Climate change refers to long-term shifts in temperatures and weather patterns. 【小题1】 But since the 1800s, human activities have been the main driver of climate change, primarily due to burning fossil fuels like coal, oil and gas. Climate change can cause extreme events like wildfires and floods. 【小题2】

How does climate change make you feel? The news of melting glaciers and oil spills may seem overwhelming and can make you feel angry, frightened, hopeless or upset. This is called climate anxiety. 【小题3】 If you feel worried about what’s happening to the world, good for you. It’s normal to be upset when things you care about are getting hurt.

【小题4】 There are lots of things you can do to help adults take better care of the world. Turn your fear into power by doing something. Breaking the problem into bite-sized chunks is a good way to start. Think of something you feel passionate about, such as protecting ocean life or saving forests, and join a community group or charity that supports that cause. Local charities like Plastic Free Coast organize beach cleans, and the Rainforest Team has lots of planet-saving ideas, such as reducing food waste.

Positive action can inspire others too. Sisters Kim and Stella King from the charity Fights Against Plastic have picked up 90,000 pieces of plastic. They ask schools, businesses and organizations to follow their lead. 【小题5】

In recent years, car manufacturers (制造商) have been put under pressure to invent a vehicle that is both cheaper to run and better for the environment.

One of the first ideas that car manufacturers tried was to replace engines which run on fossil (石化) fuels with electric motors. Unfortunately, these vehicles had several disadvantages and they didn’t sell very well. The problems were that the batteries of these electric cars ran out very quickly and took a long time to recharge.

However, car manufacturers have improved the concept. This is where the hybrid car, which has both an electric motor and a traditional petrol engine, comes in. The electric motor never needs to be recharged and it is much better for the planet than a traditional car.

In a hybrid car, the engine is controlled by a computer which determines whether the car runs on petrol, electricity, or both. When the car needs maximum power, for example, if it is accelerating or climbing a steep hill, it uses all of its resources (资源), but at steady speeds it runs only on petrol. When slowing down or breaking, the electric motor recharges its batteries.

Hybrid cars are better for the environment because they have a much smaller engine than a traditional car. Also, hybrid cars on the market are made using materials such as aluminum and carbon fiber, which makes them extremely light. Both of them mean that they use less petrol than normal cars, so they produce less pollution.

Of course, hybrid cars aren’t perfect; they still run on fossil fuel and so pollute the environment to a certain degree. However, they may be the first step along the road to cleaner, ‘greener’ cars. Car manufacturers are already working on vehicles which run on hydrogen giving off harmless water vapor. It looks like we might be heading in the right direction.

The number of fish caught just outside a recently expanded marine (海洋) protected area in Hawaii has risen. It is a sign that quadrupling (四倍) the size of the reserve in 2016 may have shored fish populations in the region.

When the Marine National Monument around Hawaii was enlarged to 1,510,000 square kilometers, marine conservationists around the world rejoiced.

Fishers may have felt differently, however, as fishing inside the area is not allowed. Yet by creating a space for dwindling tuna populations to recover, supporters argued, the reserve would benefit fisheries as well.

As populations inside the reserve boundaries steadily increased, they predicted, the fish would spill (溢出) over into the surrounding areas, increasing the amount of tuna available to catch.

Proving that is tricky, however, as tuna can’t be counted directly. Their numbers may rise or fall for a variety of reasons other than the expansion of a reserve. But the new study, published in Science this week, strongly suggests the number of fish caught just outside the MPA is higher now than it used to be.

Alan Friedlander, chief scientist for the National Geographic Society’s Pristine Seas project, calls the study a “very careful and strict test of spillover from marine protected areas.”

Importantly, says John Lynham, an environmental economist at the University of Hawaii and one of the study’s authors, the increase in tuna catches near the reserve held up even when looking at the average numbers caught by particular fishers. This shows the effect is not due to more effective crews now fishing local waters, he explains. To account for effort, catch numbers were divided by the ever-increasing number of fishing hooks in the area.

Lynham and colleagues found the catch per hook increased over the 10 years of the study. Fishers were catching on average six more yellowfin and five more bigeye tuna per year after the expansion than before.

“That last one, especially, was a surprise,” says Lynham, “because it is economically much more important, and there were fewer indications of an increase.”