When the dog named Judy spotted the first sheep in her life, she did what comes naturally. The four-year-old dog set off racing after the sheep across several fields and, being a city animal, lost both her sheep and her sense of direction. Then 
she ran along the edge of cliff( 悬崖) and fell 100 feet, bouncing off a rock into the sea.
         Her owner Mike Holden panicked and celled the coastguard of Cornwall, who turned up in seconds . Six volunteers slid down the cliff with the help of a rope but gave up all hope of finding her alive after a 90-minute search.
         Three days later, a hurricane hit the coast near Cornwall. Mr. Holden returned home from his holiday upset and convinced his pet was
 dead. He comforted himself with the thought she had died in the most beautiful part of the country.
          For the next two weeks, the Holdens were heartbroken . Then, one day, the phone rang and Steve Tregear, the coastguard of Cornwall, asked Holder if he would like his dog bark.
         A birdwatcher, armed with a telescope, found the pet sitting desperately on a rock. While he sounded the alarm, a student from Leeds 
climbed down the cliff to collect Judy.
         The dog had initially been knocked unconscious(失去知觉的)but had survived by drinking water from a fresh scream at the base of the cliff. She may have fed on the body of a sheep which had also fallen over the edge. “The dog was very thin and hungry,” Steve Tregear said , “It was a very dog. She survived because of a plentiful supply of fresh water,” he added.
          It was ,as Mr. Holden admitted, “a minor miracle(奇迹)”. 

    Watching some children trying to catch butterflies one hot August afternoon, I was reminded of an incident in my own childhood．When I was a boy of 12 in South Carolina, something happened to me that cured me forever of wanting to put any wild creature in a cage.

    We lived on the edge of a wood, and every evening at dusk the mockingbirds would come and rest in the trees and sing. There isn't a musical instrument made by man that can produce a more beautiful sound than the song of the mockingbird.

    I decided that I would catch a young bird and keep it in a cage and in that way would have my own private musician.

    I finally succeeded in catching one and put it in a cage. At first, in its fright at being captured, the bird fluttered about the cage, but eventually it settled down in its new home. I felt very pleased with myself and looked forward to some beautiful singing from my tiny musician.

    I had left the cage out on our back porch, and on the second day of the bird's captivity my new pet's mother flew to the cage with food in her mouth. The baby bird ate everything she brought to it. I was pleased to see this. Certainly the mother knew better than I how to feed her baby.

    The following morning when I went to see how my captive（被俘虏的） was doing, I discovered it on the floor of the cage, dead. I was shocked! What had happened! I had taken excellent care of my little bird, or so I thought.

    Arthur Wayne, the famous ornithologist, happened to be visiting my father at the time, hearing me crying over the death of my bird, explained what had occurred. “A mother mockingbird, finding her young in a cage, will sometimes bring it poison berries. She thinks it better for her young to die than to live in captivity.”

    Never since then have I caught any living creature and put it in a cage. All living creatures have a right to live free.

    There are 5.25 trillion pieces of plastic trash in the world's oceans, and each year, 8 million tons of plastic are added to the figure. Though the oceans seem vast enough to stomach a lot of plastic, the level of waste is starting to reach a crisis point: According to a new report by the Ocean Conservancy, by 2025, the ocean could contain one ton of plastic for every three tons of finfish.

All these floating bits of plastic not only disrupt marine ecosystems, but they also poison the global supply of seafood. “It's reaching crisis proportions,” says Andreas Merkl, CEO of the Ocean Conservancy. “Plastic breaks down into small pieces that look like plankton and is eaten by everyone from plankton to whales.” Plastic acts as a pollution sponge in the ocean, so when wildlife swallow pieces, the plastic might as well be a poison pill.

    The new report calls for a focus on improving waste management systems in a handful of developing countries that are most responsible for the plastic leakage into the ocean. China, Indonesia, the Philippines, Thailand and Vietnam contribute more than half of the oceans' plastic since their waste facilities hasn't kept up with rapid industrialization.

    On average, only about 40% of waste in these countries is actually picked up for disposal. But it's not just uncollected waste floating around-though that is three-fourths of the problem. The other quarter of the oceans' plastic came from post-collection activities. Even when a waste management company picks up waste to landfill it, poorly equipped landfills or illegal dumping mean that trash still ends up in the ocean.

    But how can countries stop the leakage of waste into the ocean? The Ocean Conservancy report suggests five “levers”: waste collection services, closing the leakage points within the collection system, gasification and burning of waste, and recycling facilities. The average waste ends up as litter. Just by expanding collection systems and plugging up their leakage points, the report says plastics leakage could by cut by 50% by 2020.

    It's not just an environmentalist's daydream. Coca-Cola and Dow Chemical, along with some other multinational companies have joined forces with Ocean Conservancy to fight ocean pollution. “We're committed to working toward a future of a plastic-free ocean. Companies don't make plastic with the intent of it ending up in the ocean, and we acknowledge the strong role industry must play in order to help eliminate ocean plastic waste by 2035.” Says Dow Packaging and Speciality Plastics' global sustainability director in a press release.

    Merkl emphasized that the countries can't recycle their way out of the problem. Only about 20% of the waste is valuable enough to be worth recycling: the rest, needs to be sent to sanitary landfills or waste-to-energy plants. “You have to concentrate on the fundamentals of waste management,” he says. And while building landfills and incinerators(焚化炉)across these developing countries might not be pretty, it's far more environmentally friendly than letting waste slide into the world's oceans.

    Director James Cameron went to new depths for his film-making on Sunday by setting the world record for the deepest ocean dive by a single person.

    This type of extreme research is nothing new to the director. Cameron, 57, is most famous for directing Titanic (1997) and Avantar (2009). During the several years of research for Titanic, he famously traveled to the bottom of the ocean to visit the sunken ship. He also visited the deep sea as research for his fictional 1989 film. The Abyss, which is about a submarine that comes across an alien species. "Most people know me as a film-maker," Cameron said. "But the idea of exploring the ocean has always been the stronger drive in my life."

    Cameron and his team had been preparing for the trip for seven years. On Sunday, Cameron took more than two and a half hours to make the dangerous 6.8-mile journey down to the Trench, an area with near-freezing temperatures, no sunlight, and heavy water pressure. Cameron traveled in a 24-foot-long mini-submarine he helped design, equipped with lights and 3D cameras for filming the adventure. It also had a mechanical arm for collecting samples of soil and deep-sea creatures. Humans had not visited the Mariana Trench since two divers first reached the deep-sea spot in 1960. The divers Don Walsh and Swiss oceanographer Jacques Piccard spent 20 minutes there but could hardly see anything. They took no pictures.

    In his well-equipped submarine, Cameron was able to spend three hours in the Trench, exploring and filming. He plans to use his recordings in a 3D film production for movie theaters and for a National Geographic TV special. "I see this as the beginning," Cameron said. "It's not a one-time deal. This is just the beginning of opening up this new frontier."

The Best Maldives Island for Your Travel Style

Every resort（度假地） in Maldives is its own private island but choosing the right one for you can be difficult. Want to kick off your Indian Ocean holiday in style? Our guide will help you know what to look for in the hunt for your ideal island.

Waldorf Astoria Maldives Ithaafushi

You'll never go hungry at the Waldorf Astoria Maldives Ithaafushi, which has 1 1 restaurants, including ones specializing in garden-to-table cuisine. There are regular food-themed events, too—our favorites include Arabian Night and the Twilight Seafood Barbecue.

Four Seasons Resort Maldives

Considered one of the best spots in the Maldives for honeymoons, the Four Seasons Resort Maldives has a huge range of room categories and offers a brilliant selection of packages, including Island Romance packages that feature fantastic extras designed with couples in mind.

Fairmon t Maldives

There are numerous reasons to visit the Fairmont Maldives, including the fact that it's a great place to learn about sustainability, whether it's at the Sustainability Lab, where guests can turn discarded plastic bottles into jewelry or during excursions with marine biologists from a charity created to protect sea turtles.

Heritance Aarah

Heritance Aarah recently opened its Live Maldivian Village Museum, which focuses on 4,000 years of Maldivian history. Guests can learn about the art of coral stone carving and find out why locals are known as some of the world's best boat builders.

To ensure you experience the Maldives' best bits, schedule a holiday every month without fail. We're joking, but you get the point: think what you want to see and do, and brush up on the different areas' seasonal selling points.

The historic city of Suzhou, about{#blank#}1{#/blank#}hour's drive from Shanghai, is laced with canals. Old buildings line the banks. A century ago some of these would have been chaguans, or traditional teahouses,{#blank#}2{#/blank#} locals gathered to discuss the news or conduct business. Today a visitor is more likely{#blank#}3{#/blank#}(spot) shops serving a different kind of beverage. Some even look like old chaguans.

Between 2010 and 2022 coffee consumption per person in China, according to the International Coffee Organization,{#blank#}4{#/blank#} (rise) four times. But the average Chinese person still drinks a small part of the amount of coffee consumed by the typical American: 0.1kg per year{#blank#}5{#/blank#}(compare) with 4.7kg.

The early history of coffee in China is fuzzy. A record from Qing dynasty described coffee{#blank#}6{#/blank#}a "black liquor, which the foreigners drank after meals,{#blank#}7{#/blank#} (claim) it can help with digestion". But after China introduced market reforms{#blank#}8{#/blank#}opened up to the world in the 1980s, foreign{#blank#}9{#/blank#}(firm) such as Nestlé brought instant coffee to the country, catering to local tastes. At that time, the biggest coffee drinking groups were white-collar workers, considering coffee' s high price.

Today, though, a wider range of the population is drinking coffee thanks to the rise of domestic coffee chains like Luckin selling{#blank#}10{#/blank#}(afford) drinks.