新视野视听说 B1 P115 U7_1_2-2

Part 2 Let’s look at three of the most important problems. The first problem is water. Many people in the world can’t get enough water. But in some countries we use too much. A person in Gambia, Africa, for example, uses much less water than someone in the United States. In Gambia, one person uses four and a half liters of water a day. But in the US it’s 600 liters. And to make the problem worse, the deserts are getting bigger. The Sahara Desert is one of the hottest places in the world, and is already the largest desert. But each year it gets bigger than before, so it gets more difficult to find clean water. Our second problem is the animals. There are more people on the earth than ever before. This means we use more space. And for the animals this means that there is less space than before. One example is the Amazon Rainforest. It has the highest number of plant and animal species in the world, but it’s getting smaller every year. People are destroying the rainforest to make more space for houses, roads and farms. In the last 10 years we have destroyed more than 150,000 square kilometers of forest – that’s an area larger than Greece! So in the future, many plants and animal species will become extinct. And the last problem on our list, but not the least important, is the weather. The world is getting warmer. The ice in Greenland is melting faster than ever before. Also sea levels are rising. This means that soon some of the world’s most important cities, like New York, London, Bangkok, Sydney and Rio de Janeiro might all be under water.