Аннотирование и реферирование научно-популярной литературы на английском языке. На материале научно-популярных статей из американской прессы. На обл.
.pdfin terms of lung-cancer, risk, breathing such radon-polluted air for 18 hours is equivalent to smoking one to two packs a day.
Researchers drew the link between radon and lung cancer 30 years ago, when they observed uranium miners with an unusually high incidence of the disease. But it wasn't until 1984 that they discovered that radon from the ground can build up to dangerous levels in houses. Today, declares EPA Administrator Lee M. Thomas, radon "is the largest health risk this agency deals with". Although the agency has no authority to enforce indoor-air quality it has drawn up guidelines to suggest what residents should do after having the household air tested. For concentrations of 200 pCi or above, the agency advises taking immediate steps to decontaminate the house, possibly vacating until levels are reduced. For 20 to 200 pCi, per liter, try to lower the level within several months; 4 to 20, make changes over months or years. Even 4 pCi radon per liter carries some risk, the EPA says, but reducing levels much below that may be difficult.
Critics attacked the radon estimates and guidelines from both sides. Some complained that the 4 pCi guideline wasn't strict enough, since breathing even that little radon for 18 hours a day carries the same risk as smoking half a pack of cigarettes daily. But others charge that the government has overdone it. Dr. Anthon, V. Nero Jr., an expert on indoor-air pollution at the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory in California, says that the EPA needlessly set off a panic by greatly overestimating the number of households with excess radon. One reason the figures are too high he says, is that many of the radon complexes were collected in basements, where levels are at their peak. Most houses with excess radon, he believes, will be in localized areas, so the recommending that everybody everywhere monitor for radon will worry a lot of people who should not be concerned.
House improvements: Fortunately, dangerous radon levels are very easy to detect and possible to reduce. There are two main means of detection, both of which involve placing a small collector in the house for days to months and then having a lab measure the radon
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buildup. The initial testing costs $10 to $50. Strategies for reducing the radon in contaminated homes range from improving ventilation to piping the radon-laden air out from under the foundation, which can cost as much as $2,500. In the past two years the number of firms certified by the EPA to perform home radon tests and improvements has risen from 39 to more than 1,000 nationwide.
The announcement to be tested for the gas was calculated to jar many Americans out of complacency. Only 10 to 15 percent of New Jersey residents living atop the Reading Prong - a uranium-rich geological formation spanning Pennsylvania, New Jersey and New York - have had their homes tested, says Robert Stern, chief of New Jersey's Bureau of Environmental Radiation. This indifference persists despite the fact that some homes in the area have radon levels exceeding 500 pCi per liter. But out of sight shouldn't mean out of mind.
One Way to Get It Out
For some homes with unacceptable radon levels, one remedy is to reroute the gas before it gets in. A ventilation duct runs from the basement to the roof. Several inlets to the duct reach through the foundation. Gases down below are drawn in by an exhaust fan located in the eaves. Out goes the radon. The typical cost of such an improvement is about $1,500.
Статья 9. Great apes get new lease on life
On the edge of extinction, the mountain gorillas may be saved by a plan to fend off poachers and bring in tourists
Pare National des Volcans, Rwanda. In death, American zoologist Dian Fossey may be doing more to save the rare mountain gorillas from extinction than she was able to accomplish in the last years of her troubled life.
When Fossey was savagely murdered last December, it seemed that the gorillas' great protector was gone and no one would care enough to continue her work. That is turning out to be
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false. Fossey's death has reunited conservation groups and galvanized Rwanda's government to take protective action. And, contrary to Fossey's beliefs, the key to survival of the great apes may well be tourists.
Fossey, who had lived alone here in the mountains with gorillas since 1967, feared that people would disrupt the animal's pristine world and their reproductive cycle. Only about 240 of the apes survive on the volcanoes that straddle Rwanda and Zaire, and 100 or so more remain in the Bwindi Forest of Uganda, 12 miles north. Their numbers have dwindled because of poaching and the takeover of their habitat for farmland.
Today, ironically, a program that lets people into their territory appears to be giving the apes a new lease on life. JeanPierre von der Becke, director of the Mountain Gorilla Project, notes that the government carefully controls the number of tourists – who must remain silent, keep at a distance from and avoid even eye contact with gorillas. Visitors - averaging 18 a day - pay $65 each in park fees. With what they spend elsewhere during their visits, tourism brings about $1 million a year to Rwanda. That makes it the fourth-largest source of foreign exchange in this Maryland-size nation of 6.3 million people with a per capita income, of $270 a year.
To provide food, farmers till the soil as far as they can up this country's thousands of hills and mountains. In 1969, the government gave 40 percent of the Parc National des Volcans to nearby villagers to grow pyrethrum, a natural insecticide. When the Mountain Gorilla Project began in 1978, farmers wanted to take over the remaining 40 square miles of the park for pyrethrum. It took years, but naturalists now have convinced the villagers that they were wrong. Tourism not only brings in more money but also provides local people with jobs as guides and rangers and as artisans catering to souvenir hunters. A recent survey shows that more than 70 percent of the villagers want to preserve the forest, recognizing that gorilla conservation serves their interests.
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Before Fossey's death, some wild life groups had been drifting away from the project - largely because оf her contention that their fund raising, was siphoning off money that she believed should go into her Karisoke Research Institute here. “It's ironic, but Dian's departure makes it easier for us to work together," says African Wildlife Foundation President Paul Schindler. "No one should take away from the great contributions she made to gorilla research, but in the end, her dedication got in the way of common sense”.
Outraged by the loss of 15 gorillas a year, on average, during the '70s, Fossey resorted to what she called "active conservation." She went into the forest to destroy snares set by villagers, who aimed to catch small antelopes but were also snagging gorillas, or by poacher out for trophies. A gorilla head brings about $1,200 on the black market, a hand about $600. In time, Fossey's hermit life took a toll. She grew more obsessed and bad tempered. Associates say she shot at people, including journalists, whom she considered intruders. They say she also killed villagers' саttlе, kidnapped the child of a suspected poacher, pistol-whipped poachers and, in what may have been her fatal move, took from an elderly poacher his prized sumu, or amulet.
That man was in jail the night Fossey was killed - her skull split by a machetlike weapon called a panga. Karisoke aides suggest that a friend of the old poacher could have killed the 53-year-old Fossey. No one expects the case to be solved: Police botched the investigation from the beginning, with several officers handling the bloody panga found under her bed.
Yet official embarrassment over the case and the international publicity it received are scaring off would-be poachers. They know that if they get caught in the park they may well face charges, not just of poaching but of murdering Fossey.
Groups such as the African Wildlife Foundation and The World Wildlife Fund have recently boosted, their support of the Mountain Gorilla Project. Von der Becke reports: "The gorilla population is stabilized. There is no reason that it cannot increase."
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Статья 10. Mummies Made in Egypt
The ancient Egyptians had one great wish: to live forever. They believed that a new life began when a person died. His ba, or soul, and ka, his invisible twin, were released from his body and live on in his tomb. The ba would keep contact with the living family and friends of the dead; the ka traveled back and forth from the body to the other world where they lived with gods and goddesses of the dead.
In order for a person to live forever, the ba and ka had to be able to recognize the body, or they could not return to it. That is why the body had to be preserved, or mummified. The earliest Egyptians were mummified naturally. The corpse was buried in the ground, and the hot sands dried out the body until it turned as hard as stone — into a fossil.
As time went on, burials became more elaborate. The dead were wrapped in a shroud of cloth or skin and buried in caves or in pits lined with wood or stone. But bodies not buried in the sand became exposed to dampness and bacteria. They decayed. So people learned how to embalm, or mummify, their dead. Mummification was a long, complicated, expensive process - especially the mummification of pharaohs, the kings of Egypt. It was believed a pharaoh became a god when he died.
Embalmers worked seventy days to prepare a body. For a royal burial, they worked in workshops near the tomb where the mummy would be buried. Priests held ceremonies for each step of the process. Embalmers removed the brain and then took out the liver, lungs, stomach and intestines. Each of these organs was embalmed in a chemical, natron, and put in its own container, called a canopic jar. The heart was left in its place.
Small bundles of natron wrapped in linen were stuffed inside the body, and the outside was covered with natron, too. The chemical dried out the body the same way the sand had done.
After forty days embalmers removed the natron packs, sponged clean the dried, shrunken body, and brushed it with oils, ointments,
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spices and resin. The head and body were stuffed with new packing soaked in the same substances. The arms were crossed, and the mummy's fingernails and toenails were dyed and covered with caps of gold. The mummy was adorned with jewels of gold and precious stones. Then the body was carefully bound with long, narrow strips of linen. Linen shrouds were laid alternately with the bindings, and every few layers were glued together with resin. After twenty layers of shrouds and binding, the mummy's body took on its normal size.
Magical objects were tucked in between the mummy's wrapping. Small figures called shabtis held farm tools; they would work in the fields of the other world for the mummy.
The bounded head was covered with a portrait mask so that if anything happened to the mummy the ba and the ka would still be able to recognize it. The head with its mask was bound, and then the mummy was wrapped in a shroud and given a last coat of resin.
Meanwhile, skilled artists, sculptors, and carpenters prepared for the burial. They built the coffin - or a nest of coffins - which they painted inside and out with gods, goddesses, and magic spells of protection. They made jewelry and furniture that would be buried in the tomb and a splendid stone sarcophagus to hold the coffin.
Tombs were more important than houses to Egyptians, and people built them during their lifetimes. For centuries, the dead were usually buried in brick and stone tombs called mastabas.
As years went by tombs became bigger, stronger, and more elaborate. For a long time pharaohs had pyramids built for themselves. Later, pharaohs were buried in secret underground tombs in a deserted place that is known as the Valley of the Kings. Tunnels, passages, chambers, and the tomb itself were cut deep in rock. They were magnificently carved and painted, but they were hidden as a protection from robbers who might try to steal the mummies and their treasures.
It is said that the first Egyptian to be mummified was Osiris, a legendary king. He was embalmed by Anubis, the jackal god, and when Osiris died, he became King of the Underworld and Prince of the Dead. It was to his kingdom the dead wished to go.
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Статья 11. Growing up poor
For many kids, the community net is gone
The numbers tell a sorry story: 7 million white children and 4 million black children under age 15 in the U.S. live below the poverty line. One out of five children in America is poor, with children nearly twice as likely to be poor today as adults or the elderly. "We have become the first nation in history", laments Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan (N.Y.), "where the children are the poorest segment of the population."
While divorce and separation are no longer unusual in higherincome families, half of all poor children grow up in households headed by women and a quarter of poor black children live in homes where Mom has never married. "My mother is my father", says Reggie Minnis, an eighth grader at Chicago's Albert Einstein Elementary, a South Side school where 90 percent of the students are from single-parent families. Children in such homes often "become the boss of the family because a parent is always away," notes guidance counselor Annie Stephens of Houston's E.O. Smith Middle School. "When they try to become the boss of the school, they wreak havoc among the other kids."
In the 1950s, malnutrition, ill health and poverty were far more common among children, yet most poor children lived in rural communities that provided leadership that today is often missing. Marian Wright Edelman, head of the Washington, D.C.-based Children's Defense Fund, recalls her childhood in Bennettsville, S.C., as a time when "the churches, schools and your family all reinforced the message that you could make it, even if you were poor. We all expected to go to college and didn't have time to get into trouble." Poor children today, particularly in the inner city, are more isolated from others who have climbed out of the slums. "That community net, the role models - the doctor, the police officer and the minister," she says, "are not there now." Many poor children come to feel as though they've done something wrong if they refrain from sex, drugs, or joining a gang. "My buddies were delighted that I did well in
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school," says James Comer, a professor at Yale University's Child Study Center who grew up in East Chicago. "Poor kids today, particularly black ones, are considered turncoats or sellouts if they do well."
More abuse, more neglect. Though today's poor kids differ in some ways from their predecessors, they share the experience of scraping by - and the stress that comes with it. Compared with the children of middle or upper-income families, poor children are seven to eight times more likely to experience child abuse and neglect, and two to three times more likely to grow up in families headed by parents who describe their health as only fair or poor. Preschool children in mother-only families are also estimated to use mentalhealth facilities four times more often than children from two-parent families.
Not by bread alone. Social scientists are increasingly concerned about a link between being poor as a child and experiencing handicaps later in life - such as giving birth out of wedlock, becoming dependent on welfare, and dropping out of school. "There was nothing broke in poor people who grew up in earlier years except that many had been subjected to terrible racism," says Charles Murray of the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research. "When they got the chance, they took it; it's a lot tougher now to help kids who don't know how to go to work or deal with a supervisor by the time they're 20."
Some critics say too much emphasis has been given to government aid to poor children, while toо little has been paid to providing guidance. Education Under Secretary Gary Bauer, who heads an administration task force on families, argues that "parents and teachers have mistakenly tried to be morally neutral in recent years. What we learned out of the antipoverty efforts of the 1960s is that children, just like man, cannot live by bread alone."
Others stress that the civil-rights movement and such antipoverty programs as Head Start opened doors to many poor children. Maintains Robert Coles, Harvard psychiatrist and author of the five-volume study Children of Crisis, "There is more hope and
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expectation among poor children today than there was 30 years ago." At the same time, he notes, government efforts to reach out to the excluded are considerably more circumscribed today than they were during the 1960s and 1970s. Says Coles: "The time when society tells poor kids "come and join" is fading."
Статья 12. It doesn’t hurt to be alone
Behaviour. Debunking the myths about only children
“Being an only child is a disease in itself,” the noted psychologist G. Stanley Hall asserted more than a century ago. Old myths apparently die hard. For years, a growing body of research has suggested that only children are more likely to be helped than to be hurt by their solitary status. Yet the portrait of only children as spoiled and maladjusted and their parents as selfish or eccentric retains a firm hold on the popular imagination. Even as the number of one child families in America continues to grow, surveys show that most people still believe the ideal family contains two children.
A major new study of only children has now provided the strongest evidence yet that the myth is just that. This sweeping study of 150,000 adults and children found that onlys are better educated, score higher on IQ tests and develop better social skills than children from larger families. Demographer Judith Blake of the University of California at Los Angeles, author of Family Size and Achievement, has found that, on average, children from one-child families get 20 per cent more years of education than do children from families with several siblings. Onlys scored higher than any other group on verbal IQ tests, believed to be the best predictor of educational success.
There is no scientific basis for the idea that life without brothers and sisters makes a child overly self-absorbed, either. In fact, the opposite holds true. “Onlys are at no disadvantage whatsoever” when it comes to personality attributes, argues psychologist Toni Falbo of the University of Texas at Austin, who has analyzed hundreds of studies on growing up without siblings. In the two personality categories where onlys differ significantly from other children, self-
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esteem and achievement, they fare better. “Every year, I ask my medical students how many are onlys or firstborns, and 85 percent of the class raise their hands,” says child psychiatrist Selma Kramer, a professor at the Thomas Jefferson School of Medicine in Philadelphia.
Getting more. The simplest explanation for the benefits of onlyhood, researchers say, is that only children receive more parental attention and a large slice of the family resources than children from large families. Researchers note that there are few significant differences between children who grow up in one-child and twochild families. But, says Blake, “adding children dilutes the material resources in a family and, more important, the amount of parental attention each child receives.” She found, for example, that onlys are more likely to have been read aloud to as children and to have been given music, dance and art lessons. Because only children are forced to become “more socially sophisticated” at seeking companionship outside the family, they are also more likely to get involved in extra curricular activities than are other children.
The enforced solitude that goes with being an only child may even have benefits. “Only children don’t easily assimilate into large groups, and when they do they tend to dominate,” says pediatrician Murray Kappelman, author of Raising Only Child, who notes that the first group of astronauts contained a significant number of only children. Among the onlys who have made their mark in politics are Indira Gandhi, Joseph Stalin and Franklin Delano Roosevelt (who had a half brother 28 years his senior). “I compete against myself,” says Governor Ray Mabus of Mississippi, who at age 40 was the youngest governor in the US until Governor Evan Bayh of Indiana, 33, also an only child, was elected last year.
For others, having to rely on imagination rather than the constant company of playmates may set off a creative spark. “Onlys have more of a sense of creating their own worlds than other kids,” says Michele Slung author of The Only Child Book. Many notable artists, including Leonardo da Vinci, Frank Sinatra, Ansel Adams, Ezra Pound, Lihan Hellman, John Updike and Cary Grant, were only
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