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【本期文稿】
This is Special English. I'm Mark Griffiths in Beijing. Here is the news.
China has launched a new program to help address poverty caused by illness.
The program, which will last until February, aims to use the slack farming season and the Spring Festival holiday when migrant workers return home, to figure out how many poor people have diseases and keep them updated with new policies.
The State Council Leading Group Office of Poverty Alleviation and Development says that more than 50 percent of impoverished residents in 10 Chinese provinces fell into poverty due to illnesses, at the end of 2016.
China aims to lift all people above the poverty line, per capita annual income of 2,300 yuan, roughly 348 U.S. dollars, in rural areas by 2020. Strong efforts have been made in helping the rural poor suffering from illnesses.
More than 4.2 million poor patients with serious or chronic diseases have been treated since last year. The family doctor system has expanded to include around 80 percent of those living under the poverty line.
Meanwhile, more than 900 top hospitals have dispatched doctors to over 1,000 hospitals in poor counties, and developed a network of distance health care.
This is Special English.
A second prototype of China's large passenger jet C919 has completed its maiden flight in Shanghai, which was marked as a step closer to China becoming a global aviation powerhouse.
The domestic jet took off shortly after 10:30 a.m. in Shanghai and the flight lasted around 2 hours. It tested the performance of the C919 major systems and equipment, such as taking-off and landing, navigation and communication, speed acceleration and deceleration.
The first C919 made its maiden flight in May. It conducted its first intercity test flight in November.
The Commercial Aircraft Corporation of China plans to produce six aircraft for flight testing. More than 1,000 tests will be carried out.
With a standard range of 4,075 kilometers, the C919 jet is comparable to the updated Airbus 320 and Boeing's new generation 737.
You're listening to Special English. I'm Mark Griffiths in Beijing.
Private U.S. company SpaceX has taken another big step in its push for reusability by launching a resupply mission to the International Space Station with a rocket and spacecraft that have both flown previously.
The liftoff, which occurred at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida, marked the first time the California-based company has re-flown both its Dragon spacecraft and Falcon 9 first stage, which were last used in April 2015 and June 2017, respectively.
SpaceX's Dragon mission manager says this is the beginning of rapid and reliable reusability. Jessica Jensen told reporters that in the long run, reusability is going to significantly reduce the cost of access to space, and that's what's going to be required to send future generations to explore the universe.
SpaceX has already had three successful 'flight-proven' Falcon 9 launches before, all of which occurred this year on commercial satellite delivery missions.
Dragon has been reused only once and it's in June this year for a similar cargo run to the space station.
But the latest mission, carrying 4,800 pounds, roughly 2,200 kilograms, of research, crew supplies and hardware, was a first for the U.S. space agency NASA.
Among the cargo were experiments investigating muscle wasting, plant growth in low gravity, and the microorganisms inhabiting the space station.
This is Special English.
Using underwater robots in waters surrounding Antarctica, scientists have shown that the intersection of strong currents with the slope of landmasses rising from the ocean floor makes a significant contribution to the mixing of different waters in the Southern Ocean.
The finding, detailed in a paper recently published online in the journal Nature Geoscience, has bearing on models of heat transport toward Antarctica and the ocean's role in the carbon cycle. According to the study, in the ocean, global water properties may depend on very localized mixing processes.
Most global ocean observations acquire measurements in the open ocean or in the top layers of the water, while the research shows that important mixing processes may be occurring in the deep ocean in thin layers over sloping topography.
The research team from Caltech deployed two autonomous underwater drones, or 'gliders', for a period of eight months over the course of a year and a half in the Southern Ocean, which encircles Antarctica.
They concentrated on the region around Drake Passage, the 1,000-kilometer-wide waterway between Antarctica and South America.
The gliders were able to reach depths of 1,000 meters, nearly scraping the bottom at times. When they come to the surface, they regularly relay this data back to Thompson and his colleagues.
You're listening to Special English. I'm Mark Griffiths in Beijing.
Chinese shoppers are ringing the cash tills more vigorously than ever at Harrods high-end department store in London, where they have become the nationality that spends the most.
Visitors from China have been spending more than British customers since February.
Michael Ward, Harrods' managing director, told the Financial Times that Chinese customers spent more than 200 million pounds, roughly 267 million U.S. dollars, in the store last year, mainly on high-end fashion items and accessories. Their spending accounted for more than 10 percent of the 2 billion pounds of annual revenues that the company reported last month in accounts that recorded a pre-tax profit of 233 million pounds.
The interest in the store from Chinese customers fits in well with the company's general shift toward doing more business in Asia.
The continued growth in spending at Harrods is being partly attributed to the declining value of the pound following the UK's decision to leave the European Union, something that means tourists' money goes further.
Ward said 'London is a much more inexpensive place to go to'.
He has also called on the UK government to do more to attract more tourists from the world's second-largest economy and has suggested the issuance of more multiple-entry visas and long-term visas for parents with children studying in the UK.
With China becoming an even more lucrative market, the upscale department store is planning a major revamp as part of a 200 million pound investment aimed at catering to its global customers and holding on to its position as the world's leading luxury retailer.
Ward told Hong Kong's South China Morning Post that the three-year project is the most ambitious to be undertaken since Harrods opened in 1834.
The company claims that one in every five pounds spent by Chinese visitors to Britain is spent in Harrods.
This is Special English.
Italy's birthrate, which is already among the lowest in the world, continues to drop, sparking calls for the government to do more to reverse the trend.
The average Italian couple now has 1.3 children, far below the almost 2 children-per couple rate for foreign couples living in Italy. Both figures are below the 2.1-child-per-couple rate needed to maintain a population over the long term.
In 1960, Italy's birthrate was a healthy 2.4 children per couple.
A demographics professor at the University of Florence says the risk is not just that with a low birthrate the population will fall, but it's also that the average age will rise. He says that has implications for the effectiveness of the workforce, for pensions, healthcare, and so on.
Now the average age in Italy is 45.5 years. That is the highest figure in Europe and the second highest in the world, trailing only Japan.
There have been more deaths than births in Italy for the last generation, but the gap between the two figures has been rising dramatically in recent years. There were 19,000 more deaths than births in Italy 15 years ago, rising to 25,000 in 2010 and to a gap of more than 140,000 last year. The 473,000 births in Italy in 2016 were the lowest level in modern times.
You're listening to Special English. I'm Mark Griffiths in Beijing. You can access the program on our Apple Podcast. Now the news continues.
The British city of Liverpool will host a festival of the best of Chinese contemporary art and culture that will last nine months in 2018 to mark the city's 10th anniversary of being named the European Capital of Culture.
A sampling of a year of events was announced by City Hall officials, with full details to come in January.
The city says the Year of the Dog celebrations in what is Europe's oldest Chinatown will kick-start the program called 'China Dream'.
The 2018 Chinese New Year celebrations will not just be bigger than ever but will also signal the start of the China Dream festival.
New Year festivities will run the length of Berry Street in Chinatown, while a spectacular visual show will illuminate the city's Chinese Arch - the largest outside the Chinese mainland - and surrounding buildings, accompanied by music from popular Chinese artists.
There will also be a Chinese New Year fireworks display that city officials say 'will blow your socks off'.
The launch of China Dream in February coincides with the opening of the Terracotta Warriors exhibit at World Museum Liverpool, which is destined to attract visitors from both home and abroad to enjoy the rare experience of seeing the famous ancient artifacts on British soil.
This is Special English.
An Edinburgh nurse is believed to have become the first person from China to conquer all 282 of the highest mountains in Scotland.
The mountains, all more than 914 meters, are known as Munros.
Sunny Huang is a 45-year-old from northeast China. She started the 70 Munros Challenge two years ago to raise money for the Christian Aid charity. It soon turned out to be something she really enjoyed, firing her determination to climb all 282 peaks.
She said when she heard that she was the first person from China to have officially climbed all 282 Munros, she was in tears and so emotional. She said it was just so exciting and she couldn't sleep the first night.
Huang climbed over 100 on her own and others with friends, spending almost all her weekends and days off hiking up the mountains.
Huang discovered her love for hill walking when her son went to university and feeling a bit at a loose end, she started walking on the Pentland Hills, south of Edinburgh.
She climbed her first Munro, Ben Narnain, in July 2015 and completed her final one, Meall Chuaich, on Nov 18 with a large group of friends, colleagues and family.
Huang came to the UK in 2004 and works at the Edinburgh Royal Infirmary as a cardiac theater nurse.
She said her next challenge is to walk the length of Hadrian's Wall and climb some of Scotland's lower mountains.
You're listening to Special English. I'm Mark Griffiths in Beijing.
Loss of water from the rocks of California's Sierra Nevada caused the mountain range to grow nearly an inch, roughly 24 millimeters, in height during recent drought years from October 2011 to October 2015.
A new research from NASA suggests that the solid Earth has a greater capacity to store water than previously thought.
The study found that significantly more water was lost from cracks and soil within fractured mountain rock during drought and gained during heavy precipitation than hydrology models show.
In the two following years of more abundant snow and rainfall, the mountains have regained about half as much water in the rock as they had lost in the preceding drought and have fallen about half an inch, roughly 12 millimeters, in height.
Researchers used advanced data-processing techniques on data from 1,300 GPS stations throughout the mountains of California, Oregon and Washington, collected from 2006 through October 2017, to closely observe how its elevation changed during the drought.
The team found that 10.8 cubic miles of water were lost from within fractured mountain rock in 2011-2015. For comparison, the amount is 45 times as much water as Los Angeles currently uses in a year.
This is Special English.
A British surgeon has done the unthinkable: burn his initials into his patients' livers while they were unconscious.
The Telegraph reported that 53-year-old Simon Bramhall, pleaded guilty to two counts of assault by beating after he branded 'SB' into a man's and a woman's livers during their transplant surgeries in 2013, using an electric beam.
Usually the marks would just fade and cause no harm, but the woman's liver didn't heal. Doctors discovered the initials in a follow-up operation.
Prosecutor Tony Badenoch said this is a 'highly unusual and complex case' and so far has no legal precedent.
Bramhall has been a liver, spleen and pancreas surgeon for 12 years at Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Birmingham, West Midlands. He hit the headlines in 2010 after he transplanted a liver saved from a burning aircraft into a patient.
That is the end of this edition of Special English. To freshen up your memory, I'm going to read one of the news items again at normal speed. Please listen carefully.
An Edinburgh nurse is believed to have become the first person from China to conquer all 282 of the highest mountains in Scotland.
The mountains, all more than 914 meters, are known as Munros.
Sunny Huang is a 45-year-old from northeast China. She started the 70 Munros Challenge two years ago to raise money for the Christian Aid charity. It soon turned out to be something she really enjoyed, firing her determination to climb all 282 peaks.
She said when she heard that she was the first person from China to have officially climbed all 282 Munros, she was in tears and so emotional. She said it was just so exciting and she couldn't sleep the first night.
Huang climbed over 100 on her own and others with friends, spending almost all her weekends and days off hiking up the mountains.
Huang discovered her love for hill walking when her son went to university and feeling a bit at a loose end, she started walking on the Pentland Hills, south of Edinburgh.
She climbed her first Munro, Ben Narnain, in July 2015 and completed her final one, Meall Chuaich, on Nov 18 with a large group of friends, colleagues and family.
Huang came to the UK in 2004 and works at the Edinburgh Royal Infirmary as a cardiac theater nurse.
She said her next challenge is to walk the length of Hadrian's Wall and climb some of Scotland's lower mountains.
That is the end of today's program. I'm Mark Griffiths in Beijing, and I hope you will join us every day, to learn English and learn about the world.
祝大家学习愉快，下期再见！
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