初三英语阅读材料Honey-Bee-Mystery

Honey Bee MysteryAll across the United States, honeybees are flying away from their hives and dying. Empty hives are causing a lot of worry about some important food crops.Bees give us a lot more than delicious honey. They are pollinatorsthey enable plants to produce the fruits and nuts we enjoy by carrying pollen from one plant or flower to the next. The wind pollinates oats, corn, and wheat, but many other plants (like apple and cherry trees and melon vines) depend on insects, bats, and birds.Animals pollinate about one out of every three bites of food we eat. And in the U.S., millions and millions of bees kept by human beekeepers fly around doing a lot of this important work for food crops.Professional beekeepers raise honeybees, box them up, and send them on trucks to fields where farmers grow food. Bees live in groups of about 40,000 individuals called colonies.Californias almond crop alone depends on about half the bees in the country, about 1.5 million colonies! The bees pollinate in the almond groves for about six weeks, and then are sent on to work other crops. But now the almond crop and many others could be in trouble with so many bees dying.“The colony is what we call a super-organism,” says Dr. Jeff Pettis of the Bee Research Laboratory at the U.S. Agricultural Research Service in Beltsville, Maryland. “When a lot of the bees die, the whole colony is at risk.” Researchers like him at government and university labs all over the country are trying to figure out why so many bee colonies are dying.However, explains Pettis, bees are hard to study. Most die away from the hive, so researchers dont have dead bodies to examine. And when researchers return to a hive after two weeks, about half the bees they studied on their first visit will be dead, replaced by new ones in the natural life cycle of bees.Making detective work even harder, these busy insects fly up to two miles away from their hive in search of pollen and nectar from flowers. So when bees pick up diseases or get exposed to poisons in their environment, it is hard to know exactly where that happened.“It isnt like studying a large animal like a cow that doesnt move around much and is easy to find out in the cow field,” says Pettis.Researchers do have some ideas about what could be affecting bee health. They could be sick from poisons widely used to kill insects, or they might not be getting enough good food to stay strong. Also, tiny insects called mites feed on bees. “Any or all of these things could be weakening the honey bees,” explains Pettis, “and then a virus or bacteria could be doing the killing.”Pettis is hoping for a solution, because bees are so important. “Heres a good example of what pollinators like bees give us,” he says. “You can eat plain oatmeal every day and get by, and oats are pollinated by the wind. But if you want to add some blueberries or strawberries or nuts to your daily oatmeal, those are the things you have to thank pollinators for. Bees are worth protecting because their work adds so much to our diet.”Cat Adopts DogThings didnt look good when Charlie the rottweiler was born at Meriden Humane Society. Charlies mother was too sick to nurse him, and workers struggled to keep the puppy healthy by bottle-feeding him every two hours. Luckily, Satin the cat came to the rescue.Satin was nursing her own kittens, and exhausted workers hoped she might be willing to add one more to her family. “She loved it when we put them together,” says director Marlena DiBianco. Satin fed Charlie for three and a half weeks. Her kittens welcomed the puppy like a brother, wrestling and sleeping with them.In 17 years at the shelter, DiBianco has never witnessed anything like a cat nursing a puppy. That didnt matter to Satin. Even as Charlie grew, the cat still mothered him. “He was twice her size and she would still groom him,” DiBianco says.Q&A; With Reza, Photographer/HumanitarianReza, one of the best-known photojournalists in the world, has captured the beauty and turmoil of the Middle and Far East for National Geographic, Newsweek, and Time.In 2001, he founded AINA, Afghan Media and Culture Center, to bring a free press to Afghanistan. AINA trains people, especially women and children to use media tools such as radio, photography, video, and journalism to bring their own local stories to the world. They publish a childrens magazine, Parvaz.NG Kids: What were you like as a child?Reza: I wanted to change the whole worldto make everything beautiful, to have every child laughing, and no poor in the country. I had a Utopian ideait came to me even when I was a small kida place where everyone had something to eat, to be dressed correctly, to have shelter, and no need for money to buy things but just get the things you need. I waslooking around me and being touched very deeply by, not social injustice, because when you are a kid you dont know about injustice, but inequality. I didnt understand how someone could sleep at night if he had seen some poor people or some beggars, because I wasnt able to sleep, even as a kid. I was always touched by those things. And its still the same for me.Many children, given the conditions of their life, they became adult very soon. If you go to Africa and Asia today and you talk to the kids, they dont have kids dreams that you find in the U.S. or Europe.NG Kids: How are kids in war-torn countries different from kids in wealthy nations around the world?Reza: The main difference is that they have touched the burning reality almost from the wombthey have heard explosions, guns, their mothers crying, people having nothing to eat. So all those things have influenced them. When you look into their eyes, you dont see the eyes of a child. You see the eyes of a 60-year-old person, maybe even more. The main difference is the hard reality, its not only about developed or undeveloped countriesits about the poor and rich.Only the proportion is different in the world. In the U.S., you have maybe 80 percent of the people who have comfort, but you have 20 percent poor. So the children of the 20 percent poor in America, is equal for me to the children of the poor nations. In poor countries you always find some very rich families, whose children are sometimes more spoiled than the rich children in the U.S. Its a matter of the proportion. Its all over the world, you just have to look for it.NG Kids: Do you have a hero?Reza: In reality my heroes have no names. My heroes are the tens of thousands of people that I meet every day that I admirethat even with all the difficulties that they continue. One of my heroes was a little girl in Sarajevo who was selling dolls during the war. She set up a table and was selling her dolls to help her family. Or the little boy who was growing one of those little plants that was grown in school. He was carrying it carefully and he said he wanted to grow this small plant into a big tree.NG Kids: What is a normal day like for you?Reza: I have very different days, actually. When I am in the field in photography, it is totally different from when I am in Washington. If I am in Kabul working with AINA, its a totally different day. When I am really involved in work, I try to forget everything else. What I am doing now is the most important thing I have to do in my life.So a normal day for me if I am in the field, always starts before sunrise. Whatever happens if I am photographing nature, or cities, even if I have only slept for one hour or two hours, it doesnt matter, I have to get out before sunrise. It gives you a very nice feeling and understanding of the people and of the place, if you are up very early. And you see little by little how everything is waking upeverything is blooming, people are coming to work, so you feel a little bit that you know them. You have seen them growing. It is a very strange feeling, but you get immediately a grasp on the culture, civilization even if its very different than yours. Its very important.So that is how I startespecially in the work of photography. Its amazing. The other day I was thinking about one day, in Cairo, that I started before sunrise. I had a meeting with fishermans family that was living on a boat on the Nile, on the small fisherman boatsjust the ones that you row. A man, wife, and two children, this is their home, this is their kitchen, their work, their bathroom. Everything is there. And there are thousands of those people, not only one family.They told me if you come early morning you can have breakfast with us. So I said of course, yes. So I ate a small fish for breakfast, which I dont like to eat fish, especially for breakfast, but obviously for them this was the best thing that they were offering to a guest, so I ate it. Then about one hour afterward I went to a fish market with this man.Then I had a meeting about the planning of the opening of the opera house and I had to go and see the architect of the opera house. Then there was a demonstration at the market, and I ran to photograph the demonstration. Then there was a fashion show in one of the hotels that was going on.Then in the afternoon I was in the places where people make pottery, and they use garbagegarbage collectorsand I photographed that. Then I had to go around to my hotel to change, because of all this garbage, to go and participate in the opening of the opera house with the minister of culture, and the FIFA president and have dinner with them. This is every day! He laughs.NG Kids: What kind of camera do you use? Digital?Reza: The camera is less important than the eye. The type of camera is not importantit is only a tool.NG Kids: What is the best place that you have ever visited?Reza: When people ask me how many countries I have been to I say 110 and then they always ask me what is the best place. And I say my best place, today now is here. This is the best place exactly where I am sitting here, and the people around me are the best people in the world.NG Kids: What do you do for fun or to be silly, and is that important for everyone to have fun and be silly?Reza: I think that sometimes you need to relax and to joke. I joke a lot. And even sometimes the worst situation I make a joke out of it and make people laugh out of it. And say dont take it too serious.I always tell funny stories that have philosophical meaning at the end and not just a regular normal joke. Here is one: There was a man and he believes that his wife is deaf and she doesnt hear anymore, so he is upset about it. He doesnt want to say it to his wifehes shy.So he goes to the doctor and says, Doctor, my wife has lost her hearing, and I dont know how to tell her she needs a hearing aid, so how can I do that? And he says, Go home and you make a little test. Go four meters behind her when is doing something with her back to you so she doesnt see that you are talking. And then you ask a question and if she doesnt answer you, move to three meters and then to two meters.So the man goes back home and his wife is in the kitchen preparing the food, and he thinks this is a fantastic moment, so he measures four meters and asks her, Honey, what are we having for dinner? And no answer, so he goes to three meters and asks, Honey what are we having for dinner? No answer. Two meters, no answer. One meter, no answer so he thought, she is really deaf.So he goes up to her and asks, Honey, what are we having for dinner? and she turns around and she says, Honey its four times that you have asked me and I have told you its chicken. So the whole thing changes, and its important to think about it.NG Kids: What is the best piece of advice that anyone has given you?Reza: The one that changed my life was when I was 16. I did this kids magazine, Parvaz, but I was arrested by Iranian security, because I didnt know at the time that it is forbidden to do any thing like this during the time of the Shah. They were beating me and suddenly at 16 you realize that the whole world is different.And I came back home very afraid about what was going to happen. That was when my father was able to change the whole thing. He could have said, why did you publish this magazine, you are putting us in trouble. But instead of doing this, he said if you are doing something that you really believe that is right, you do it, but before you do it you look around and make it in a way that you will not be arrested. When you believe in what you say, continue to say it, but make sure that you will be able to continue without being arrested. This was so important and changed the way I grew up after that.NG Kids: Do you think that the children who grow up around war will be affected their whole life?Reza: I believe if you go even one hour, one minute, one second in a trauma, you need psychotherapy to get out of it otherwise it will remain for your whole life. And that is why sometimes the cycle of the violence continues. We need to find a way that we can stop the wheel, you know put a stick in a wheel to stop it from turningwe need to find the right time and the right place to put the stick in the wheel. Its possible.NG Kids: What is Parvaz?Reza: Parvaz is a magazine for kids. We have a group of the best writers and photographers that we train for two years. We dont have funds to publish regularly. Governments would rather pay for bombs and airplanes than magazines for the children. So when we have funds we bring them together in the office, they create the magazine and go back to their work. One of the most things that they have learned, everybody that we train they get a fantastic job outside. So instead of keeping them in the office for months without anything to offer, they have their jobs and do their own work and have their own income. And whenever we have money to make Parvaz they come back, work on it, and put it together.The only Parvaz employee that we keep on a regular basis is one of the boys. He was 11 years old when we met him in 2001. He was one of the street children and we helped him to sell newspapers. And we realized that he is a fantastic calligrapher. We helped him to go to school and because we needed a calligrapher for Parvaz, we brought him in as a calligrapher. He is in charge of the 11 members of his family and he has become one of the best calligraphers in Afghanistan. And he is from a very poor family. His name is Momen.The Secret Language of DolphinsHeres a conversation worth talking about: A mother dolphin chats with her babyover the telephone! The special call was made in an aquarium in Hawaii, where the mother and her two-year-old calf swam in separate tanks connected by a special underwater audio link. The two dolphins began squawking and chirping to each otherdistinctive dolphin chatter.Cracking the CodeIt seemed clear that they knew who they were talking with, says Don White, whose Project Delphis ran the experiment. Information was passing back and forth pretty quickly. But what were they saying? Thats what scientists are trying to find out by studying wild and captive dolphins all over the world to decipher their secret language. They havent completely cracked the code yet, but theyre listeningand learning.Chatty MammalsIn many ways, you are just like the more than 30 species of dolphins that swim in the worlds oceans and rivers. Dolphins are mammals, like you are, and must swim to the surface to breathe air. Just as you might, they team up in pods, or groups, to accomplish tasks. And theyre smart.They also talk to each other. Starting from birth, dolphins squawk, whistle, click, and squeak. Sometimes one dolphin will vocalize and then another will seem to answer, says Sara Waller, who studies bottlenose dolphins off the California coast. And sometimes members of a pod vocalize in different patterns at the same time, much like many people chattering at a party. And just as you gesture and change facial expressions as you talk, dolphins communicate nonverbally through body postures, jaw claps, bubble blowing, and fin caresses.Thinking DolphinScientists think dolphins talk about everything from basic facts like their age to their emotional state. I speculate that they say things like there are some good fish over here, or watch out for that shark because hes hunting, says Denise Herzing, who studies dolphins in the Bahamas.When the going gets tough, for instance, some dolphins call for backup. After being bullied by a duo of bottlenose dolphins, one spotted dolphin returned to the scene the next day with a few pals to chase and harass one of the bully bottlenose dolphins. Its as if the spotted dolphin communicated to his buddies that he needed their help, then led them in search of this guy, says Herzing, who watched the scuffle.Language LessonsKathleen Dudzinski, director of the Dolphin Communication Project, has listened to dolphins for more than 17 years, using high-tech gear to record and analyze every nuance of their language. But she says shes far from speaking dolphin yet. Part of the reason is the elusiveness of the animals. Dolphins are fast swimmers who can stay underwater for up to ten minutes between breaths. Its like studying an iceberg because they spend most of their lives underwater, Dudzinski says.Deciphering dolphin speak is also tricky because their language is so dependent on what theyre doing, whether theyre playing, fighting, or going after tasty fish. Its no different for humans. Think about when you raise a hand to say hello. Under other circumstances, the same gesture can mean good-bye, stop, or that something costs five bucks. Its the same for dolphins. During fights, for example, dolphins clap their jaws to say back off! But they jaw clap