Universidad Nacional de Moreno

Departamento Ciencias Aplicadas y Tecnología INGLÉS I (2114 Y 2261)

Licenciatura en gestión ambiental y Licenciatura en Biotecnología.

Assignment 3

Rural Water, Not City Smog, May Be China’s

Pollution Nightmare
点击查看本文中文版 Read in Chinese

By CHRIS BUCKLEY and VANESSA PIAOAPRIL 11, 2016

A woman after washing clothes in a canal in Hebei Province, China, in 2013. Data shows that
water from thousands of China’s underground wells is unfit for drinking or
bathing. CreditAdam Dean for The New York Times

1. Read the title, look at the picture, read the caption, skim the text. State your
reading hypothesis.

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 Universidad Nacional de Moreno
Departamento Ciencias Aplicadas y Tecnología INGLÉS I (2114 Y 2261)
Licenciatura en gestión ambiental y Licenciatura en Biotecnología.

BEIJING — More than 80 percent of the water from underground wells used by farms,
factories and households across the heavily populated plains of China is unfit for
drinking or bathing because of contamination from industry and farming, according
to new statistics that were reported by Chinese media on Monday, raising new alarm
about pollution in the world’s most populous country.

After years of focus on China’s hazy skies as a measure of environmental blight, the
new data from 2,103 underground wells struck a nerve among Chinese citizens who
have become increasingly sensitive about health threats from pollution. Most
Chinese cities draw on deep reservoirs that were not part of this study, but MANY
villages and small towns in the countryside depend on the shallower wells of the kind
that were tested for the report.

“From my point of view, this shows how water is the biggest environmental issue in
China,” said Dabo Guan, a professor at the University of East Anglia in Britain who
has been studying water pollution and scarcity in China.
“People in the cities, THEY see air pollution every day, so it creates huge pressure
from the public. But in the cities, people don’t see how bad the water pollution is,”
Professor Guan said. “They don’t have the same sense.”

The latest statistics are far from the first about the damage done to China’s underground water
reservoirs and basins by runoff from farming and industry. Still, the numbers, WHICH were
issued recently but given extensive coverage by the Chinese news media only on Monday,
revived concern.
“Does China have any clean underground water?” asked an online commentary by
National Business Daily, which had earlier brought widespread notice to the data.
“The recently published truth is alarming.” Exactly how much of the alarm was
justified was unclear.

Ma Jun, an environmentalist WHO is a director of the Institute of Public and

Environmental Affairs in Beijing, noted that the survey measured water sources
relatively close to the surface, and that many cities get their water from reservoirs that
are hundreds or even thousands of feet deeper.

“Fewer and fewer cities are using the heavily polluted shallow-depth underground
water,” Mr. Ma said in an interview. “Most are digging deep wells for drinking. This
is a very important distinction that must be made.”

For years, the Chinese government has acknowledged that wells and
underground water reserves were endangered by overuse as well as widespread
contamination from industry and farming. In 2011, the Ministry of Environmental
Protection issued a plan to cut the polluting of underground water resources by the
end of this decade.

That plan said that China’s use of underground water grew from 57 billion cubic meters a year
in the 1970s to 110 billion cubic meters in 2009, providing nearly one-fifth of the country’s

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 Universidad Nacional de Moreno
Departamento Ciencias Aplicadas y Tecnología INGLÉS I (2114 Y 2261)
Licenciatura en gestión ambiental y Licenciatura en Biotecnología.

total supplies. In the arid north, underground supplies provided about two-thirds of water for
domestic needs, it said.
But estimates of pollution of underground sources have varied depending on the depth
and location of the wells tested. An annual report from the Ministry of Water
Resources said that in 2014, nearly half of 2,071 monitored wells had “quite poor”
water quality, and an additional 36 percent had “extremely poor” quality.

“Environmental pollution has become a hot topic in recent years,” Zheng Yuhong,
an agricultural resources expert who is a member of China’s national legislature, said
last month during the annual meeting of the legislature, according to a report at the
time. “But pollution of underground water has virtually been forgotten.”

The latest study found that 32.9 percent of wells tested across areas mostly in
Northern and Central China had Grade 4 quality water, meaning that IT was fit only
for industrial uses, National Business Daily said. An additional 47.3 percent of wells
were even worse, Grade 5. The contaminants included manganese, fluoride and
triazoles, a set of compounds used in fungicides. In some areas, there was pollution
caused by heavy metals.

The heavy contamination of supplies near the surface was forcing more cities to
dig thousands of feet underground for clean water, and that was taxing the capacity of
those deep aquifers, Professor Guan said.

Source:http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/12/world/asia/china-underground-water-pollution.html?_r=0

Language activities

2. Identify the tenses of the verbs in bold type

3. Notice the use of comparative and superlative adjectives and find more!

4. Prefixes: find these words in the text. What do they have in common?
a. underground (paragraph 1)
b. unfit (paragraph 1)
c. unclear (paragraph 6)
d. overuse (paragraph 9)

5. Connectors. What do these connectors convey in context? Match them!

RESULT/CONSEQUENCE - ADDITION- EXAMPLE- CONTRAST/CONCESSION - REASON

6. Lexical categories. Re- read the LAST paragraph and find an example of a:
a. preposition
b. demonstrative pronoun
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 Universidad Nacional de Moreno
Departamento Ciencias Aplicadas y Tecnología INGLÉS I (2114 Y 2261)
Licenciatura en gestión ambiental y Licenciatura en Biotecnología.

c. adjective
d. definite article
e. verb
f. noun
g. a conjunction (connector)

Reading comprehension

7. Reference. What do THESE WORDS refer to in the text.

MANY

THEY

WHICH

WHO

IT

8. Are these sentences true or false? Underline the evidence in the text.
a. This article is mainly about air pollution in China.
b. Grade 5 quality water means that it is only appropriate for industrial uses.

9. Answer these questions in Spanish.

a. What does Professor Guan study?
……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..
b. Who is Ma Jun?
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c. Why do more cities in China need to dig thousands of feet underground?
.........................................................................................................................................................

10. Translation

a. Underline the head noun in each of these noun phrases and attempt a translation in Spanish
 underground wells used by farms
 water pollution and scarcity
 one fifth of the country’s total supplies
 a member of China´s national legislature
 pollution caused by heavy metals

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 Universidad Nacional de Moreno
Departamento Ciencias Aplicadas y Tecnología INGLÉS I (2114 Y 2261)
Licenciatura en gestión ambiental y Licenciatura en Biotecnología.

b. In pairs, translate the last paragraph into Spanish

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c. Compare and contrast your translation with the one provided below. Can you find any differences?

11. Group discussion. Which biological methods can be used to detect pollutants? Read the text below and find out
more!

Environmental Detection and Monitoring:

A wide range of biological methods are in use to detect pollution and for the continuous monitoring of pollutants. The
techniques of biotechnology have novel methods for diagnosing environmental problems and assessing normal
environmental conditions so that human beings can be better- informed of the surroundings. Applications of these
methods are cheaper, faster and also portable.
Rather than gathering soil samples and sending them to a laboratory for analysis, scientists can measure the level of
contamination on site and know the results immediately. Biological detection methods using biosensors and immunoassays
have been developed and are now in the market. Microbes are used in biosensors contamination of metals or pollutants.
Saccharomyces cerevisiae (yeast) is used to detect cyanide in river water while Selenastrum capricornatum (green alga) is
used for heavy metal detection. Immunoassays use labelled antibodies (complex proteins produced in biological response
to specific agents) and enzymes to measure pollutant levels. If a pollutant is present, the antibody attaches itself to it
making it detectable either through colour change, fluorescence or radioactivity.

Prof. Victoria Camila Reyes.