2 . The world’s oceans will likely lose about one-sixth of their fish and other creatures within 100 years if climate change continues on its current path. Every degree Celsius that the world’s oceans warm, their biomass is expected to drop five percent, a study found.

The study predicts that if there is no change in the rate of worldwide greenhouse gas production, there will be a 17-percent loss of biomass by the year 2100. But, if the world reduces carbon pollution, biomass losses could be limited to only about 5 percent.

Warming temperatures are the biggest issue. But climate change also produces oceans that are more acidic and have less oxygen. This also harms sea life. Much of the world depends on the oceans for food or work.

The findings make sense and the possible effects of the predicted losses of animal life are huge. “Climate change has the potential to cause serious new conflicts over ocean resource use as the human population continues to grow,” said scientists.

Marine biologist Boris Worm, who helped run the study, added that the “building blocks of marine life—plankton and bacteria—may decline less heavily.”

“Those marine animals that we use directly, and care about most deeply, are predicted to suffer the most,” said Worm. He works at Canada’s Dalhousie University.

Scientists had already believed climate change would likely reduce future ocean life. But past computer-based studies looked at only part of the picture or used only one model. The latest study used six different computer models to give the best picture look yet, William Cheung said.

University of Georgia marine biologist Samantha Joye was not part of the research. But she praised the study as well researched and extremely detailed, and called it “an urgent call for action”.

4 . Baggy has become the first dog in the UK — and potentially the world — to join the fight against air pollution by recording pollutant levels (污染水平) near the ground.

Baggy_______a pollution monitor (监测器) on her collar (颈圈) so she can _______data measurements close to the ground. Her monitor has shown that air pollution levels are_______closer to ground level, which has helped highlight (强调，突出) _______that babies and young kids may be at higher_______of developing lung problems.

Conventional (传统的) air pollution monitors are normally _______on lampposts (灯柱) at about nine feet in the air. However, since Baggy stands at about the same height as a child in a pushchair (婴儿车), she frequently _______pollution levels which are much higher than the data gathered by the Environment Agency.

The doggy data research was the idea of Baggy’s 13-year-old owner Tom Hunt and his dad Matt. The English youngster _______that pollution levels are around two-thirds higher close to the ground than they are in the air at the height where they are recorded by the agency. Tom has since reported the _______findings to the government in an attempt to emphasize (强调) that babies are at higher risk of developing asthma (哮喘).

Matt Hunt said he was “very proud” of his son ________“when the boy gets an idea, he keeps his head down and gets on with it, and he really does want to do some good and stop young kids from getting asthma.”

Single-use plastic bags are used at most a few times before they     1     (throw) away. It takes them hundreds of years     2     (break) down. Many of these bags end up in the ocean where larger ones can trap sea creatures, such as turtles and dolphins. Over time, the bags fall apart into countless tiny pieces, and fish can     3     (accidental) eat some of them. Now, lots of     4     (country) and regions are taking action to ban the sale of such bags to stop people using them.

7 . The fight is on to get rid of air pollution in our cities. While the best solution in the long-term would be to ban fossil-fueled cars, that won’t help the millions who are dying in the meantime, and so some high-tech solutions are now on the cards.

In March 2016, 10 London pigeons became famous. These pigeons took to the sky from Primrose Hill in north London, wearing backpacks monitoring air pollution. Once in the air, the backpacks sent live air-quality updates to the smartphones of the Londoners below.

The pigeons and their backpacks were just the latest in a series of increasingly desperate attempts to monitor and control air pollution. London’s air pollution problem has been getting worse for years, and it often rises to more than three times the European Union’s legal limit.

Another promising approach can be found in Beijing, after China declared a “war against pollution” in 2014. A seven-metre-high “Smog Free Tower”, designed by a Dutch scientist, Daan Roosegaarde, opened in Beijing’s 751 D Park in September 2016.

It is a huge, outdoor air purifier. Airborne particles (颗粒) are sucked into the tower where they receive a positive charge. The particles are then caught by a negatively charged dust-removal plate and clean air is blown out of the other end. “Changing smog particles does not take much current.” Roosegaarde said.

As for what to do with the collected PM waste, he has currently set up a business making jewellery out of the waste. Prince Charles owns a set of “smog free” cuff links (袖扣). If collected on at a big scale, Roosegaarde believes it could even be used as a building material.

Mexico City has an alternative solution. Looking to Nature to maximize the surface area of a building, Allison Dring, a Berlin - based architect, managed to catch light and wind from all sides. She is now making a building material by burning agricultural crop by-products in the absence of oxygen. “It means that you are actually taking carbon (碳) out of the sky, transforming it into a material, and then using it to build,” says Dring.

The fight against outdoor air pollution is really just starting. Even if none of the ideas take off, at least Prince Charles’ cuff links, the special building surface and pigeons wearing back-packs will have brought the issue more to the public’s attention.

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8 . If humans were truly at home under the light of the moon and stars, we would go in darkness happily, the midnight world as visible to us as it is to the vast number of nocturnal (夜间活动的) species on this planet. Instead, we are diurnal creatures, with eyes adapted to living in the sun’s light. This is a basic evolutionary fact, even though most of us don’t think of ourselves as diurnal beings. Yet it’s the only way to explain                    what we’ve done to the night: We’ve engineered it to receive us by filling it with light.

The benefits of this kind of engineering come with consequences -- called light pollution -- whose effects scientists are only now beginning to study. Light pollution is largely the result of bad lighting design, which allows artificial light to shine outward and upward into the sky. Ill-designed lighting washes out the darkness of night and completely changes the light levels -- and light rhythms -- to which many forms of life, including ourselves, have adapted. Wherever human light spills into the natural world, some aspect of life is affected.

In most cities the sky looks as though it has been emptied of stars, leaving behind a vacant haze (霾) that mirrors our fear of the dark. We’ve grown so used to this orange haze that the original glory of an unlit night -- dark enough for the planet Venus to throw shadows on Earth -- is wholly beyond our experience, beyond memory almost.

We’ve lit up the night as if it were an unoccupied country, when nothing could be further from the truth. Among mammals alone, the number of nocturnal species is astonishing. Light is a powerful biological force, and on many species it acts as a magnet (磁铁). The effect is so powerful that scientists speak of songbirds and seabirds being “captured” by searchlights on land or by the light from gas flares on marine oil platforms. Migrating at night, birds tend to collide with brightly lit tall buildings.

Frogs living near brightly lit highways suffer nocturnal light levels that are as much as a million times brighter than normal, throwing nearly every aspect of their behavior out of joint, including their nighttime breeding choruses. Humans are no less trapped by light pollution than the frogs. Like most other creatures, we do need darkness. Darkness is as essential to our biological welfare, to our internal clockwork, as light itself.

Living in a glare of our own making, we have cut ourselves off from our evolutionary and cultural heritage-the light of the stars and the rhythms of day and night. In a very real sense, light pollution causes us to lose sight of our true place in the universe, to forget the scale of our being, which is best measured against the dimensions of a deep night with the Milky Way -- the edge of our galaxy -- arching overhead.

A BBC film crew was working on the remote Lord Howe Island for a new wildlife documentary called Drowning in Plastic. They filmed many birds that     1    (die) for no clear reason. After some research, they found out the truth — what caused     2     death of the birds was that their stomachs were literally too full of plastic. The documentary team also filmed biologists     3    (work) on the island to save the birds. The scientists captured hundreds of chicks and removed plastic from their stomachs     4    (give) them a chance of survival.

10 . We are what we eat, and what we eat reveals something about what we are in return. So it shouldn’t be all that surprising that humans are now apparently eating plastic.

A small trial at the Medical University of Vienna found tiny pieces of it in the digestive systems of people from eight different countries. The study involved just eight people and doesn’t tell us what if any effect eating plastic was having on their bodies. We already knew fish were eating plastic. Did we really think it wouldn’t reach back up to the top of the food chain, that the consequences of our own actions couldn’t return to us?

This goes beyond cleaning up the oceans. Six of the eight subjects of the study ate sea not all of them did. Other possible theories involve drinking out of plastic bottle. eating food that’s been wrapped in plastic, or tiny plastic pieces floating in the air which then land on our food. But our environment is so filled now with plastic that it seems that we were going to absorb it somehow.

Does it actually matter? This study can’t answer that question, because all it tells us is that microplastics were found in human wastes. If it’s just passing through the body, then perhaps there’s no damage done. However, if there were evidence of plastics being absorbed and gathering in our internal organs, as some animal studies have suggested, that would potentially be a red flag.

Solving plastic pollution is nowhere near as simple as some campaigners make it sound. Switching away from plastic packaging to other materials would create other environmental dilemmas. Bottling liquids in glass rather than plastic makes them heavier which potentially means more trips to transport them, paper production has a bigger carbon footprint. Even if it were possible to stop using the stuff tomorrow, it would take up to 1,000 years for some of what’s being produced right now to break down.

But just because it’s difficult, it doesn’t mean we shrug our shoulders and do nothing. There is something genuinely mad about a society that is on the one hand crazy about the quality of the food we put in our mouths, and yet also mindlessly eats its own garbage. The war on plastic, it seems, just got personal.