Nomadism

Directions: Read and print this article. Look up any words you don't know and come prepared to discuss the article and its vocabulary on Friday.

Nomadism

For the past two millennia, nomadic herders have grazed their animals in the steppe and Gobi regions of Central Asia. Today Mongolia remains the focus of a vibrant nomadic culture, whose traditional technologies, spiritual worldview and folk arts offer a significant contribution to the intangible cultural heritage of humanity.

The Central Asian steppe and deserts have been continuously occupied by nomadic peoples for over two thousand years. A great number of Chinese sources make mention of the Hunnu (Xiong-nu), who established an empire extending throughout most of Central Asia that endured from the 3rd century BC to the 1st century AD. Believed to be the ancestors of the Mongols, the Hunnu are described as being a nomadic people who moved about in search of pasturage and did not practise agriculture. The Jujan people are described in almost identical terms; it is recorded that they moved nomadically following pasturage and water, and that they lived in felt yurts. The later Turks, Uighurs and Khitan are also known to have been nomadic pastoralists-although unfortunately, there is almost no documentary evidence demonstrating the specific husbandry techniques of these early peoples.

One of the most significant monuments attesting to the historical importance of these nomads is the Great Wall of China, erected and maintained principally as a defense against these peoples by the sedentary Chinese. In approximately 214 BC the Chinese Ch'in emperor ordered the construction of a "10-thousand li wall" to protect his state against the nomadic Hunnu, linking together several existing wall segments in the north of China; this wall was later reinforced to provide better protection against the Hunnu during the succeeding Han dynasty. Under the Toba (Northern Wei) state the Great Wall was further repaired and extended as a defense against the Jujan, while in the late 6th and early 7th centuries, the Great Wall was repaired on several occasions so as to improve protection against the Turks. During the Ming dynasty (1368-1644) the wall was rebuilt and maintained as a defense against the Mongols.

Traditional nomadic animal husbandry in Mongolia involves the herding of five types of animals, known as the tavan khoshuu mal ("five-snout livestock") - cattle (including yaks), sheep, goats, camels, and horses. The products obtained from these animals satisfy nearly all of the Mongolian family's basic needs: beef, mutton, and goat meat, supplemented by a wide variety of dairy products, constitute the Mongolian diet; sheep wool, processed into felt, is used to make clothing, bedding, and insulation for the ger (yurt); horses, camels, and yaks provide transportation; and animal hair and bones are even used to produce musical instruments and children's toys.

Nomadic movements of Mongol herders are not conducted randomly, but according to precisely-defincd traditions. Mongolian nomadic families move their animals into a different general area of pasturage for each of the four seasons, referrred to as uvuljuu (winter pasturage), khavarjaa (spring pasturage), zuslan (summer pasturage), and namarjaa (autunm pasturage). During winter and spring the herds are generally kept in a fixed location to conserve their strength, but in summer and autumn the family will move the herds several times within the larger area of pasturage, so as to give the animals more of a chance to fatten by grazing on fresh vegetation. In the wamer months the herding family leaves behind many of its possessions, travelling in a smaller and lighter yurt with minimal furniture. In forested-steppe regions, where precipitation is more abundant, families move between six and eight times a year, over an average distance of 15-20 kilometres; in mountainous and dry steppe regions families move farther and more frequently, travelling as far as 150 kilometres at a single time. Nomadic patterns in the Gobi are more directly influenced by weather and the location of springs; drought or extreme snowfall can force families to move great distances in search of adequate water and pasturage.

For the winter pasturage a sheltered area is chosen, and animals are kept in a roofed enclosure with an insulating bed of dried animal dung. In the spring, as the animals are at their weakest, the family moves to a pasturage which both has early vegetation and is free of rocky, boggy, or slippery areas that might tax the animals' strength. The herding family moves most frequently in the summer months, bringing the herds to open areas with abundant vegetation. In autumn, as the animals must fatten in preparation for the winter, the animals are taken to a quiet location - far from roads or settlements - where they can graze in peace.

Moving from one pasturage to the next is considered an important and ceremonial event. Before moving, the head of the family dresses in his finest clothing and rides out on his best horse to examine the new pasturage. Once he has chosen a suitable location he places three stones on the ground, symbolically in the form of a hearth, to mark the future site of each of the family's yurts. The family then chooses an auspicious day for moving and begins to pack the household objects in advance of the move. The move itself is subdued, as it is considered extremely unlucky for any argument or commotion to occur during the displacement or its preparations. On the moving day the family's gers are dismantled and all possessions put into oxcarts or a truck, with the most valuable items - the hearth and roof frame, chest, religious icons, head of the household's personal objects - being placed in the head cart. Families along the route followed by the movers invite the passeresby in for tea; and upon setting up their home in its new location, the family invite their new neighbours to visit.

http://www.culture.mn/mongolia.php?recordID=nomadism

Links for Monday 6/25

Timed Reading:

http://college.hmco.com/collegesurvival/watkins/learning_companion/1e/students/timed_reading.html

Do Exercise 6: Leisure. Write down your words per minute and your score on the quiz for your reference. This way, you can see how you improve after future timed readings!

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Idioms:

http://teacherjoe.us/Idioms01.html

With the person next to you, write a dialogue (be as creative as you would like!) using at least 10 of the 25 idioms explained on this site. When you're done, post your dialogue as a comment to this post (just one comment per pair, but please include both of your names).

Stem Cells

Directions: Read and print this article. Answer the questions below.

Stem Cell Basics

Research on stem cells is advancing knowledge about how an organism develops from a single cell and how healthy cells replace damaged cells in adult organisms. This promising area of science is also leading scientists to investigate the possibility of cell-based therapies to treat disease, which is often referred to as regenerative or reparative medicine.

Stem cells are one of the most fascinating areas of biology today. But like many expanding fields of scientific inquiry, research on stem cells raises scientific questions as rapidly as it generates new discoveries.

The NIH developed this primer to help readers understand the answers to questions such as: What are stem cells? What different types of stem cells are there and where do they come from? What is the potential for new medical treatments using stem cells? What research is needed to make such treatments a reality?

A. What are stem cells and why are they important?

Stem cells have two important characteristics that distinguish them from other types of cells. First, they are unspecialized cells that renew themselves for long periods through cell division. The second is that under certain physiologic or experimental conditions, they can be induced to become cells with special functions such as the beating cells of the heart muscle or the insulin-producing cells of the pancreas.

Scientists primarily work with two kinds of stem cells from animals and humans: embryonic stem cells and adult stem cells, which have different functions and characteristics that will be explained in this document. Scientists discovered ways to obtain or derive stem cells from early mouse embryos more than 20 years ago. Many years of detailed study of the biology of mouse stem cells led to the discovery, in 1998, of how to isolate stem cells from human embryos and grow the cells in the laboratory. These are called human embryonic stem cells. The embryos used in these studies were created for infertility purposes through in vitro fertilization procedures and when they were no longer needed for that purpose, they were donated for research with the informed consent of the donor.

Stem cells are important for living organisms for many reasons. In the 3- to 5-day-old embryo, called a blastocyst, stem cells in developing tissues give rise to the multiple specialized cell types that make up the heart, lung, skin, and other tissues. In some adult tissues, such as bone marrow, muscle, and brain, discrete populations of adult stem cells generate replacements for cells that are lost through normal wear and tear, injury, or disease.

It has been hypothesized by scientists that stem cells may, at some point in the future, become the basis for treating diseases such as Parkinson's disease, diabetes, and heart disease.

Scientists want to study stem cells in the laboratory so they can learn about their essential properties and what makes them different from specialized cell types. As scientists learn more about stem cells, it may become possible to use the cells not just in cell-based therapies, but also for screening new drugs and toxins and understanding birth defects. However, as mentioned above, human embryonic stem cells have only been studied since 1998. Therefore, in order to develop such treatments scientists are intensively studying the fundamental properties of stem cells, which include:

1. determining precisely how stem cells remain unspecialized and self renewing for many years; and

2. identifying the signals that cause stem cells to become specialized cells.


Questions:

1. What is regenerative/reparative medicine?

2. What is the NIH (you may have to search online to find this)?

3. What distinguishes stem cells from other types of cells? (Give an answer in words that you comfortably understand.)

4. What are the two types of stem cells with which scientists most often work?

5. What does the phrase "normal wear and tear" mean? ("Tear" here is like tearing a piece of paper, not a tear that you cry.)

6. For what do scientists eventually want to use stem cells?

Dream that Shook the World

Directions: Print out and read the two articles. Post a list of vocabulary words you don't know. Also, respond to the articles - what do you think about them? How are they different? What is the feeling/mood/tone of the articles?


Edward Samson was a news editor on the Boston Globe in the last part of the 19th century. The business news in those days was not as professional or efficient as it is today. Samson was a good writer, but he spent many evenings drinking with his friends. One night in August 1883, he got so drunk that he went to sleep on a shabby sofa in his office.
He did not have a peaceful night. He had a terrible nightmare. A volcano, erupting for several hours and then destroying a whole island, appeared in Samson's dream. When he awoke at three in the morning, still shaking, he put on the light. Then he started to write down the dream while it was still fresh in his mind.

It had been a very realistic dream. Samson saw a small island called Pralape. He did not know where it was, but it looked warm and tropical. There was a huge volcano in the middle of the island and in his dream it was erupting. Vast quantities of boiling lava were rushing down the steep sides of the volcano. Shooting high into the air, the flames turned the whole sky red. Terrified people were trying to escape from the great wave of lava, but the island was so small that they had to rush into the sea. Thousands drowned. Samson felt the heat and terror in his dream. At the end, he heard an enormous roar and the whole island exploded. All that was left was a flaming crater in the middle of the sea.

Samson finished writing his account of the dream, wrote IMPORTANT in the corner and left it on his desk. Then he went home to bed. Later that morning, his editor came in and found the story. Naturally, he thought that it was a news story that had come in by telegraph during the night. He put it on the front page with a banner headline. When they read it, other journalists around the world printed it too. It was an important item of news on 29 August 1883.

However, when they asked for more information, the journalists were surprised to find there was none. The island of Pralape could not be found on any map. The chief editor of the Boston Globe asked Samson to explain. Very ashamed of himself, he told the truth. It was just the story of his nightmare! Samson was fired.

A few days later, there were unnaturally high waves around the world. Captains of ships that reached ports near Indonesia told the world a strange story. The tiny island of Krakatoa had exploded. Krakatoa had begun erupting on 27 August and had blown itself to pieces the following day --- the day that Edward Samson had had his dream. But what about the name Pralape? The Dutch Historical Society solved that mystery. They found a map that was 150 years old. On it, Krakatoa was called by its ancient name --- Pralape.

http://www.stlouis.edu.hk/language.lab/Form_2_exercises/Book2BUnit7/Bk2BUnit7passage.htm

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A Dream that Shook the World.

It was Sunday night in Boston, where Byron Somes was sleeping off a binge in his office at the Boston Globe.

It was Monday morning in the Straits of Sunda, where the mightiest explosion in the history of man had just taken place.

In his dream, Byron Somes had seen the catastrophe as clearly as though he had been watching it from mid-air, although he was actually twelve thousand miles away! Two days before the Boston newsman's remarkable experience, nature had set the stage for catastrophe. The volcano of Krakatoa jutted up from an island in the Straits of Sunda, where an earthquake had torn the islands of Java and Sumatra apart in the year 1115. Krakatoa was noted for its rumblings and frequent eruptions. On August 25th,1883,it began deep underground mutterings which quickly reached the intensity of cannonading. By nightfall the volcano was showering the island with boulders. Bridges fell. Roads became impassable. Ships had to scurry out to sea to
elude the stones. Great undersea explosions churned the seas around the island and the temperature of the water rose sixty-five degrees overnight.

By noon on the 26th, the great volcano Maha-Meru, Java's largest, had joined the thunderous chorus. Then Gunung-guntur, and a few hours later the entire volcanic chain of the Kadangs was trumpeting in full volume.The sea boiled around the doomed island. The earth trembled. The nights were ruddy with the glow from the seething volcanoes--fifteen of them roaring in unison. Suddenly there was one explosion so vast that it defies description--the island of Krakatoa had disintegrated in one cataclysmic blast that sent earth shocks and air waves around the globe. The tidal waves killed tens of thousands of persons, some of them hundreds of miles from Krakatoa. There had been nothing like it in the annals of the human race.

In Boston, on that hot Sunday night in August of 1883, Byron Somes awakened from his troubled sleep and sat there for a while pondering the nightmare he had just experienced. He could still hear in his mind the screams of those doomed mortals on that little tropical island as they sought vainly to escape from the fiery fate that engulfed them. Somes jotted down the details of the dream while they were fresh in his mind, on the off chance that it might be usable as feature material some dull newsday. He marked the notes as 'important'--put them on his desk and went home. There was little news of the Krakatoa disaster next day, for communications to the stricken sector were sparse at best and the blast had virtually erased them. Somes did not report for work that day but someone evidently found his notes and misinterpreted them as a report on the seismological disturbances that was puzzling the experts. Something tremendous had happened--but where? Then came a fragmentary report from Batavia that located the disaster at Krakatoa--and the Boston Globe, on August 29th, ran an excellent story based on the details in the notes Somes had jotted down. Other papers evidently predicated their stories on that of the Boston Globe -- and in a matter of a short time his remarkable dream had been translated into widespread newspaper copy.

When his employers found Somes and demanded more detail and more copy, Somes broke down and admitted that his "report" was not intended as news matter--that it was nothing more than notes on a nightmare. The higher-ups at the Globe
probably experienced a nightmare of sorts at the discovery that they had printed a dream as though it were factual news --and had permitted other papers to duplicate it. Byron Somes was in the doghouse--and out of the newspaper business.

Before the Globe could make a public confession, nature rescued them. Great waves began hammering at the west coast of the United States, seismic waves generated by the explosion of Krakatoa thousands of miles away. News of the disaster began filtering in as survivors reached cities where telegraphed facilities still functioned. As the newswires brought in the real story, hour by hour, the amazing accuracy of the account based on the dream of Byron Somes became evident. That bewildered fellow found himself in the good graces of the Globe again. And the paper declined, at the time, to reveal the story behind the story. [Eventually, the Globe "explained" that Somes's account of the Krakatoa disaster had been based on information from a coffee broker; later this was amplified to include another "explanation" that Somes had also been doing some research on volcanoes in tropical islands at the time of the Krakatoa incident, etc. Author's note.]

In his remarkable dream Byron Somes, in Boston, seems to have witnessed the explosion of Krakatoa, halfway 'round the world, at approximately the time it happened. His dream was translated (accidently perhaps) into a news story which was subsequently confirmed by conventional processes. During the dream Somes kept hearing the word "Pralape." It made no sense at the time, but years later, through a Dutch historical society, he learned that Pralape was an ancient native name
for Krakatoa, unused for nearly two centuries before he heard it in his "dream that shook the world."

http://p102.ezboard.com/dremptOf/fyyondefrm548.showMessage?topicID=24.top

Crossword Puzzles

Go to this site and choose crossword puzzles to do. If you don't know some of the the words or phrases used, write them down so you can learn them!

http://a4esl.org/a/c3.html

Give the Gift of Languages

Directions: Read and print out this article. Answer all of the questions that follow by commenting or by bringing them to class. Also, be sure to know the bold words!

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Give the Gift of Languages
by Beth Butler


We live in an increasingly global society – our neighbor is from Puerto Rico, our co-worker from South Africa, and our child's teacher from Sweden! As adults, we often feel it's too difficult to learn a new language, but for kids, it's easy.

Time and Newsweek ran feature articles on the window of opportunity for second language learning – reported to be between birth and 10 years old. And a growing number of brain studies concur. The truth is, young children learn languages easily and retain them longer if they are exposed to them early in life. That's because when a baby is learning one word for an item, it's just as easy for his young brain to learn a second word for the same item. It grows more difficult as he gets older.

Being bilingual gives advantages beyond the joy of conversing in more than one tongue. A study by Dr. Ellen Bialystok of York University showed that children who received instruction in two languages scored twice as high on language tests than their monolingual peers. These bilingual children also read sooner and demonstrated advanced problem solving capabilities.

Latest research suggests that children learning through a bilingual format will outperform their monolingual peers in grade school as they experience advanced cognitive development. And the added benefit of learning a second language before middle school? These children will speak the new languages with native or near-native pronunciation.

The sooner you get kids started, the better. Believe it or not, at six months old a baby has the ability to learn all the languages of our world at the same time. Up until the age of five, a child still has the ability to learn five languages simultaneously. By middle school we all know learning a new language is no longer as easy as it used to be in elementary school. Children whose brains have been wired to learn languages early in life will experience advanced success in learning any language of their choice later in life.

Find a fun way to bring the language learning into your family's daily routine. Sing, dance, and play together on the road to becoming bilingual. We live in an increasingly global society. There is no better gift you can give your child than the ability to explore that world, speaking seamlessly.

Beth Butler is the creator of the BOCA BETH Language Learning Series for young children. www.bocabeth.com

http://www.education.com/magazine/article/Ed_Give_Gift_Languages_2/

Questions to answer:

1. What does the phrase "window of opportunity" mean? Why do you think the word "window" is in that? Do you know of other common phrases/sayings that use the word "opportunity" or "window"?

2. Define "tongue" as it is used in the article.

3. What does the phrase "believe it or not" suggest/imply?

4. What does it mean for children's brains to be "wired" to learn languages?

5. In the phrase "on the road to becoming bilingual," is "road" literal or figurative? How do you know?

6. What does it mean to speak "seamlessly"? What is a "seam"?

Whale video

Here is the video of the beached whale you asked me to post. It's very tragic.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AVe4qHGNTO4

"History of the RMS Titanic"

Directions: Here is the article on the RMS Titanic. Please READ it and POST A SUMMARY of the article. The summary should be 1-2 paragraphs long. Post by Sunday evening. I will be checking this for a grade! For those who want to read the "Potato" article, it is below the Titantic one.


http://www.titanicarchive.com/History.aspx

History of the RMS Titanic

A brief history of the RMS Titanic. For more history on the Titanic use the advanced search.

The history of the Titanic began at a dinner party in a London mansion in 1907. Then, J. Bruce Ismay, managing officer of the White Star Line, a prominent ship operating company, and Lord James Pirrie devised plans to build three magnificent ships that would set a new standard for luxury and elegance. The first two would be named Olympic and Titanic while the third, to be built later, would be the Britannic.

The White Star Line started production on the Olympic in December of 1908, while work on the Titanic started the following March. The Titanic included amenities that many of its passengers had never enjoyed in their own homes, such as electric light and heat in every room. The size and splendor of the Titanic quickly established the ship as a legend, even before the first voyage.

The Titanic was officially launched from Southampton, England, on April 10, 1912. While the ship carried more than 2,200 passengers and crew, Titanic was equipped with only 16 lifeboats, with a capacity of 1,708. The White Star Line had decided to use only half the number of boats the Titanic could carry in order to alleviate what was referred to as a "cluttered" feeling on the main deck of the ship.

The Titanic sailed first to Cherbourg, France, to pick up additional passengers, and then to Queenstown, Ireland, before setting out to sea for the transatlantic voyage to New York. The first three days of the voyage passed without incident, while the fourth did not. Although the Titanic had received five ice warnings throughout the day on April 14, Captain Edward Smith decided not to slow down and continued on at 21 knots (25 mph). At 11:40 PM, lookout Fred Fleet spotted an iceberg and notified the bridge. First Officer William Murdoch then ordered the ship turned hard to port and the engine room was signaled to reverse direction. The ship did move slightly, but could not avoid the iceberg, which tore a 300 feet-long hole in the ship, causing compartments to begin filling with water.

Twenty-five minutes after the crash, the ships officers ordered the lifeboats uncovered and began preparing the passengers and crew for evacuation. The first lifeboat was launched twenty minutes after the orders were given. Despite having a carrying capacity of 68, the first lifeboat launched with only 28 passengers. When the last boat launched, there were more than 1,500 passengers left on board. The lifeboats contained mostly women and children. However, J. Bruce Ismay managed to escape by sneaking onto one of the last lifeboats.

At approximately 2:10 AM, the stern, or rear of the ship, rose out of the water and shortly thereafter the weight of the raised stern caused the ship to split in two. The bow, or front of the ship, slowly sunk as the stern settled back into the water. Then, the stern filled with water until it disappeared into the ocean. More than 1,500 souls were lost in the "greatest maritime disaster in history".

Many attempts have been made to find the wreck of the Titanic, yet it wasn't until 1985, when an expedition combining teams from IFREMER and Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute discovered the famous ship. The team, led by Robert Ballard and Jean-Luis Martin, took the first photographs of the Titanic in 73 years.

More than 90 years later, people continue to be fascinated with the Titanic. The disaster and its survivors have been the subject of four movies, a Broadway musical and countless books. The movie Titanic, written and directed by James Cameron, is the most expensive film ever made and in 1998 it won 11 Academy Awards. The Titanic recently made headlines again in 2001, when a New York couple announced they would be wed in a deep-sea submersible at the Titanic gravesite.

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http://www.townhall.com/News/NewsArticle.aspx?contentGUID=abcd1034-40c1-4c6b-b703-466b35112ad2

Potatoes Could Be Used for Bioplastics

The usual choices for potatoes include baked, mashed or french fried, but a new study suggests another option: plastic.

A report by the University of Maine's Margaret Chase Smith Policy Center says the state's potato industry could benefit by becoming a producer of bioplastics, which are made from plant starch rather than crude oil and petroleum products.

Bioplastics can be used to produce carpeting, upholstery fabric and recyclable plastic bottles, the report said. Countries including the United Kingdom and Japan have turned to potato-based plastics technology to turn out such items as "spudware," or plastic silverware made from potatoes.

Researchers, environmentalists and industry representatives agreed Tuesday that turning potatoes into plastics makes technological and economic sense for manufacturers and Maine potato growers.

"I think this is a first step for agriculture to look at new avenues and develop new markets," said Don Flannery, executive director of the Maine Potato Board. He said there is plenty of additional acreage that could be planted for bioplastics without reducing the current food crop.

Aroostook County would be the likely location of a bioplastics plant that would put the state at the cutting edge of the biobased products market, speakers said. Guilford-based InterfaceFABRIC, which has pioneered the manufacture of textiles from recycling plastics and corn, has indicated it may be interested in building such a plant.

Interface, which makes carpeting and upholstery fabrics, received a grant last year from the Maine Technology Institute to evaluate the possible use of Maine potatoes in place of corn. That grant helped fund the UMaine study.

Wendy Porter, Interface's director of environmental management, estimated the cost of a bioplastics plant at $50 million and said the next step is to work out technical details of the operation and identify a location.

Other companies that have expressed interest in using potato-based plastics include Toms of Maine, Correct Building Products and Sagoma Technologies, a Biddeford firm that makes compact disc cases from corn-based plastics.

Because biobased plastics are made from starch, they are toxic-free, recyclable and often biodegradable in industrial composting facilities.

The economic and environmental advantages of potato-based plastics were cited by Michael Belliveau, executive director of the Environmental Health Strategy Center, a nonprofit group that promotes clean industries.

"We are here today because we imagine a future when plastics are made from sustainably grown Maine potatoes instead of toxic petrochemicals," Belliveau said. "This represents green chemistry in action."

Websites about idioms

Many of you were asking about idioms. Here are some websites that have extensive (vocab word!) lists of commonly used American idioms. Feel free to look through them, and if you have any questions, you can comment on the blog, e-mail me, or ask me in class!


http://www.englishdaily626.com/idioms.php
This site has excellent sample conversations using the idioms.


http://a4esl.org/q/h/idioms.html
Here, you can take quizzes to see how well you know English idioms! It also has a lot of examples of phrasal verbs.


http://www.idiomconnection.com/
This site divides idioms alphabetically and by topic.


http://english-zone.com/index.php?ID=3
Here's another site with lots of categories of idioms.

Climate Change Refugees

Directions: Print and read the article. Underline words you don't know, but try to figure them out from the context of the article. Think about the main idea/argument of the article, how it's structured, and the kind of language it uses.


Scientific American
June 01, 2007

Climate Change Refugees (extended version)

As global warming tightens the availability of water, prepare for a torrent of forced migrations

By Jeffrey D. Sachs

Human-induced climate and hydrologic change is likely to make many parts of the world uninhabitable, or at least uneconomic. Even if there are some "winners" from climate change perhaps farmers in high-latitude farm regions where the growing season will be extended by warmer temperatures there will also be large numbers of undeniable losers. Over the course of a few decades, if not sooner, hundreds of millions of people may be compelled to relocate because of environmental pressures.

To a significant extent, water will be the most important determinant of these population movements. Dramatic changes in the relationship between water and society will be widespread, as emphasized in the new report from Working Group II of the Inter-Governmental Panel on Climate Change. These shifts may include rising sea levels, stronger tropical cyclones, the loss of soil moisture under higher temperatures, more intense precipitation and flooding, more frequent droughts, the melting of glaciers and the changing seasonality of snowmelt. Combined with the human-induced depletion of groundwater sources by pumping, and the extensive pollution of rivers and lakes, mass migrations may be unavoidable.

Impacts will vary widely across the world. It will be important to keep our eye on at least four zones: low-lying coastal settlements which are especially vulnerable to rising sea levels; farm regions which are dependent on rivers fed by glacier melt and snowmelt; sub-humid and arid regions which are likely to experience greater drought frequency; and humid areas in Southeast Asia vulnerable to changes in monsoon patterns.

A significant rise of sea levels, even by a fraction of a meter, much less by several meters, could wreak havoc for tens or even hundreds of millions of people. One recent study by Gordon McGranahan, Deborah Balk, and Bridget Anderson (2007) found that although coastal areas less than 10 meters above sea level constitute only 2 percent of the world's land area, they contain 10 percent of the world's population. (High-density urban settlements are commonly located on coastlines for convenient access to international trade.) These low-elevation coastal zones are highly vulnerable to storm surges and increased intensity of tropical cyclones call it the New Orleans Effect.

Regions much further inland will wither. Hundreds of millions of people, including many of the poorest farm households, live in river valleys where irrigation is fed by glacier melt and snowmelt. The glaciers are disappearing, and the annual snowmelt is coming earlier each year, synchronizing it less and less well with the summer growing season.

Thus, the vast numbers of farmers in the Indo-Gangetic Plain and in China's Yellow River Basin will most likely face severe disruptions in water availability. Yet those regions are already experiencing profound water stress due to unsustainable rates of groundwater pumping performed to irrigate large expanses of Northern China and Northern India. Surface water bodies in these regions are already over-appropriated and degraded.

In Africa, all signs suggest that currently subhumid and arid areas will dry further, deepening the food crisis for many of the world's poorest and most vulnerable people. The severe decline in precipitation in the African Sahel during the past 30 years seems to be related to both anthropogenic warming and aerosol pollutants. The violence in Darfur and Somalia is fundamentally related to food and water insecurity. Cote d'Ivoire's civil war stems, at least in part, from ethnic clashes after masses of people fled the northern dry lands of Burkina Faso for the coast. Worse chaos could easily arise.

In Southeast Asia, each El Niño cycle brings drying to thousands of islands in the Indonesian archipelago, with attendant crop failures, famine and peat fires. Some climatologists hypothesize that global warming could induce a more persistent El Niño state; if so, the 200 million people in Indonesia and neighboring areas could experience lasting drought conditions.

Until now, the climate debate has focused on the basic science and the costs and benefits of reducing greenhouse gas emissions. That stage is now ending, with a resounding consensus on the risk of climate change and the need for action. Attention will now increasingly turn to the urgent challenge of adapting to the changes and helping those who are most affected.

Some hard-hit places will be salvaged by better infrastructure that protects against storm surges or economizes on water for agriculture. Others will shift successfully from agriculture to industry and services. Yet some places will be unable to adjust altogether, and populations are likely to suffer and to move. We are just beginning to understand these phenomena in quantitative terms. Economists, hydrologists, agronomists, and climatologists will have to join forces to take the next steps in scientific understanding.

http://sciam.com/article.cfm?chanID=sa020&articleID=E82F5561-E7F2-99DF-36D3CB7EB5DA209C&pageNumber=1&catID=2

- Provided by Yakup

English is toughest European language to read

For class Monday, June 4, 2007.

Directions: Read the following article and answer the questions that follow it. Complete the vocabulary sheet as you go if you can. If there are words you cannot figure out from the context, define them and write a sentence using a monolingual dictionary to help you.

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English is toughest European language to read

15:30 04 September 2001

From New Scientist Print Edition.

http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn1233

James Randerson

Despite being the world's lingua franca, English is the most difficult European language to learn to read. Children learning other languages master the basic elements of literacy within a year, but British kids take two-and-a-half years to reach the same point.

In the most extensive cross-national study ever, Philip Seymour of Dundee University and his team compared the reading abilities of children in 15 European countries. They found that those learning Romance languages such as Italian and French progressed faster than those learning a Germanic language such as German and English. "Children do seem to find English particularly complex and problematic though," says Seymour.

The team focused on the earliest phase of learning to read. They tested the children's ability to match letters to sounds, their capacity to recognise familiar written words, and their ability to work out new words from combinations of familiar syllables.

Seymour's findings might explain why more people are diagnosed as being dyslexic in English-speaking countries than elsewhere.

In languages where sounds simply match letters, some symptoms just would not show up, says Maggie Snowling, a dyslexia expert at the University of York. The condition would be more difficult to diagnose in children who speak these languages, though subtle symptoms such as impaired verbal short-term memory would remain. "People might be struggling, but no one would notice," she says.

Consonant clusters

The Germanic languages are tricky because many words contain clusters of consonants. The word "sprint", for example, is difficult because the letter p is sandwiched between two other consonants, making the p sound difficult to learn.

Another feature of English that makes it difficult is the complex relationship between letters and their sounds.

In Finnish, which Seymour found to be the easiest European language to learn to read, the relationship between a letter and its sound is fixed.

However, in English a letter's sound often depends on its context within the word. For example, the letter c can sound soft (as in receive) or hard (as in cat). Many words like "yacht" don't seem to follow any logic at all.

Historical accident

However, the things that make English difficult to read might have contributed to Britain's rich literary tradition. Words like "sign" and "bomb" are difficult because of their silent letters, but these hint at relationships with other words. The connection with words like "signature" and "bombard" is obvious.

Mark Pagel, an expert on language diversity at the University of Reading, acknowledges the irony that despite being the international lingua franca, English is the most difficult to learn. The dominance of English has more to do with historical accident than any innate superiority of the language, he says.

"People who speak English happen to have been the ones that were economically and politically dominant in recent history. Those forces greatly outweigh any small difficulties in language acquisition."

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Questions:

1. What is this article about? Write one sentence to summarize the main point.

2. Which language is the world's lingua franca?

3. Why is English so hard to learn to read?

4. Children were studied in how many European countries?

5. Did children learning Romance or Germanic languages progress faster?

6. What did the team test?

7. Why is a word like "sprint" difficult?

8. Which European language is the easiest to learn to read?

9. What is ironic about the international lingua franca?

10. Why is English so globally dominant?

Bonus: There's a word in this article that lets you know it was written by a Brit. Which word is it?