TEXT 1: Earth Day is celebrated annually on April.

Various events are held in many

countries to demonstrate support and raise awareness about the importance of protecting
our Earth's natural environment and taking action. The first Earth Day was held in the
USA It was founded by United States Senator Gaylord Nelson as an environmental teach-
in-a general educational forum or seminar. While the first Earth Day was focused on the
USA. an organization launched by Denis Hayes, who was the original coordinator in
1970, took it international in 1990 and organized events in 141 nations.
TEXT 2: A Swiss man was amazed to see an extra $100,000 in his bank account one day.
He started spending the money immediately, organizing expensive parties for his friends
and buying things he'd never been able to afford before. When the bank noticed its
mistake- the money actually belonged to a much richer man with the same name - he had
already spent $85.000. A court ruled that the money wasn't his, and that he would have to
repay the full amount.

TEXT 3: Alexander Graham Bell is best-known for his invention of the telephone. While
trying to discover the secret of transmitting multiple messages on a single wire, Bell
heard the sound of a plucked string along some of the electrical wire. One of Bell's
assistants. Thomas A. Watson, was trying to reactivate a telephone transmitter. After
hearing the sound. Bell believed he could send the sound of a human voice over the wire.
After receiving a patent on March 7, 1876 for transmitting sound along a single wire, he
successfully transmitted human speech on March 10 Bell's telephone patent was one of
the most valuable patents ever issued. He started the Bell Telephone Company in 1877.
TEXT 4: The great white shark is the largest predatory shark an d is probably the most
well-known and feared shark. The great white shark is gray or bluish above and white
below. The largest great whites can reach lengths of 22 feet and weigh up to 5.000
pounds. Most are between 13 and 16 feet and weigh 1.500- 2.400 pounds. The great
white has massive teeth, which are positioned in rows and serrated. When the great white
attacks, it bites its prey and shakes its head back and forth. The serrated teeth act as a saw
and literally tear the victim apart. The great white shark often swallows many of its own
teeth in an attack.

TEXT 5: The debate in the USA about whether to start school later has been running for
many years. Ask any American teenager arriving at school at 7.30 a.m. and they will tell
you that it’s difficult to memorize chemical formulae or lists of vocabulary so early in the
morning. Is it just laziness, or is there a biological reason for this? Studies by scientists in
the UK show that teenagers naturally want to go to bed about two hours later than adults
and also get up later. This trend begins at about the age of thirteen and continues right
through the teenage years. The scientists conclude that students inevitably feel tired in the
morning and will therefore perform worse at school before lunch.
TEXT 6: It has been called the Holy Grail of modern biology. Costing more than £2
billion, it is the most ambitious scientific project since the Apollo program that landed a
man on the moon. And it will take longer to accomplish than the lunar missions, for it
will not be complete until early next century. Even before it is finished, according
to those involved, this project should open up new understanding of, and new treatments
for, many of the ailments that afflict humanity. As a result of the Human Genome Project,
there will be new hope of liberation from the shadows of cancer, heart disease,
autoimmune diseases such as rheumatoid arthritis, and some psychiatric illnesses. The
objective of the Human Genome Project is simple to state, but audacious in scope: to map
and analyze every single gene within the double helix of humanity's DNA. The project
will reveal a new human anatomy — not the bones, muscles and sinews, but the complete
genetic blueprint for a human being.

TEXT 7: Drought, housing expansion, and oversupply of tinder make for bigger, hotter
fires in the western United States. Wildfires are becoming an increasing menace in the
western United States, with Southern California being the hardest hit area, the ‘Santa Ana
Winds’.
The wildfires themselves, experts say, are generally hotter, faster, and spread more
erratically than in the past. Megafires, also called ‘siege fires’, are the increasingly
frequent blazes that burn 500,000 acres or more - 10 times the size of the average forest
fire of 20 years ago. One explanation for the trend to more superhot fires is that the
region, which usually has dry summers, has had significantly below normal precipitation
in many recent years. Another reason, experts say, is related to the century- long policy of
the US Forest Service to stop wildfires as quickly as possible. The unintentional
consequence has been to halt the natural eradication of underbrush, now the primary fuel
for megafires.

TEXT 8: Drought, housing expansion, and oversupply of tinder make for bigger, hotter
fires in the western United States. Wildfires are becoming an increasing menace in the
western United States, with Southern California being the hardest hit area, the ‘Santa Ana
Winds’.
The wildfires themselves, experts say, are generally hotter, faster, and spread more
erratically than in the past. Megafires, also called ‘siege fires’, are the increasingly
frequent blazes that burn 500,000 acres or more - 10 times the size of the average forest
fire of 20 years ago. One explanation for the trend to more superhot fires is that the
region, which usually has dry summers, has had significantly below normal precipitation
in many recent years. Another reason, experts say, is related to the century- long policy of
the US Forest Service to stop wildfires as quickly as possible. The unintentional
consequence has been to halt the natural eradication of underbrush, now the primary fuel
for megafires.

TEXT 9: Artificial intelligence (Al) can already predict the future. Police forces are
using it to map when and where crime is likely to occur. Doctors can use it to predict
when a patient is most likely to have a heart attack or stroke. Researchers are even trying
to give Al imagination so it can plan for unexpected consequences. Many decisions in our
lives require a good forecast, and Al is almost always better at forecasting than we are.
Yet for all these technological advances, we still seem to deeply lack confidence in Al
predictions. Recent cases show that people don’t like relying on Al and prefer to trust
human experts, even if these experts are wrong. If we want Al to really benefit people,
we need to find a way to get people to trust it. To do that, we need to understand why
people are so reluctant to trust Al in the first place. The Al promised to deliver top-
quality recommendations on the treatment of 12 cancers that accounted for 80% of the
world’s cases.

TEXT 10: Across cultures, wisdom has been considered one of the most revered human
qualities. Although the truly wise may seem few and far between, empirical research
examining wisdom suggests that it isn’t an exceptional trait possessed by a small handful
of bearded philosophers after all - in fact, the latest studies suggest that most of us have
the ability to make wise decisions, given the right context. Recent empirical findings
from cognitive, developmental, social, and personality psychology cumulatively suggest
that people’s ability to reason wisely varies dramatically across experiential and
situational contexts. Understanding the role of such contextual factors offers unique
insights into understanding wisdom in daily life, as well as how it can be enhanced and
taught. It seems that it’s not so much that some people simply possess wisdom and others
lack it, but that our ability to reason wisely depends on a variety of external factors.

TEXT 11: According to a leading business consultancy, 3-14% of the global

workforce will need to switch to a different occupation within the next 10-15 years, and
all workers will need to adapt as their occupations evolve alongside increasingly capable
machines. Automation - or ‘embodied artificial intelligence Al’ - is one aspect of
the disruptive effects of technology on the labor market. ‘Disembodied Al’, like
the algorithms running in our smartphones, is another. On the subject of job losses, low
believes the predictions are founded on a fallacy. It assumes that the number of jobs is
fixed. If in 30 years, half of 100 jobs is being carried out by robots, which doesn’t mean
we are left with just 50 jobs for humans. The number of jobs will be increased to 150
jobs. The promises of these new technologies are astounding. They deliver humankind
the capacity to live in a way that nobody could have once imagined.

TEXT 12: New Zealand is a small country of four million inhabitants, a long-haul
flight from all the major tourist-generating markets of the world. Tourism currently
makes up 9% of the country’s gross domestic product, and is the country’s largest export
sector. Unlike other export sectors, which make products and then sell them overseas,
tourism brings its customers to New Zealand. The product is the country itself - the
people, the places and the experiences. In 1999, Tourism New Zealand launched a
campaign to communicate a new brand position to the world. The campaign focused on
New Zealand’s scenic beauty, exhilarating outdoor activities and authentic Maori culture,
and it made New Zealand one of the strongest national brands in the world. A key feature
of the campaign was the website www.newzealand.com, which provided potential
visitors to New Zealand with a single gateway to everything the destination had to offer.

TEXT 13: Many procedures are available for obtaining data about a language. They
range from a carefully planned, intensive field investigation in a foreign country to a
casual introspection about one's mother tongue carried out in an armchair at home. In all
cases, someone has to act as a source of language data. Often, when studying their mother
tongue, linguists act as their own informants, judging the ambiguity,
acceptability, or other properties of utterances against their own intuitions. It is
considered to makes it widely used the norm in the generative approach to linguistics.
Many factors must be considered when selecting informants - whether one is working
with single speakers, two people interacting, small groups or large-scale samples. Age,
sex, social background and other aspects of identity are important, as these factors are
known to influence the kind of language used.

TEXT 14: Music is a purely abstract art form, devoid of language or explicit ideas. And
yet, even though music says little, it still manages to touch us deeply. When listening to
our favourite songs, our body betrays all the symptoms of emotional arousal. The pupils
in our eyes dilate, our pulse and blood pressure rise, the electrical conductance of our
skin is lowered, and the cerebellum, a brain region associated with bodily movement,
becomes strangely active. Blood is even re-directed to the muscles in our legs. In other
words, sound stirs us at our biological roots. Although the study involves plenty of fancy
technology, including functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and ligand-based
positron emission tomography (PET) scanning, the experiment itself was rather
straightforward. Because the scientists were combining methodologies (PET and fMRI),
they were able to obtain an impressively exact and detailed portrait of music in the brain.

TEXT 15: What are the implications of the way we read today? Look around on your
next plane trip. Younger school-aged children read stories on smartphones; older kids
don’t read at all, but hunch over video games. Parents and other passengers read on
tablets or skim a flotilla of email and news feeds. Unbeknown to most of US, an
invisible, game-changing transformation links everyone in this picture: the neuronal
circuit that underlies the brain’s ability to read is subtly, rapidly changing and this has
implications for everyone from the pre-reading toddler to the expert adult. As work in
neurosciences indicates, the acquisition of literacy necessitated a new circuit in our
species’ brain more than 6,000 years ago. My research depicts how the present reading
brain enables the development of some of our most important intellectual and affective
processes: internalized knowledge, analogical reasoning, and inference; perspective-
taking and empathy; critical analysis and the generation of insight.