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 系列3准备结束噜~ 继续坚持每天被虐吧xdjm们~~ 希望更多筒子们加入被虐队伍^^
每日阅读汇总贴http://forum.chasedream.com/GMAT_RC/thread-562296-1-1.html
逻辑姊妹篇：http://forum.chasedream.com/GMAT_CR/thread-580862-1-1.html
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Hot in the Garden: Too Much Sun Can Harm Vegetables
Last week we discussed how to grow vegetables in partial sun. This week we learn how to protect vegetables from too much sun.
Curtis Swift is an extension agent at Colorado State University. He says shading plants from intense sunlight in hot weather can increase production. Plants can suffer damage when their temperature rises above thirty-two degrees Celsius.
CURTIS SWIFT: "Tomatoes, peppers, eggplants, and okra and other members of that family drop flower buds and young fruit when the plant temperatures exceed thirty-two degrees C."
Plants can get sunburn. Yellow spots may appear on their leaves and fruit. These areas can become thin and white as plant tissue is affected.
Curtis Swift says shade can help correct these problems.
CURTIS SWIFT: "What it does is, it actually allows the plant to give off adequate water, which cools the tissue."
He suggests shading plants with bed sheets, shade cloth or brush -- in other words, sticks and branches. Cut them about a meter long and stand them in the ground on the south and west sides of plants.
CURTIS SWIFT: "Anything you can put over the plant. A lot of people can cut brush at the edge of the field and stick that into the soil on the south and west side of the plant and provide some shade."
Curtis Swift says if you use cloth sheeting, suspend it at least five centimeters above the plants. That way there is enough space for bees to fly around. Be careful not to cover plants too closely, which could trap heat and defeat the purpose of shading.
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People can also buy canopies to shelter their plants. Some canopies have narrow strips of metal or wood to provide either sunlight or shade, depending on the position of the sun.
Curtis Swift says shading works with field crops as well as vine crops like squash. People sometimes plant shrubs or trees to shade their vegetables. But he says tree roots compete with the vegetable roots. The veggies may not get enough nutrients and water.
And that's the VOA Special English Agriculture Report, written by Jerilyn Watson. Here are a few of your comments about last week's report on shade growing. Ko from South Korea wrote: I can't imagine plants in the shade for most of day without sunshine! That's a really creative idea.
Andy in Chile wrote: This is an interesting article. But you forget that the shadow allows the growth of the fungi. And Slava in Croatia recalled: Once I grew small tomatoes on a balcony under a roof. Sun shone there only in the afternoon. In October the plants had only a few green tomatoes. I took them inside behind the window and they had ripe fruits on Christmas and the entire winter.
From VOA: http://www.51voa.com/VOA_Special_English/Hot-in-the-Garden-Too-Much-Sun-Can-Harm-Vegetables-42660.html
Ice Hockey A Hit in Beijing
When one thinks of the sports in which China excels, swimming, gymnastics or track and field usually come to mind. But ice hockey? While the sport may not have as big a following as soccer or basketball, there are an increasing number of youngsters who are learning about slap shots, hat tricks and teamwork.
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Flying Tigers
Nestled in a newly built neighborhood on the northwest side of Beijing, high up on the fourth floor of a massive shopping complex, is one of this city's newest ice rinks. It is also the site of an ice hockey camp for young, talented players.
For several weeks last month, the Flying Tigers hosted a summer camp for these young players. Most were from Beijing, but some came from as far away as Hong Kong and the northeastern province of Heilongjiang.
"Initially coming to China where hockey isn't their main focus, I was very impressed with the skill level of the kids right from the 04-05s, right up to the big kids," said Kevin Masters, one of several coaches flown in from Canada. "The specifics of the skating and the individual type skills are absolutely comparable to what we see back home in Canada."
Supportive parents
And where there is ice hockey - a sport that requires a lot of time and money - there are always ice hockey parents cheering their kids on and giving pointers.
"When my son started playing ice hockey, we had just seen the movie Transformers and he thought goalies look like Transformers with all of their pads on and because of that it was his favorite position," said Zhou Jianwei, whose eight-year-old son is a goalie.
Zhou says that in China, where many families have only one child, his son is learning more than just a sport.
"Many kids [in China] lack a sense of teamwork and what it means to work hard for what they want to get because their parents have taken care of everything for them. But since he's started playing ice hockey, he's slowly begun to understand how to work together with his teammates to accomplish a goal and gained a sense of how [in society] people need to help one another to get things done," Zhou said.
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China's colder northeast provinces are largely considered the home of ice hockey in the country. And, a large majority of the players on China's national ice hockey team grew up there.
New ice rinks
Now, with new rinks in Beijing, that is starting to change. Local hockey organizers note that the number of U16 or 16 year-old ice hockey players in Beijing is likely to surpass the number of players in the northeast in the next season or two.
The reasons, they say, are because more families in Beijing can afford ice hockey, which is an expensive sport, and because the northeast is opening up to other sports, which is taking players away from the ice.
Cao Zhennan says her father played hockey while growing up in the northeast and helped to get her son interested. She says the lessons her son learns from ice hockey far outweigh any future prospect of making the national team or playing more competitively.
"Ice hockey is a fast and physical sport, it's a really a fun sport," Cao said. "On top of that, he's a boy and we got into the sport hoping it would help him become more courageous. It (ice hockey) also gets more interesting as the kids learn how to work together and make a lot of new friends."
Charlie, an 11-year-old, who plays right wing, says his friend Abiyasi got him interested in the sport a year-and-a-half ago. Charlie says the sport has other benefits besides keeping him away from computer games.
"I think it's fun. It's good for my health and it's not boring!" Charlie said.
More teams
Mark Simon, vice president and head coach of the Beijing Imperial Guard Hockey Club, one of several teams in the Beijing Junior Hockey League, says team rosters have been growing in recent years.
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"A group of us, our club and a few others started a league in 2008 and 2009 with four teams, which included about 50-60 players," Simon said. "Now, last season in 10-11, we had about 25 teams, so about 300 players, 300-350."
Simon, an ex-banker from Montreal who started playing ice hockey at the age of five, says he left his gear in Canada when he first came to China. Several years later, he works for a company that builds rinks in Asia.
He says that as far as Asian cities go, Beijing is quite spoiled.
"To have four full ice sheets is quite rare," noted Simon. "And that is one of the reasons ice hockey is growing here a lot more quickly than in places like Hong Kong. Hong Kong has got a huge hockey following, a lot of kids playing, but they are very limited by the number of ice surfaces they have."
Just getting started
Lane Moore, another coach who is helping out at the Flying Tigers camp, says ice hockey is just getting started in Beijing.
"With their development of new rinks, new ice surfaces, the numbers in Beijing are going through the roof and I am hearing in Shanghai it is the same way and I just think the potential for ice hockey in China is going to keep going," Moore said.
Both he and Kevin Masters say they never expected to be running an ice hockey camp in China, and certainly not on the fourth floor of a shopping mall. But they say the publicity from curious shoppers helps build interest in a sport that they say is quickly on its way from a novelty to the mainstream.
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From VOA: http://www.51voa.com/VOA_Standard_English/Ice-Hockey-A-Hit-in-Beijing-42665.html
Sex selection
Cat got your tongue?
AS HE walked into the maternity ward of Lok Nayak Jayaprakash Narayan Hospital in Delhi on his first day at work in 1978, Puneet Bedi, a medical student, saw a cat bound past him “with a bloody blob dangling from its mouth.” “What was that thing—wet with blood, mangled, about the size of Bedi’s fist?” he remembers thinking. “Before long it struck him. Near the bed, in a tray normally reserved for disposing of used instruments, lay a fetus of five or six months, soaking in a pool of blood…He told a nurse, then a doctor, I saw a cat eat a fetus. Nobody on duty seemed concerned, however.” Mara Hvistendahl, a writer at Science magazine, is profoundly concerned, both about the fact that abortion was treated so casually, and the reason. “Why had the fetus not been disposed of more carefully? A nurse’s explanation came out cold. “Because it was a girl.”
Sex-selective abortion is one of the largest, least noticed disasters in the world. Though concentrated in China and India, it is practised in rich and poor countries and in Buddhist, Hindu, Christian and Muslim societies alike. Because of males’ greater vulnerability to childhood disease, nature ensures that 105 boys are born for every 100 girls, so the sexes will be equal at marriageable age. Yet China’s sex ratio is 120 boys per 100 girls; India’s is 109 to 100.
The usual view of why this should be stresses traditional “son preference” in South and East Asia. Families wanted a son to bear the family name, to inherit property and to carry out funerary duties. Ms Hvistendahl has little truck with this account, which fails to explain why some of the richest, most outward-looking parts of India and China have the most skewed sex ratios. According to her account, sex-selection technologies were invented in the West, adopted there as a population-control measure and exported to East Asia by Western aid donors and American military officials.
The ultrasound and other technologies that identify the sex of a fetus started out as diagnostic devices to help people with sex-linked diseases, such as haemophilia, conceive healthy children. They were greeted rapturously in America in the 1960s. “Ultrasound Device Takes Guessing Out of Pregnancy” ran one headline. “Control of Life: Audacious Experiments Promise Decades of Added Life” ran another.
But 1960s America was also a period of growing concern (hysteria, even) about population in developing countries. Policymakers, demographers and military men all thought rapid population growth was the biggest single threat to mankind and that drastic measures would be needed to rein it in. One such figure was Paul Ehrlich, whose book, “The Population Bomb”, became a bestseller in 1968. Mr Ehrlich pointed out that some Indian and Chinese parents would go on having daughter after daughter until the longed-for son arrived. If, he argued, they could be guaranteed a son right away, those preliminary daughters would not be born, and population growth would be lower. Sex selection became a tool in a wider battle to stop “overpopulation”.
But how did an obsession of Western policymakers turn into the widespread practice of destroying female fetuses in Asia? Partly, argues Ms Hvistendahl, through aid. The Ford and Rockefeller Foundations gave over $3m to the All-India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) in the 1960s, helping it to pioneer India’s first amniocentesis tests, initially for genetic abnormalities and later for identifying fetal sex. India at that time was the World Bank’s biggest client, and the bank made loans for health projects conditional on population control.
No less important, American military officers helped make abortion the population control tool of choice in those Asian countries where they wielded influence, first in Japan in the late 1940s and 1950s, then South Korea in the 1960s. USAID, America’s aid agency, provided Jeeps for mobile clinics which roamed South Korea performing abortions. At one point, a quarter of the country’s health budget was going on population control and the number of abortions hit an all-time record in Seoul, where, in 1977, there were 2.75 abortions for every live birth. “What would have happened if the government hadn’t allowed for such easy abortion?” asks one sociologist. “I don’t think sex-selective abortion would have become so popular.”
Ms Hvistendahl is convincing in telling the little-known story of how Westerners helped create the conditions under which sex selection began in Asia. But her emphasis on the West’s role is less sure an explanation for the practice’s spread throughout China and India. China’s coercive population-control policies were developed in the late 1970s, at the end of the Cultural Revolution and the early reforms of Deng Xiaoping. This was a period of isolation and modest opening-up, when China was not much interested in Western advice. The available records are scanty so it is hard to be sure, but the influence of Westerners on the one-child policy seems modest. Westerners had more clout in India, but it turns out some of them used it against, rather than for, sex selection. One (Indian) doctor from AIIMS, arguing in favour of sex-selective abortions, concedes that “this may not be acceptable to persons in the West…” Oh.
Ms Hvistendahl’s history is marred by the occasional lapses into self-righteousness and polemic. She says others who have written about sex-selection technology have not been critical enough “because blaming backward cultural traditions is simpler.” She dismisses a World Bank report that said South Korean actions to combat sex selection had worked, as “flat-out wrong”, apparently because it would let the bank off the hook for previous support of population control. She calls Western population policies a “plot”.
Still, the merits of her book outweigh such flaws. Ms Hvistendahl’s distinctive contribution is twofold. She provides a history of the modern practice of sex-selective abortion, based on new and detailed research, and she helps readers think about its possible consequences. Most of them look grim. America’s violent Wild West, she points out, had a huge preponderance of men. Excess males in central and southern China also contributed to the Taiping rebellion of 1850-64, one of the bloodiest civil wars in history.
Sex selection, Ms Hvistendahl says, still does not get its proper attention. Female genital mutilation is all over the websites of UNICEF and the World Health Organisation. Sex selection, in contrast, hardly gets a mention. One hopes her book will help the subject get its due.
From The Economist:
http://www.economist.com/node/21525348
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发表于 2011-8-11 20:04:02
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