. Many of the areas at risk are largely populated now. Major earthquakes hitting those areas today could produce terrible damage.

Actually, there are several million small earthquakes every year. Large earthquakes, such as the 1964 Alaska earthquake that measured 9.2 on the Richter scale, caused millions of dollars in damage. In the last 500 years, millions of people have been killed by earthquakes around the world-including over 240,000 in the 1976 Tangshan earthquake in China.

A60-second or less earthquake can cause devastation that continues for years after the first tremor. In 1972, a series of severe earthquakes struck Managua, Nicaragua. Fifteen years later, the city still looked the way it had a week after the earthquake hit, because the country did not have the necessary money to rebuild it.

The shaking of the earth is sometimes not the greatest disaster. It is in the ensuing fires and floods that often the greatest damage occurs. In the 1906 earthquake, it was the fires caused after it that did the majority of the damage. An earthquake can also destroy dams high above a city or valleys, causing floods to sweep down and sweep away everything in their path.

With few trees left to slow the wind in southern Madagascar, red sand is blowing everywhere: onto fields, villages and roads, and into the eyes of children     1    (wait) for food aid parcels. The area has been transformed     2     a dust bowl because of the facts that the weather is     3    (extreme) dry and forest is cleared to make farmland.

“There’s nothing to harvest. That’s     4     we have nothing to eat. As a result, we’ re suffering from     5    (hungry),” said mother-of-seven Tarira, standing at a remote World Food Programme (WFP) post near Anjeky Beanatara, where children are examined for signs of malnutrition (营养不良) and given food. It is reported that at     6     present time more than one million people in southern Madagascar need food handouts from the WFP, a United Nations agency.

The world’ s fourth     7    (large) island and one of its most diverse ecosystems, Madagascar     8    (regard) as a natural paradise (天堂) at one time. However, in parts of it, such as its far southern regions, the reality on the ground has changed. “When you look in the villages, you see children running left and right. That     9    (be) not the case before. We used to call Madagascar the green island.     10     now it is more of a red island, which makes us very sad,” said Soja Lahimaro Tsimandilatse, governor of the southern Androy area.