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The population of the world is increasing at an alarming rate. There are now about 5,700 million people on the earth. By the year 2000 there will "be at least 400 million more. Where will all these millions live? More houses, blocks of flats and skyscrapers will have to be built. Soon no new houses will be able to have a garden. Man will have to build houses under the sea. Scientists are already working on this possibility. By the twenty-first century many men will probably go to live on other planets if life is found to be possible there. There will probably be regular flights in spaceships from the earth to these other planets.
Uneven Population Distribution
China's population is unevenly distributed, becoming denser as one moves from west to east. The coastal areas in the east are densely populated, with 360 people per sq. km; the plateau areas in the west are sparsely populated, with fewer than 10 people.
If a straight line is drawn between Heine in Heilongjiang Province and Tengchong in Yunnan Province, we will find that in the area east of the line, which makes up 42.9% of China's territory, live 94.4% of the country's population, whereas in the area west of the line, which constitutes 57. 1% of the total area of China, inhabit only 5.6% of its population.
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China is home to many famous mountains, such as the "Five Great Mountains", the four sacred peaks of Buddhism, Huangshan and Lushan. Mountain areas cover two-thirds of the country.
The Five Great Mountains
"The Five Great Mountains", located in central China, were named according to the cardinal points on the compass, including Taishan Mountain to the east in Shandong Province, Huashan Mountain to the west in Shaanxi Province, Hengshan Mountain to the south in Hunan Province, Hengshan Mountain (same sound but different character in Chinese) to the north in Shanxi Province, and Songshan Mountain in the central Henan Province.
Taishan Mountain is in central Shandong Province to the south of the Yellow River, the second longest river in China. Its highest peak, Yuhuangding is 1,545 meters above sea level, but absolute altitude and relative altitude are the highest within a circumference of several thousand kilometers. Since the Qin Dynasty (221 - 209 BC) many Chinese emperors held various sacrifices and religious rites in Taishan Mountain, making the mountain a holy site. The Dai Temple at the foot of the Mountain and steles on the mountain itself reflect the ancient culture of the area.
Huashan Mountain is located in Huayin County of Shaanxi Province. It got its name ("Hua" means flower in Chinese) because its five peaks resemble a blooming lotus, but it is also the most precipitous among China's mountains. The Qianchidong Trail, just one meter wide, is the only path up to Huashan Mountain.
Hengshan Mountain in Hunan is located on the west bank of the Xiangjiang River. It has 72 peaks, with the summit, Zhurong, 1,290 meters above sea level. Hengshan Mountain with its dense forest, is renowned as one of the most beautiful mountains in the country.
Another mountain also named Hengshan is situated in northeastern Shanxi Province. The summit, Xuanwu Peak is 2,017 meters above sea level. Beiyue Temple was built atop the mountain about 1, 000 years ago. The Hanging Temple was built halfway up the mountain over a precipice. Finally, the Ying County Wood Pagoda, the oldest and largest of its kind in China, sits nearby.
Songshan Mountain is located on the south bank of the Yellow River. Its summit is 1,500 meters above sea level. The nearby Shaolin Temple is the birthplace of Zen Buddhist, and even today the temple's collection of stupas is the largest in China. The Zhongyue Temple is also located here, one of the earliest Taoist temples in the country. The Songyang Academy nearby was one of the four great academies of ancient China.
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Guangzhou—Collecting items that used to be regarded as a hob-by for the rich has become a popular pastime among residents of this capital of South China's Guangdong Province.
Statistics suggest that more than 100,000 people from all walks of life are collecting everything from traditional stamps, coins and matchbox labels to cigarette packs, paintings, newspaper clippings, tickets, bonds, antiques and other cultural relics.
Local residents' interest in collecting is running at such a pitch that some streets in the city have been turned into exchanges for collectors.
Experts attribute this flowering to improvements in residents' lives and the increasing amount of spare time.
Li Weixin, an economist with the Guangzhou Textiles Group, has won the distinction of being "King of Matchbox Collections" by obtaining a large variety of matchbox labels with pictures and designs from the natural sciences, history, geography, culture and fine arts.
Among his 1 million matchboxes, the largest is said to be 50 centimeters long and the smallest is as small as a fingernail.
One young man has been designated "King of Newspapers" by collecting some 8,000 newspapers published at home and abroad.
A natural out grow world of this has been the increasing organization of collecting efforts in the city to feed residents' appetite for collecting.
Collecting has become a popular pastime in other parts of China, with a larger number of people collecting an ever-widening range .of articles.
In Beijing, there are an estimated 500,000 amateur and professional collectors.
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My dreams are worthless, my plans are dust, my goals are impossible. All are of no value unless they are followed by action.
Never has there been a map, however carefully executed to detail and scale, which carried its owner over even one inch of ground. Never has there been a parchment of law, however fair, which prevented one crime. Action alone, is the tinder which ignites the map, the parchment, my dreams, my plans, my goals, into a living force. Action is the food and drink which will nourish my success.
My procrastination which has held me back was born \ of fear and now I recognize this secret mined from the j depths of all courageous hearts. Now I know that to fear I must always act without hesitation and the , flutters in my heart will vanish. Now I know that action reduces the lion of terror to an ant of equanimity.
Henceforth, I will remember the lesson of firefly who gives off its light only when it is on the wing, only when it is in action. I will become a firefly and even in the day my glow will be seen in spite of the sun. Let others be as butterflies who preen their wings yet depend on the charity of a flower for life. I will be as the firefly and my light will brighten the world.
I will not avoid the tasks of today and charge them to tomorrow for I know that tomorrow never comes. Let me act now even though my actions may not bring happiness or success for it is better to act and fail than not to act and flounder. Happiness, in truth, may not be the fruit plucked by my action yet without action all fruit will die on the vine.
I will act now. Henceforth, I will repeat these words again and again, each hour, each day, until the words become as much as a habit as my breathing and the actions which follow become as instinctive as the blinking of my eyelids. With these words I can condition my mind to perform every act necessary for my success. With these words I can condition my mind to meet every challenge which the failure avoids.
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Clyde's report card was on the kitchen table and we all sat around it like it was some kind of a big important document. I had got a pretty good report card and had wanted to show it off but I knew it wasn't the time. Clyde pushed the card toward me and I read it. He had all satisfactory remarks on the side labeled Personal Traits-and Behavior. He had also received B's in music and art appreciation. But everything else was either a C or a D except mathematics. His mathematics mark was a big-red F that had been circled. I don’t know why they had to circle the F when it was the only red mark on the card. In the Teacher's Comments section someone had written that
Clyde had "little ability to handle >an academic program. "
"A little ability is better than none," I said. No one said anything so I figured it probably 'wasn't the right time to try to cheer Clyde up.
I knew alt rubout his switching from a commercial program to an academic program, but I really hadn't thought he'd have any trouble.
"I saw the grade adviser today. He said I should switch back to the commercial program. " Clyde looked like he'd start crying any minute. His eyes were red and his voice was shaky. "He said that I had to take mathematics over and if I failed again or failed another required subject I couldn't graduate. The way it is now I'm going to have to finish up in the summer because I switched over. "
"I think you can pass it if you really want to." Kitty said. Clyde's sister was' so pretty I couldn't even look at her. If I did, I started feeling funny and couldn't talk right. Sometimes I daydreamed about marrying her.
Just then Clyde's mother came in and he gave a quick look at Kitty.
"Hi, young ladies and young gentlemen. " Mrs. Jones was a kind of heavy woman but she Was pretty, too. You could tell she was Kitty's mother if you looked close. She put her package down and started taking things out. "I heard you people talking when I first came in. By the way you hushed up I guess you don't want me to hear what you were talking about. I'll be out of your way in a minute, soon as I put the frozen foods in the refrigerator. "
"I got my report card today," Clyde said. His mother stopped taking the food out and turned toward us. Clyde pushed the report card about two inches toward her. She really didn't even have to look at the card to know that it was bad. She could have told that just by looking at Clyde. But she picked it up and looked at it a long time. First she looked at one side and then the other and then back at the first side again.
"What they say around the school?" she asked, still looking at the card.
"They said I should drop the academic course and go back to the other one. " I could hardly hear Clyde > he spoke so low.
"Well, what are you going to do, young man?" She looked up at Clyde and Clyde looked up at her and there were tears in his eyes and I almost started crying. I can't stand to see my friends cry. "What are you going to
"I'm —I'm going to keep the academic course," Clyde said.
"You think it's going to be any easier this time?" Mrs. Jones asked.
"No."
"Things aren’t always easy. Lord knows that things aren’t always easy. "
For a minute there was a faraway look in her eyes, but then her face turned into a big smile. "You're just like your father, toy. That man never would give up on anything he’ realty Wanted. Did 1 ever tell you the time he was trying to-learn to play the trombone?"
"No. " Clyde-still had tears in his eyes but he was smiling, too. Suddenly everybody was happy. It was like, seeing a rainbow when it was still raining-
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Chinese people recently crowded into Beijing's main art gall and paid close attention to the exhibition of Western Old Mat paintings owned and lent by the Japanese. I was among them, a am very fond of paintings and indeed have passed an examination the history of Italian Renaissance art. I am especially fond of that gallery, I think because I so much enjoy the genre paintings in oil? traditional and modern Chinese life. One tender picture of VOL mothers in a
clinic moves me almost to tears, because of the love it, the love of the mothers for their children, the love of the artist his subjects.
In the West, documentary painting, though popular with middlebrows, is out of fashion with experts: modernism reigns supreme and artists have avoided anything like photographic- realism, (referring the decorative or the abstract. As a result, our Western ;allergies are full of so-called 'abstract' art, formal patterns and form-2ss ones, blobs, lines and patches of color representing nothing but themselves. One American artist, Jackson Pollock, used to ride a bicycle over his canvases to spread the paint. But the ordinary art-lover has resisted the trend: he obstinately prefers pictures of flowers or :Hilden to ink blots on white space. Formalists insist that the relationship between lines and spaces constitutes artistic beauty, but the man in the street obstinately demands representation or meaning, and :he advocates of 'significant form' , or of form without signification, ire in retreat.
But the meaning of pictures is not a simple matter. A portrait of Queen Elizabeth or of Chou Fn Lai is only fully significant if you know who the people are and of the roles they played in history. Possibly every)day can enjoy one of Canaletto's cityscapes of Venice, largely unchanged today, nearly three centuries after he painted them, but often appreciation of art is dependent on cultural context. This came home to me as I contemplated the magnificent portrait by the Scottish painter Sir Thomas Lawrence, labeled simply 'King George the Fourth'. This large painting appealed, obviously, to Fasten as well as Western visitors, because of the virtuosity of its painterly technique. Silk velvet and lace were created before our eyes with slashes and gobs of paint in thick impasto; the harmony of reds and grays appealed to the eye. The subject was a handsome young man in his prime.
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Recent developments in astronomy have made it possible to detect planets in our own Milky Way and in other galaxies. This is a major achievement because, in relative terms, planets are very small and do not emit light. Finding planets is proving hard enough, but finding 5 life on them will prove infinitely more difficult. The first question to answer is whether a planet can actually support life. In our own solar system, for example, Venus is far too hot and Mars is far too cold to support life. Only the Earth provides ideal conditions, and even here it has taken more than billion years for plant and animal life to evolve.
Whether a planet can support life depends on the size and brightness of its star, that is its 'sun'. Image a star up to twenty times larger, brighter and hotter than our own sun. A planet would have to be a very 1< way from it to be capable of supporting life. Alternatively, if the star were small, the life-supporting pla would have to have a close orbit round it and also provide the perfect conditions for life forms to devil But how would we find such a planet? At present, there is no telescope in existence that is capable
is detecting the presence of life. The development of such a telescope will be one of the great astronomy projects of the twenty-first century.
It is impossible to look for life on another planet using earth-based telescopes. Our own warm atmospheres and the heat generated by the telescope would make it impossible to detect objects as small as planets. a telescope in orbit round the earth, like the very successful Hubble telescope, would not be suitable became
of the dust particles in our solar system. A telescope would have to be as far away as the planet Jupiter look for life in outer space, because the dust becomes thinner the further we travel towards the outer ed of our own solar system. Once we detected a planet, we would have to find a way of blotting out the li from its star, so that we would be able to 'see' the planet properly and analyze its atmosphere. In the f instance, we would be looking for plant life, rather than 'little green men'. The life forms most like develop on a planet would be bacteria. It is bacteria that have generated the oxygen we breathe on earth.: most of the earth's history they have been the only form of life on our planet. As Earth-dwellers, we always cherish the hope that we will be visited by little green men and that we will be able to communicate with them. But this hope is always in the realms of science fiction. If we were able to discover lowly forms of like bacteria on another planet, it would completely change our view of ourselves. As Daniel Goldin NASA observed, 'Finding life elsewhere would change everything. No human Endeavour or thought be unchanged by it.'
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When Chang's parents first told her about Nanjing Datusha, the Nanjing Massacre, their voices had "quivered with outrage." But her childhood library visits searching encyclopedias and history books turned up little on the carnage.
After Chang graduated from university and earned her master's, Nanjing remained only on the periphery of her thoughts.
Why had such a terrible event passed out of the public consciousness? In the West the headlines from Nanjing were supplanted by ominous events in Europe. Soon the horrors of a world at war became everyday fare in the media. Then the postwar West was engulfed in a new struggle with the Soviet Union and eager to turn Japan into a friendly economic bulwark. A war-crimes tribunal, which briefly focused attention on Nanjing, was largely forgotten when the Korean War began. By 1994 Chang had got married, moved to California and was happily pursuing a writing career that had already resulted in one published biography.
While attending a conference in Cupertino, California, on the history of World War II, she encountered some poster-size photos from Nanjing on display. Nothing she'd heard about the massacre had prepared her "for the helpless, terrorized looks of those about to die with no hope oft rescue, the piles of bodies or the grins on the soldiers' faces as they participated or looked on."
She stood, almost paralyzed by the wave of anger and revulsion that swept over her. One photo showed a Japanese officer, his samurai sword raised high, about to decapitate a bound and kneeling Chinese prisoner. Here, indeed, was the nightmarish "man with a sword" of her childhood memory.
Chang did not cry... then. But in an instant she determined, "I will tell these people's story" Systematic Murder. Chang expected a difficult search for a trickle of material. She found instead a great river of documentation. From the Yale Divinity School Library in New Haven, Connecticut, to the National Archives in Washington, D.C. to China (including Taiwan), Chang culled her story from secret cables, missionary letters and diaries, war crimes trial testimony, and interviews with victims and Japanese soldiers. Her research focused on three months in the midst of China's long and bitter Anti-Japanese War (1937 — 1945), a period that retains a special place in the annals of human butchery.
After capturing Shanghai in November 1937, the Japanese army was just outside Nanjing by the second week of December. Commenting on the panic set off by the retreating Chinese forces, a German diplomat in Nanjing wrote, "We expected that with the appearance of the Japanese, the return of peace, quiet and prosperity would occur."
They were wrong.
Rather than deal with the tens of thousands of Chinese soldiers who had surrendered, the Japanese decided to systematically exterminate them. A chin order to the 66th Battalion read: "All prisoners of war are to be executed.
In one instance the Japanese spent most of one day tying the arms of 14 7' Chinese soldiers behind their backs. The prisoners were then marched to a river at surrounded by troops with machine guns. As evening approached, the firing began at continued about an hour. It took all night for soldiers to bayonet the bodies one by 01 to be sure they were dead.
Ongoing decapitation "contests" were covered in the Japanese press as if they were sporting events. Soon Japanese officers complained about not finding enough; ditches for burials. Eyewitnesses reported that some ponds were so stuffed with corpse that they disappeared, the water completely displaced. Thousands of bodies we: dumped into the Yangtze. It was the river red with blood Chang had heard about as child.
When the prisoners of war were being murdered, rape and slaughter were und< way inside the walled city. Japanese soldier’s herded people to the roofs of building that were then burned down; They half-buried people to then be killed by ravened dogs. Old men and little children were mowed down, their bodies left on the sidewalks. But "women suffered most," recalled one Japanese soldier. "No matter h<v young or old, they could not escape the fate of being raped."
The awful images sometimes left Chang shaking or reduced to weeping in front t her word processor. But some incidents she found "so shocking I could not even cry."
Safety Zone. When the city's fall seemed imminent, 15 American and Europea missionaries and businessmen created a small island of sanity. They carved out a 2--square-mile sector near the city center, mark it off with white flags and Red Crops banners, and declared it an International Safety Zone.
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Many of the victims come to accept beatings as an inevitable ac commandment of a woman's inferior status in home and society. G)n detained from birth to esteem themselves only in terms of their ability; to serve and satisfy others, many women respond to violence by looking first to their own failings, blaming themselves, justifying then attackers, and hiding the marks of their shame, the tears and the bruises, from the outside world. Often, self-esteem will sink so that the victim will isolate herself from friends and family — and for the knowledge that she deserves better.
Children also suffer. A mother who is a victim of domestic violence is twice as likely to have a miscarriage and four times more likely to have a low birth weight baby. Her children are also more like to be malnourished, to drop out of school, and to become violent their turn. More widely, violence against women is also a tragedy development effort. As a recent UNICEF publication puts it, enormous contribution that a woman makes to family, community; and national life depends upon “her knowledge and strength morale and personal relationships, the support of her family and community, her titivation in the affairs of the wider world, and her sense of command over the forces shaping her life. Domestic violence devastates all of these.
In more and more? Countries, attempts are being made to bring this problem into the open, to help the victims, and to expose the causes- In Latin America alone, there are over 400 non-governmental organizations specifically concerned with violence against women.
Two recent publications, published by the UN Development Fund for Women and the World Hank, have attempted lo assess the scale and impact of this problem. One disturbing feature of such research is die ability of a link between domestic violence and progress towards equality for women (as measured, for example, by the closing of the literacy gap between males and females). The suspicion is that the risk of violence rises when male partners feel that their traditional of superiority and control is being threatened.
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Irrespective of how well — optimized the protective packaging life cycle may be, there will inevitably be some post - use solid waste to be managed. Life cycle assessment can contribute to sustainable development during this phase of the package life cycle by identifying where more than value can be extracted from the waste prior to final disposal. This could be as recovered secondary material: compost, energy (or the consumption of less energy) and other resources in the process.
Ultimately, the question is finding the right balance between cast and convenience between effective protection and the optimal use of our resources. Environmental issues and social concerns will continue to exert pressure on the protective packaging industry in balancing business versus environmental decision. It is possible to protect products while also protecting our planet. In order to meet this challenge, the industry must find the right solutions today to meet the demands of tomorrow. !t is the right thing to do.
