1 . Lima, the capital of Peru, is the world’s second largest desert city. The region is water-stressed. The annual rainfall is less than 4 cm. Access to water is an ongoing problem for the residents in and around the South American capital.

When industrial engineer Abel Cruz was a boy, his weekly work was to climb down a valley in the foothills of the Peruvian Andes to fetch the family’s water from a spring. “It was downhill from the house, far away and steep,” he says. Cruz began dreaming up better ways to collect water. Then he noticed that subtropical plants capture rain and mist with their wide leaves. Actually Lima doesn’t lack in humidity (湿度), averaging 83% year-round. Located in the foothills of the Andean mountains, it is close to the Pacific Ocean, which ensures that blankets of dense fog roll in for three-quarters of a year. Eventually, Abel Cruz struck upon the idea of a fog net.

Each upraised net is 20 square metres, where micro-droplets of water suspended in the foggy atmosphere condense (凝结) and drip down into collection tanks. Approximately 200 to 400 litres of water is collected daily from each net. Locals can fetch it in buckets for small-scale farming. Working in Lima with support from the Creating Water Foundation, Cruz has installed over 3, 600 nets on hillsides around the city to capture fog drifting in from the Pacific Ocean. Cruz raised funds for hundreds of nets in Peru with his revolutionary initiative Peruvians Without Water. He aims to set up even more fog harvesters, and to treat the water to make it drinkable.

“The planet has less and less fresh water,” Cruz points out, “because the glaciers that are natural reservoirs are disappearing. So we must find a way to accumulate and save water for times of drought.” The technology is life-changing for the poor households who normally have to rely on water tanks being delivered to them. His approach ends extreme poverty and brings rural development. Moreover, he is trying to bring healthy and clean water also to urban areas lacking water.

2 . Zhang Xingli, a 60-year-old villager, sat on a stone in front of his house and struck a pose as painters quickly sketched him and his traditional house. At his age, Zhang _________ thought he could earn money working as a _________ in Sanhe, a poverty-stricken mountain village in Songxian County, Henan province.

The village welcomes _________ who come to draw landscapes and _________ the beauty of its traditional houses. Villagers were recently preparing for the upcoming travel season and building an exhibition hall, a _________ of Sanhe’s rapid development.

_________ in the depths of Funiu Mountain, the village was once mired(陷入) in poverty and the surrounding rolling hills and deep gorges made it difficult to _________. Most of the land was not _________and there was no mineral wealth under the ground. One-third of the 415 village _________lived in poverty.

In 2016, changes began when Feng Yake, a college-trained artist, ____________ to the village, who had taken his students to many spots to draw landscapes, making him realize the ____________ of this remote village. Later, he ____________ his parents to tear down their house and build the first agritainment(农家乐) ____________ in the village to accommodate students who want to paint and draw landscapes. Six months after the resort opened, he and his family had ____________ 200,000 yuan.

Feng’s success ____________ other villagers. In a short time, the village was redesigned and rebuilt. Old houses and a bean curd workshop were repaired. The walls were painted white, to ____________ with the gray roof tiles, and a pavilion was built. The village signed contracts with ____________ 70 art studios to receive artists and students.

In 2020, the village was completely lifted ____________ . Over the past two years, 25 agritainment resorts have been built in the village, ____________ more than 30,000 tourists and generating an annual ____________ of over 4 million yuan.