VOASE0819_Development Report

19 August 2007

Building a Windbreak to Protect Crops
Barriers of trees and other plants seem to work best when they let a little wind pass through.

Download
Download

This is the VOA Special English Development Report.

A windbreak of trees

Farmers use different kinds of soil conservation methods to protect their land from damage by farming and the forces of nature. One important form of soil conservation is the use of windbreaks.

Windbreaks are barriers formed by trees and other plants with many leaves. Farmers plant them in lines around their fields.

Windbreaks stop the wind from blowing soil away. They also keep the wind from destroying or damaging crops. They are very important for growing grains, such as wheat.

There have been studies done on windbreaks in parts of West Africa, for example. These found that grain harvests can be twenty percent higher in fields protected by windbreaks compared to fields without such protection.

However, windbreaks seem to work best when they allow a little wind to pass through. If the wall of trees and plants stops wind completely, then violent air motions will take place close to the ground. These motions will lift soil into the air where it will be blown away.

For this reason, a windbreak is best if it has only sixty to eighty percent of the trees and plants needed to make a solid line.

An easy rule to remember is that windbreaks can protect areas up to ten times the height of the tallest trees in the windbreak.

There should be at least two lines in each windbreak. One line should be large trees. The second line, right next to it, can be shorter trees and other plants with leaves. Locally grown trees and plants are best for windbreaks.

Windbreaks not only protect land and crops from the wind. They can also provide wood products. These include wood for fuel and longer pieces for making fences.

You can get more information about windbreaks and other forms of soil conservation from the group Volunteers in Technical Assistance. VITA is part of EnterpriseWorks/VITA, on the Web at enterpriseworks.org.

Internet users can read and listen to our reports at voaspecialenglish dot com. And if you have a question, write to VOA Special English, Washington, D.C., two-zero-two-three-seven U.S.A. Or send e-mail to special@voanews.com and make sure to include your name and where you are from. We might be able to answer your question on the air, but we cannot answer questions personally.

And that's the VOA Special Development Report, written by Gary Garriott. I'm Steve Ember.

VOASE0819_This Is America

19 August 2007

Chicago: Some Big Places to See in the 'City of the Big Shoulders'
Come along to a huge park, a cultural center known as “the People’s Palace,” and more, in the nation’s third largest city.

Download
Download

VOICE ONE:

Welcome to THIS IS AMERICA in VOA Special English. I’m Faith Lapidus.

VOICE TWO:

And I’m Steve Ember. This week: some places to see in Chicago.

(MUSIC)

VOICE ONE:

Early last century, the poet Carl Sandburg described Chicago, Illinois, as the “City of the Big Shoulders.” That still seems right. Chicago does a lot of things in a big way.

For example, the city is a big transportation center in the Midwest for trains, trucks, ships and planes.

Manufacturing is one of the biggest industries in Chicago.

And Chicago has one of America’s busiest ports. The city stretches for about forty kilometers along the southwestern shore of Lake Michigan. The Saint Lawrence Seaway opened in nineteen fifty-nine. It connects the Great Lakes to the Atlantic Ocean.

(MUSIC)

VOICE TWO:

Chicago is big on music. Visitors can find all kinds, from classical to hip-hop. Some of the best places for jazz and blues are along Rush Street.

There are lots of things to see and hear in Chicago.

At the Art Institute of Chicago, people can see fine Asian art and much more.

At the Museum of Science and Industry, visitors crowd a working coal mine and a World War Two submarine.

At the Adler Planetarium, people see stars and learn about space. And at the Shedd Aquarium, they see colorful fish and learn about life under the sea.

VOICE ONE:

The Sears Tower

Not surprisingly Chicago has a lot of big buildings. The two tallest are the Sears Tower and the John Hancock Building.

Many people take architectural tours around Chicago. There are many interesting landmarks and building designs to see.

The Wrigley Building, near the Chicago River, opened in the early nineteen twenties. This office building is hard to miss. It is bright white.

Downtown Chicago, the business center, is known as the Loop. There are many offices and stores. The Loop includes the financial district around LaSalle Street. The financial district is home to the Chicago Board of Trade, the Chicago Stock Exchange and many banks.

(MUSIC)

VOICE TWO:

Another big thing to see, and feel, is the weather. After all, another name for Chicago is the "Windy City." People turn their shoulders to the strong winds off Lake Michigan. In winter, Chicago gets a lot of snow; in summer, the weather is hot and sticky.

Almost three million people live in Chicago. Chicago is America's third largest city, after New York and Los Angeles. More than nine million people live in surrounding communities.

Over the years many immigrants have settled in Chicago. Many of its people have ethnic roots in Poland, Germany, Ireland and Italy. More recent immigrants have come from all over the world.

Today just under half the population of the city of Chicago is non-Hispanic white. The city has large black and Hispanic populations. Four percent of the people are Asian.

VOICE ONE:

Millenium Park, Chicago

When people in Chicago want to be outdoors, one place to go is Millennium Park. In this City of Big Shoulders, almost everything about Millennium Park is big. It covers ten hectares. It took almost nine years to finish.

Millennium Park is on Michigan Avenue near Lake Michigan. It officially opened in two thousand four. It cost four hundred seventy-five million dollars.

Millennium Park has gardens and places for music, dance and ice skating. It also has one of the largest outdoor sculptures in the world. Anish Kapoor of Britain created this work of public art. It weighs one hundred ten tons.

A huge rounded form of shiny steel captures a looking-glass image of the Chicago skyline and the clouds above. The sculpture is called “Cloud Gate.”

VOICE TWO:

The Spanish artist Jaume Plensa designed the Crown Fountain in Millennium Park. The fountain is surely one of the most unusual in the world.

The artist set a pool of water between two tall glass towers. Video images appear on the towers. The images are a series of pictures of nature and people’s faces. The water appears to pour from their mouths. The faces represent the many different people of Chicago.

VOICE ONE:

Millennium Park has music in the Jay Pritzker Pavilion. The architect Frank Gehry designed this modern-looking structure. It can seat four thousand people under its open-top steel ribbons. There is also an area called the Great Lawn to listen to the music. The sound system makes the music seem like it is coming from inside a concert hall.

The pavilion is a home for the Grant Park Music Festival. Listen as the Grant Park Symphony plays “Julius Caesar: Symphonic Epilogue After Shakespeare," Opus Twenty-eight, composed by Robert Kurka.

(MUSIC)

VOICE TWO:

McCormick Place, Chicago

In warm weather, people eat outdoors in the McCormick Tribune Plaza and Ice Rink in Millennium Park. In winter, skaters come out to enjoy the ice.

Visitors can also walk and ride bicycles in several areas of the plaza.

An indoor space has room for three hundred bicycles. There are also places where people who ride their bikes to work can clean up and change clothes.

Another part of Millennium Park is the Lurie Garden. This one-hectare area is bordered by what is called the "Shoulder Hedge." Trees almost five meters tall form a living wall around the garden.

"Shoulder" in this case is meant to honor the poet Carl Sandburg. One hundred thirty-eight kinds of plants grow in the Lurie Garden.

VOICE ONE:

Many people enjoy the activities at Millennium Park. But critics wonder why the city needed a park so big and costly. They say the city should have spent the money instead on its more than six hundred public schools. They say it could have helped the poor.

Twenty-one percent of people in the city of Chicago were living below the poverty level in two thousand four. The official poverty rate nationally that year was about thirteen percent.

VOICE TWO:

Other people say Millennium Park has improved the appearance of the area where it was built. The mayor and many other city leaders believed a big park would bring more people, more homes and more businesses to the area.

Mayor Richard M. Daley is the son of former Chicago mayor Richard J. Daley. The father is still remembered for his control over the local Democratic Party organization. The city has not elected a Republican mayor since nineteen fifteen.

(MUSIC)

VOICE ONE:

Another big development, the Chicago Cultural Center, stands across Michigan Avenue from Millennium Park. It contains the city's official Visitor Information Center. It is also a showplace for the arts.

The building that now houses the cultural center was completed in eighteen ninety-seven. It held the first permanent collection of the Chicago Public Library. It served as library headquarters until nineteen ninety-one.

There are white walls made of marble from Carrara, Italy. And there are two Tiffany domes. The bigger dome is one of the largest Tiffany designs in the world. It rises almost twelve meters above the floor.

People say the restored Chicago Cultural Center looks like a home for kings and queens. Some call it “the People’s Palace.”

VOICE TWO:

Visitors can listen to all kinds of music at the Chicago Cultural Center. For example, Monday through Friday, there are free LunchBreak Concerts. Listen now to Middle Eastern music performed by Safwan Matni, a popular LunchBreak Concert guest artist.

(MUSIC)

Dancers from Hubbard Street Two in Chicago have also performed at the Cultural Center. Hubbard Street Two is a six-member dance group. It trains promising dancers between the ages of seventeen and twenty-five. They perform works by young choreographers.

VOICE ONE:

Carl Sandburg would probably not have been surprised by big projects like the Chicago Cultural Center and Millennium Park. The poet wrote: “Come and show me another city with lifted head singing so proud to be alive … ”

(MUSIC)

VOICE TWO:

Our program was written by Jerilyn Watson and produced by Caty Weaver. I’m Steve Ember.

VOICE ONE:

And I’m Faith Lapidus. Read and listen to our programs at voaspecialenglish.com. And join us again next week for THIS IS AMERICA in VOA Special English. We leave you with Frank Sinatra singing about "My Kind of Town."

VOASE0818_People In America

18 August 2007

Edward Teller, 1908-2003: "Father of the Hydrogen Bomb"
He was one of the best-known American scientists of the twentieth century.

Download
Download

VOICE ONE:

I’m Faith Lapidus.

VOICE TWO:

And I’m Steve Ember with PEOPLE IN AMERICA from VOA Special English. Today, we tell about Edward Teller. He was one of the best-known American scientists of the twentieth century.

(MUSIC)

VOICE ONE:

Edward Teller was often called the "father of the hydrogen bomb.” However, he

Edward Teller

reportedly did not like that name. Teller helped develop the first nuclear weapons. Later, he was an activist for a strong national defense. He was an important influence on America’s defense and energy policies.

Experts say Teller’s strong support for defense resulted from experiences that helped shape his opinion of world events. One was the rise of the Nazi party while he lived in Germany during the nineteen thirties.

VOICE TWO:

Edward Teller was born in Budapest, Hungary in nineteen-oh-eight. His father was a lawyer and his mother had strong musical abilities. His parents and teachers recognized at an early age that Edward was excellent in mathematics. Yet his father was unhappy when Edward said he wanted to be a mathematician. He told his son that mathematicians had trouble earning money. So Edward agreed to study chemistry. He went to Leipzig, Germany for his university education. While in Germany, Edward was in a streetcar accident. One of his feet was cut off. He had to wear a man-made, replacement foot for the rest of his life.

VOICE ONE:

One of Teller’s professors in Leipzig was Werner Heisenberg. Heisenberg helped invent the theory called quantum mechanics. This theory involves the study of matter and radiation at an atomic level. It was one of the most important theories in twentieth century science. In nineteen thirty-two, Heisenberg won the Nobel Prize for physics for developing the theory. Later he worked in Germany’s nuclear research program.

Edward Teller received a doctorate in physics from the University of Leipzig in nineteen thirty. He was a professor at the University of Gottingen for three years.

In nineteen thirty-three, Adolf Hitler became Germany’s Chancellor. Hitler and his Nazi Party organized a campaign against Jews and other minorities. This forced Teller and a number of other Jewish scientists to flee Germany. Teller and his wife, Mici, came to the United States in nineteen thirty-five. They became American citizens six years later.

(MUSIC)

VOICE TWO:

By the late nineteen thirties, scientists in several countries were learning how to split the nuclei of atoms. They discovered that this nuclear fission releases huge amounts of energy and could be used to create a powerful new weapon. Some scientists in the United States feared that Germany was developing an atomic bomb and would be the first to use it as a weapon. One of those who believed this was a friend of Teller’s, Leo Szilard. Like Teller, Szilard was a scientist who had left Hungary and come to live in the United States.

Szilard believed that the United States should have its own program to develop atomic weapons. He wanted to get American officials interested in such a program. He decided to seek help from the world’s most famous scientist, Albert Einstein.

VOICE ONE:

In nineteen thirty-nine, Szilard prepared a letter to President Franklin Roosevelt for Einstein to sign. The letter urged the need for an atomic weapons program. Szilard decided to visit Einstein at his summer home near New York City. But Szilard could not drive a car, so he asked his friend Teller to drive them to Einstein’s home. Einstein signed the letter. It led to a secret American program to develop an atomic bomb. This program was called the Manhattan Project.

To carry out the program, the Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory was secretly established in the southwestern state of New Mexico in nineteen forty-two. This was during World War Two. The United States wanted to build an atomic bomb before Germany or Japan did. Teller joined the project along with America’s other top scientists. He and his wife brought their one-hundred-year-old piano to the New Mexico desert. Teller often stayed up late, playing music written by Mozart and other famous composers.

VOICE TWO:

Edward Teller hoped to design a hydrogen fusion bomb, a device he called the “super.” The idea for the hydrogen bomb came from another scientist, Enrico Fermi. Fermi suggested that the fusion of hydrogen atoms might create an even more powerful force than splitting them. Teller quickly accepted the idea.

However, the director of the Manhattan Project disagreed. J. Robert Oppenheimer wanted his team of scientists to develop an atomic bomb, not a hydrogen bomb. The Manhattan project succeeded in developing the world’s first atomic bomb. Its energy came from splitting the nuclei of uranium atoms.

VOICE ONE:

Edward Teller was among the scientists who gathered to see the world’s first atomic test explosion. They watched as a huge cloud rose from the New Mexico desert on July sixteenth, ninety forty-five. By that time, the war in Europe was over. The Germans had never come close to creating an atomic bomb. But the war with Japan continued. In an effort to end the war, United States planes dropped atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki on August sixth. Japan surrendered within days to end World War Two.

VOICE TWO:

After the war, Edward Teller taught at the University of Chicago in Illinois. Many scientists who helped develop the atomic bomb returned to civilian jobs. Some had problems with moral issues.

Years later, Teller wondered if the United States could have shown Japanese leaders the power of the atom without destroying the two cities. Teller said he regretted that he and other scientists did not seek to demonstrate American power in some other way to influence Japan to end the war. Teller said: “If we could have ended the war by showing the power of science without killing a single person, all of us would be happier, more reasonable and much more safe.”

(MUSIC)

VOICE ONE:

The United States tested the first hydrogen bomb in 1952

In nineteen forty-nine, the Soviet Union tested its first atomic bomb. Suddenly, the United States faced its own threat of nuclear attack. Edward Teller believed the country needed a hydrogen bomb for defense. President Harry Truman agreed. Teller returned to Los Alamos and worked to develop the hydrogen bomb. Scientists tested the bomb in the Pacific Ocean in nineteen fifty-two.

VOICE TWO:

As the United States and the Soviet Union built more nuclear bombs, Edward Teller called for a second national nuclear weapons laboratory. The Lawrence Livermore Laboratory opened near San Francisco, California in nineteen fifty-two. Teller worked as an advisor there. He served as director from nineteen fifty-eight to nineteen sixty. Then he became a professor at the University of California at Berkeley. In the nineteen sixties, opponents of the Vietnam War criticized Teller for his work in developing nuclear weapons.

(MUSIC)

VOICE ONE:

Edward Teller spent the rest of his life on matters of war and peace. He believed that the security of the United States depended on strong national defense. In nineteen eighty, Teller said he believed nuclear war with the Soviet Union was possible. He said: “ I cannot just go back to physics because I believe that to prevent another war happens to be … more important.”

In the nineteen eighties, Teller argued for a missile-defense system for the United States. Teller strongly supported President Ronald Reagan’s proposed Strategic Defense Initiative. It called for space satellites armed with lasers to destroy possible nuclear missiles directed at the United States.

This program became known as “Star Wars.” Critics said it would cost too much money to develop and would not work. It was never built. However, President Bush has renewed the idea of establishing a missile-defense system to protect the United States.

VOICE TWO:

Edward Teller receives the Presidential Medal of Freedom on August 26, 2003. With him is Shirley Petty of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory Director's Office.

Edward Teller received many honors during his life. In two thousand three, he was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor. That same year, Teller suffered a stroke. He died at his home on the campus of Stanford University in Palo Alto, California. He was ninety-five years old. Until his last days, Edward Teller continued to support the idea of a system to defend the country against a danger he helped create.

(MUSIC)

VOICE ONE:

This Special English program was written by George Grow and produced by Lawan Davis. I’m Faith Lapidus.

VOICE TWO:

And I’m Steve Ember. Join us again next week for another PEOPLE IN AMERICA program on the Voice of America.