3 . My husband and I always wanted to go to the Caribbean but didn’t know much about the islands or how we were going to afford it. By chance, a friend of ours in Australia mentioned “pet sitting” and that it is something you can do all over the world.

We quickly created an account on a pet sitting website and began searching for options. There were only a couple of sits available in that part of the world, but we tried our luck, sent a request, and to our surprise, landed a three-month job in Grenada, so our year was going to be taken up with Caribbean pet sits.

Inspired by a Canadian couple, we decided to start our own travel blog. We began by writing about The British Virgin Islands, highlighting the beautiful beaches. However, for every photo album of a beautiful beach, there were 10 photos of trash (垃圾). It was hard to ignore the plastic pollution issue, especially on such primitive and remote beaches. So, we began to share photos of the trash we saw and how much we could pick upon our daily dog walks.

The more we looked into plastic pollution, the more we realized the severity of the global plastic pollution. From that point, we used our platform to create awareness and highlight ways to say no to plastic and travel plastic-free. We changed our daily routines, our way of living, and even our diets to accommodate more organic foods and little to no plastic packaging.

It’s been over three years now and we continue to do what we can. This journey has led us to some amazing places, working with great brands and even organizing a country-wide beach clean-up campaign in Grenada.

Our aim now is to keep on going. We love connecting with like-minded people. It’s been amazing few years that was sparked by a conversation about pet sitting. Who would have guessed?

Earlier 2019,the International Center for Integrated Mountain Development published    1    most comprehensive analysis up to now of how climate change will affect the glaciers of the world,    2    (warn) that about 18,00 glaciers(冰川) will disappear by 2100.

This is a bad    3    (predict) for some 1.9 billion South Asians,    4     use water from the glaciers not only for drinking but also for agriculture, hydroelectric power,and tourism. But the survey also looked at an immediate question: As the glaciers     5    (rapid) melt, where will all the water—more than a quadrillion gallons of it, almost the amount    6    (contain) in Lake Huron—go?

The answer is that the Himalaya, for example, long defined by    7    (it) glaciers,is becoming a mountain range defined by lake. In fact, another study found that from 1990 to 2010, more than 900 new glaciers-fed lakes     8    (form) across Asia's high mountain ranges.Because of those remote locations scientists must rely    9    satellites to count them ,and new lakes appear to be growing so quickly that it's difficult for scientific teams to agree on the precise number. I's all happening much    10    ( fast) than we expected it to even five or ten years ago.

5 . As heat waves continue to ravage the planet, air conditioners are becoming more and more common. However, these "active" cooling devices are posing problems because the electricity consumption which most people are concerned about and the release of ozone-damaging chemicals worsen the greenhouse gas effect, resulting in the creation of heat islands and further thermal pollution. Therefore, "passive" cooling, which doesn't have such effects, has attracted considerable attention from both scientists and ordinary people in recent years.

In a recent study, a team of researchers from China and US presented an eco-friendly, low-cost smart coating to keep buildings cooler while consuming zero electricity. Infrared radiation-based passive cooling has been investigated since 2014, but challenges, mainly the expensive and unsustainable design, have greatly limited their large-scale and widespread application. Besides, the imbalance in cooling ability of these coatings during the day and night tends to lead to great day-night temperature differences as more heat is lost than gained at night.

The solution therefore requires a "smart" mechanism that can both enhance daytime cooling and minimize nighttime heat loss. To do this, the researchers created a new smart coating comprised of conventional building materials, including titanium dioxide nanoparticles, fluorescent microparticles, and glass microspheres that were engineered to reflect most of the sunlight. Specifically, the titanium dioxide particles effectively reflect sunlight through light scattering（撒播）while the fluorescent particles increase the amount of reflection by changing the absorbed sunlight into fluorescence emissions, which drive more heat away from the building. Meanwhile, the glass microspheres re-send mid-infrared broadband radiation, allowing not only heat loss, but allowing heat exchange to take place between the building and the sky.

The coating was tested on a model concrete building. Through this efficient heat exchange with the sky, daytime cooling was strengthened while nighttime cooling was reduced. The building's inside temperature was always maintained at around 26℃, even when the out-side temperature varied from 24℃ to 37℃ during the day. We believe this new coating will make it to commercialization soon, enabling a sustainable, passive cooling technology that could help to fight climate change and the global energy crisis.

8 . Melbourne Girls' College is getting rid of all dustbins and asking students to take their rubbish home to encourage them to move towards zero waste.

Starting next Monday, the college will gradually_______all the rubbish bins in five weeks in classrooms and the yard, _________1400 students and 140 staff to find their own home for chip packets and juice boxes. Volunteer students will _______ daily non- compulsory food inspections in which children bringing “zero waste" lunch boxes will be _______. Students using only _______ packaging will receive a token (礼券）to win prizes such as keepcups.

The rubbish that students take home may still go to landfill(废物填埋场）via their home bins, _______the new policy will help persuade_______to buy fewer packaged items and reuse containers. Most issues around carrying rubbish home, such as smell and mess, can be solved._______tuna （金枪鱼）in a tin, for example, can_______ the school's compost（堆肥）bin and the tin can be __________ before it's taken home.

The college principal Karen Money acknowledges that some parents may not have the time or means to avoid   ________ in single-use packaging, “but it's________to get as many people as we can to avoid it. We talk a lot, ________ educators, about the bad problems the world ________, and if we don't start putting some actions ________ that beautiful idea, then it's just empty."

10 . Twenty-four trains, nine countries, 13, 500 miles. They are the numbers behind the heroic round trip one man took from Southampton in the UK to eastern China.

Roger Tyers, 37, used over $2, 500, which was almost twice more than the cost of a return flight, to travel to the Chinese port city Ningbo for academic research in May, 2019. The man spent a month on board 15 trains during the first leg of his round trip. It was the climate crisis, not a love of trains, that drove the sociologist to choose this complicated route over a return flight. He stopped flying when UN climate experts warned that the world had less than 11 years to avoid terrible levels of global warming. Tyers calculated that his train journey to China produced almost 90% less emissions than a return flight.

Tyers is not the only person to avoid air travel in response to climate change. Thousands of people worldwide have publicly promised to stop flying. Activist Maja Rosen launched the “Flight Free” campaign in Sweden with the goal of encouraging 100,000 people not to fly for one year. Although only around 14,000 people signed the online “#flightfree2019” pledge (保证), Rosen, who stopped flying 12 years ago, says that the campaign had made more people worry about the climate crisis and aware of harm of travel by air and motivated them to try new ways of travelling.

According to a survey released in May 2019 by Swedish Railways (SJ), 37% of respondents chose to travel by train instead of by plane where possible, compared to 20% at the start of 2018. An SJ spokesperson said: “Rail travel has been augmented due to the worries.” Domestic passenger numbers in July fell by 12% compared to the previous year, according to Swedavia, a company which operates Sweden’s 10 busiest Airports.

“The collective pledge helps fight the sense of hopelessness many people feel when it comes to tackling climate change”, Rosen said. “One of the problems is that people feel there’s no point in what you do as an individual. The campaign is about making people aware that if we do this together, we can actually bring changes.”