For generations, Babusha, 【小题1】 is on the southern edge of the Tengger Desert, was troubled by sandstorms that frequently buried farmland, often leaving nothing to harvest.

Today, the desert’s southward spread has been stopped thanks to a green belt ten kilometers in 【小题2】 (long) and eight kilometers in width, 【小题3】 (plant) by Guo Wangang and his colleagues.

Guo’s father was one of the six men who first began planting trees in Babusha 【小题4】 (prevent) their land from being buried in 1981. When he 【小题5】 (force) to stop in 1983 due to poor health, Guo quit his job in the city and followed in his father’s rootsteps because he didn’t want to see the trees die. A deadly sandstorm in 1993 which claimed 23 students’ 【小题6】 (life) firmed his resolve, turning Guo into 【小题7】 stubborn soldier, unwilling to give up the fight. “I asked 【小题8】 (I) that if we couldn’t protect our farmland or our children, how were we supposed to keep going?” Guo recalled. “That’s when I made up my mind to devote my life to this fight.”

Year after year, Guo and his colleagues have continued to plant trees each spring and fall, 【小题9】 (watch) out for fire and pruning (修剪) them in the winter. The vegetation coverage rate in Babusha has increased 【小题10】 less than 3 percent to 70 percent and the desert no longer moves further south.

When man starts his work in nature, the balance is likely 【小题1】(disturb). He grows a crop and takes it away to eat; then there are no dead leaves to fall on the ground, holding water while it sinks into the surface. Thus he is most likely to make the land 【小题2】(bad) year by year. To take the place of the useful matter in the crops that he removes, he uses some kind of fertilizer. In some places, it is a habit to burn waste material lying about, but such burning 【小题3】(destroy) the useful matter that the plants need to grow.

In 【小题4】 past, when the world population was much less, man had little difficulty growing the food. When a field 【小题5】 had been used for some years became tired, the farmer could move to another place. The tired land then slowly recovered. 【小题6】 (Gradual) grasses and other plants would appear on it and its productive power would slowly return to normal. But nature, 【小题7】(leave) alone, would take a long time to bring back the land to its former state. The length of time 【小题8】 (require) would depend on local conditions, but it might well be ten years.

Anyway, 【小题9】 is a bad practice to grow the same crop in a field year after year and is man's 【小题10】 (responsible) to find solutions to the problem of soil protection.

On one late-autumn day, Wang Ting, 【小题1】 resident in the Shanxi provincial capital of Taiyuan, took his family to the Jueweishan Mountain in the city’s northwestern suburbs to take hundreds of pictures.

“Autumn is usually the best season for Taiyuan,” Wang said. “But that was not necessarily true in the past for the city, 【小题2】 was troubled by pollution from heavy industry companies.

A change for the better, not only in Taiyuan but the entire Shanxi Province, 【小题3】 (take) place over the past few years thanks to the local governments and people’s efforts in environmental protection.

Statistics from the Shanxi Department of Ecology and Environment show that 【小题4】 (compare) with 65.7 percent in 2017, Shanxi had 72.1 percent of its days with an air quality reaching good and excellent levels in 2021. There is also an obvious 【小题5】 (improve) in water quality across rivers and lakes.

During a recent news conference, Wang Yanfeng, head of the department, said that Shanxi has been holding the idea that green mountains and clear waters are 【小题6】 good as mountains of gold and silver 【小题7】 (achieve) a balance between the environment and social economic development over the past few years.

“Our initiatives include upgrading local industries to clean production, 【小题8】 (develop) clean energy resources, reducing pollution and emissions, and promoting environmentally friendly industries as new growth drivers,” Wang said.

After the industrial upgrades, Shanxi, 【小题9】 (tradition) a coa-producing province, is seeing 75 percent of 【小题10】 (it) coal output generated from advanced and clean production facivilities. In the power industry, 34.3 percent of the electricity in Shanxi now comes from new and renewable energy resources, according to Wang.