You may have heard that some plants and animals are endangered. What does that mean exactly?

Endangered means there are very few of that kind still alive. Someday they might become extinct. You may wonder what people can do to help them.

Plant trees

As the date of Earth Day roughly coincides with U.S.Arbor Day, planting trees is a popular Earth Day activity. Trees helps to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, clean pollution, secure soil in place to prevent erosion, and provide homes for many birds, insects and other animals. 【小题1】

【小题2】. And plant them in your garden or on nature strips where plants are usually grown. Restoring the local plant life will help attract native bird life, pollinators and local mammals.

【小题3】

Why not welcome these nonhuman neighbors into your yard？ Here is how to do it. Instead of mowing the entire yard, leave a few sections unmoved. 【小题4】 Provide a source of water, like a bird bath or a small pond. Don’t try to get rid of snakes, lizards, frogs,moles, squirrels,and the other creatures, many of which are beneficial.

Clean up litter in your community

Many groups use the weekend of Earth Day to clear roadways, highways and neighborhood streets of litter that has accumulated since the last clean-up day. 【小题5】

If you’ve ever seen elephant seals (象海豹) lying on a beach, you might think that they’re always. sleeping. But in fact, they spend about seven months of the year in the ocean. So how do they sleep while they’re in the ocean?

Even though elephant seals are large animals, they have to be careful in the ocean. Near the surface, some dangerous animals like sharks might attack(攻击)them. So elephant seals spend most of their time diving (下潜) deep underwater, looking for food.

To find out how they sleep in the deep, a scientist named Jessica Kendall-Bar created a special cap. She and her team put the caps on thirteen female young elephant seals. The caps recorded the elephant seals brain activities. They also collected information on the elephant seals’ heart rates (心率), how their bodies were moving, and how deep they were.

The scientists learned that elephant seals sometimes sleep for a short time while they are diving. They only sleep for about 10 minutes at a time. As they begin to sleep, the elephant seals can control their bodies. But when they are deeply asleep, they simply begin to fall, spinning (快速旋转) in a circle “like a falling leaf”. The elephant seals wake up in time to go up for more air. In shallower (较浅的) areas, the elephant seals sometimes wake upon the seafloor.

Using the information they collected from the cap-wearing elephant seals, the scientists created a computer program to study older records of elephant seal trips. The scientists found that elephant seals only sleep for about two hours a day when they’re in the ocean. That means that the rest on land is very important for them. Back on land, they sleep for about 10. 8 hours a day.

The scientists hope that their work will help to protect the places where elephant seals sleep when. they’re on land.

How to Train Guide Dogs in the UK

Guide dogs are a big help to blind people. A guide dog helps its owner cross the street and do many other things. 【小题1】 In the United Kingdom it is organizations such as Guide Dogs that raise and train animals for the job. Here's what's involved.

▲ Prepare the young dog for its training in its first year by socializing it and exposing it to a variety of different people, places, environments, toys, animals and transport. 【小题2】 Teach it simple commands such as "sit", "come", "wait" and "forward".

▲ Move the dog to a training centre when it reaches one year of age. 【小题3】 The course will develop its skills as a guide dog. It will be taught to lead a person while responding to the environment such as stooping to check for cars before crossing the road. The dog will be tested by staff members who wear something to cover their eyes pretending to be blind.

▲ 【小题4】 The advanced level training involves a process. The dog now guides the blind person around busy areas under the supervision of the instructor until they are satisfied that the dog is ready to be a guide dog for the blind.

【小题5】 Then they will work as a team.