LECCO, Italy — Each morning, about 450 students travel along 17 school bus routes to 10 elementary schools in this lakeside city at the southern tip of Lake Como. There are zero school buses.
In 2003, to confront the triple threats of childhood obesity, local traffic jams and — most important — a rise in global greenhouse gases abetted by car emissions, an environmental group here proposed a retro-radical concept: children should walk to school.
They set up a piedibus （literally foot-bus in Italian) — a bus route with a driver but no vehicle. Each morning a mix of paid staff members and parental volunteers in fluorescent yellow vests lead lines of walking students along Lecco？ s twisting streets to the schools？ gates, Pied Piper-style, stopping here and there as their flock expands.
At the Carducci School, 100 children, or more than half of the students, now take walking buses. Many of them were previously driven in cars. Giulio Greppi, a 9-year-old with shaggy blond hair, said he had been driven about a third of a mile each way until he started taking the piedibus. “I get to see my friends and we feel special because we know it？ s good for the environment,” he said.
Although the routes are each generally less than a mile, the town？ s piedibuses have so far eliminated more than 100,000 miles of car travel and, in principle, prevented thousands of tons of greenhouse gases from entering the air, Dario Pesenti, the town？ s environment auditor, estimates.
The number of children who are driven to school over all is rising in the United States and Europe, experts on both continents say, making up a sizable chunk of transportation？ s contribution to greenhouse-gas emissions. The “school run” made up 18 percent of car trips by urban residents of Britain last year, a national survey showed.
In 1969, 40 percent of students in the United States walked to school; in 2001, the most recent year data was collected, 13 percent did, according to the federal government？ s National Household Travel Survey.
Lecco？ s walking bus was the first in Italy, but hundreds have cropped up elsewhere in Europe and, more recently, in North America to combat the trend. Towns in France, Britain and elsewhere in Italy have created such routes, although few are as extensive and long-lasting as Lecco？ s.
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The author implies that all of the following statements about duplicate artifacts are true EXCEPT__
A．A market for such artifacts already exists.
B．Such artifacts seldom have scientific value.
C．There is likely to be a continuing supply of such artifacts.
D．Museums are well supplied with examples of such artifacts.
E．Such artifacts frequently exceed in quality those already catalogued in museum collections. -
While nurturing parents can compensate for adversity, cold or inconsistent parents may ___ it.求正确答案
（A) exacerbate
（B) neutralize
（C) aggravate
（D) eradicate
（E) ameliorate
（F) relieve
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中国人民选择和平发展道路，是基于中国的传统文化、惨痛的历史和现实的巨大成就所作出的明智选择。中国是一个有5000年历史的文明古国，有着与外来文化取长补短、兼容并蓄的传统。我们的祖先历来强调“以和为贵”。历史上，中国在对外交往中始终强调亲仁善邻、和而不同。2000多年前，中国与周边国家有使节往来、商品交易、文化交流，汉朝张骞出使西域开辟了陆上“丝绸之路”。1000多年前，中国对外交往海陆并重，盛况空前，茶叶、丝绸、瓷器等商品远销亚欧诸多国家；600多年前，中国明代航海家郑和率领舰队“七下西洋”，足迹遍及亚非30多个国家和地区，带去的是先进的农耕和手工艺技术，还有精美的产品和真诚的友谊。这样的文化传统决定了今天的中国必然选择和平发展延续历史，并融入当今世界和平与发展的潮流。
从19世纪80年代之后的鸦片战争、甲午战争，到庚子之乱乃至20世纪30年代的日本侵华战争，中国惨遭东西方列强的屠戮和极其野蛮的经济掠夺；再加上封建腐败和连年内乱，中国主权沦丧、生灵涂炭、国力衰弱、民不聊生。深重的灾难、惨痛的事实使中华民族深知和平之珍贵、发展之重要。这样的历史实践形成了中国人民渴望和平、企求安定的心理，坚定了中国人民走和平发展道路的信念。
1949年新中国成立后，我们在发展道路上艰辛探索，既经历过成功的喜悦，也经受过失败的挫折。从1978年开始，中国开启了新的征程，从计划转向市场，从封闭转向开放，从自成一体转向融入经济全球化，走独立自主地建设中国特色社会主义的道路，取得了举世瞩目的辉煌成就。实践充分证明，坚持走和平发展的道路是正确的，既符合中国国情，又顺应时代潮流。中国将沿着这条和平发展的道路，坚定不移地走下去。 -
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中国已经制定和实施了《应对气候变化国家方案》，明确提出2005年到2010年降低单位国内生产总值能耗和主要污染物排放、提高森林覆盖率和可再生能源比重等有约束力的国家指标。
今后，中国将进一步把应对气候变化纳入经济社会发展规划，并继续采取强有力的措施。一是加强节能、提高能效工作，争取到2020年单位国内生产总值二氧化碳排放比2005年有显著下降。二是大力发展可再生能源和核能，争取到2020年非化石能源占一次能源消费比重达到15％左右。三是大力增加森林碳汇，争取到2020年森林面积比2005年增加4000万公顷，森林蓄积量比2005年增加13亿立方米。四是大力发展绿色经济，积极发展低碳经济和循环经济，研发和推广气候友好技术。 -
LONGYEARBYEN, Norway — With plant species disappearing at an alarming rate, scientists and governments are creating a global network of plant banks to store seeds and sprouts, precious genetic resources that may be needed for man to adapt the world？ s food supply to climate change.
This week, the flagship of that effort, the Global Seed Vault near here, received its first seeds, millions of them. Bored into the middle of a frozen Arctic mountain topped with snow, the vault？ s goal is to store and protect samples of every type of seed from every seed collection in the world.
As of Thursday, thousands of neatly stacked and labeled gray boxes of seeds — peas from Nigeria, corn from Mexico — reside in this glazed cavelike structure, forming a sort of backup hard drive, in case natural disasters or human errors erase the seeds from the outside world.
Descending almost 500 feet under the permafrost, the entrance tunnel to the seed vault is designed to withstand bomb blasts and earthquakes. An automated digital monitoring system controls temperature and provides security akin to a missile silo or Fort Knox. No one person has all the codes for entrance.
The Global Vault is part of a broader effort to gather and systematize information about plants and their genes, which climate change experts say may indeed prove more valuable than gold. In Leuven, Belgium, scientists are scouring the world for banana samples and preserving their shoots in liquid nitrogen before they become extinct. A similar effort is under way in France on coffee plants. A number of plants, most from the tropics, do not produce seeds that can be stored.
For years, a hodgepodge network of seed banks has been amassing seed and shoot collections in a haphazard manner. Labs in Mexico banked corn species. Those in Nigeria banked cassava. Now these scattershot efforts are being urgently consolidated and systematized, in part because of better technology to preserve plant genes and in part because of the rising alarm about climate change and its impact on world food production.
“We started thinking about this post-9/11 and on the heels of Hurricane Katrina,” said Cary Fowler, president of the Global Crop Diversity Trust, a nonprofit group that runs the vault. “Everyone was saying, why didn？ t anyone prepare for a hurricane before？ We knew it was going to happen.“Well, we are losing biodiversity every day — it？ s a kind of drip, drip, drip. It？ s also inevitable. We need to do something about it.”
This week the urgency of the problem was underscored as wheat prices rose to record highs and wheat stores dropped to the lowest level in 35 years. A series of droughts and new diseases cut wheat production in many parts of the world. “The erosion of plants？ genetic resources is really going fast,” said Dr. Rony Swennen, head of the division of crop biotechnology at the Catholic University of Leuven in Belgium, who has preserved half of the world？ s 1,200 banana types. “We？ re at a critical moment and if we don？ t act fast, we？ re going to lose a lot of plants that we may need.”
The United Nations International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources, ratified in 2004, created a formal global network for banking and sharing seeds, as well as for studying their genetic traits. Last year, its database received thousands of new seeds.
A system of plant banks could be crucial in responding to climate crises since it could identify genetic material and plant strains better able to cope with a changed environment.
Here at the Global Vault, hundreds of gray boxes containing seeds from places ranging from Syria to Mexico were moved this week into a freezing vault to be placed in suspended animation. They harbor a vast range of qualities, like the ability to withstand drier, warmer climate.