Vocabulary work

A. MATCH SYNONYMS:

B. MATCH THE WORDS WITH THEIR DEFINITIONS:

5. CHOOSE THE BEST VARIANT TO COMPLETE THE SENTENCES:

1. Principle 21 of the Declaration has special (importance, significance, meaning, sense).

2. (evolutive, development, developing, upcoming) countries generally emphasized that satisfaction of basic development needs must have priority.

3. World population had (enlarged, extended, intensified, increased) by 1.7 billion to more than 5 billion.

4. The Stockholm Conference (accepted, adopted, approved, took) a Declaration and an Action Plan, which established the basis for a new era of international co-operation on environmental issues.

5. Sweden took up the recommendation of the Stockholm Conference (to gather, to convene, to take place, to organize) another conference on the human environment.

B. MARK THE STATEMENTS AS TRUE (T) OR FALSE (F). CORRECT THE FALSE STATESMENTS:

1. The motto of the Stockholm Conference was “Only One Earth”.

2. UNEP was established by the General Assembly of the United Nations with location in Stockholm, Sweden.

3. The serious ozone problem was the subject of a convention signed in Vienna in 1985.

4. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is composed of the world’s most competent climate scientists, representatives of Government, and experts in the social sciences.

5. The purpose of the IPCC has been to carry out research on its own, to monitor and evaluate existing research, adding its own conclusions and presentations for policy-makers.

6. A. TRANSLATE FROM ENGLISH INTO RUSSIAN:

1. The globalization process accelerated in the last 25 years.

2. UNEP has a special role in most cases to provide administrative and other kinds of support.

3. The Commission further underlined that safeguarding of the environment should not be seen as a sectorial interest, but as an integrated component in all economic and social development.

4. By maintain a certain dualism it could easier be made clear that the responsibility to take action against environmental destruction primarily rested with the industrialized countries which in their view had caused the problems in the first place.

5. As the perception of global threats to the environment became stronger in the 1980’s, the climate change issue came increasingly into focus.

B. ANSWER THE FOLLOWING QUESTIONS:

6. When and where did the United Nations Conference on the Human Environment (the Stockholm Conference) convene? What are the most significant results of the Conference?

7. What issues did the Brundtland Comission bring up?

8. Giving examples proved environmental deterioration in the 1990’s?

9. What documents did the Rio Conference adopt? Explain their purpose.

10. Why is the process of global warming dangerous?

VARIANT 2

1. Read the text and translate the italised extract in written form.

The Damaged Environment – How Long Will It Last?

Man has influenced the environment in three very different ways: a dramatic reshaping of the landscape to create effecient agriculture ad urban life: a major interference in the biogeochemical cycles of carbon, nitrogen, phosphorus and metals changing the physics and chemistry of the environment throigh increased nutrients flows, acidification, global warming, and increased UV radiation; thousands of chemicals, foreign to the planet and its life forms, have been used extensively in the environment, some of them deliberately to poison life.

The pollution chain is the way that pollutants take from production into the environment over air and water. Some chemicals are easily taken up by life forms, they are bio-available, they may accumulate in organs and tissues, stay in the food chains as they migrate form prey to predatorm even form the mother to the child. Many of them also ens up in man.

Chemicals have special effects in ecosystems. An ecosystem might be completely disrupted if one key species is badly damaged, and prey-predator relationships are changed. Typically ecosystems hit by pollution lose diversity and biomass. At the same time environments that are less diverse, both as landscapes and as ecosystems, are more vulnerable to environemntal impacts.

Compared to the 1059’s and 1960’s, when the threat form chemical pollution was first grasped seriously, much has happened. Many chemicals have been banned and new chemicals have been designed so they do not accumulate in ecosystems. But old chemicals still leak from the society in to the environment, and new threats are comtunuously discovered. Lately pollutants that influence the sexual defferentiation in animals, the so called endocrine disruptors, have been creating a new scene, a chemical panorama that seems more threatening than before. It is discussed whether endocrine disruptors, also called hormon-mimetic pollutants, can reach man and threaten his reproduction.

Environmental impacts interacts in several ways, either to reinforce one another or sometimes dampen each other. Landscape changes make the environment more or less susceptible fro eutrophication and acidification. For example, a modernised monotonous productionlandscape enhances eutrophication since the factors that reduce nitrogen and phosphorus flows are ansent. In the same time an ecosystem that has relatively few species is less able to withstand the impact of pollution and changes in general, e.g. the Baltic Sea ecosystem. Th environment is more or less robust, that is more or less able to withstans impact. An environment that has changed but is able to go back to its original status after an impact has ceased, is called resilient.

Some of the impacts that man has had on the environment ill last very long. Changes in infrastructure, roads, buildings etc., will last perhaps to the next ise age, that is many tens of thousands of years. Also landscapes changes, e.g. deforestation and drainage, may be very long lasting. Forests will take hundreds of years to be more natural and a “virgin” forest will take a thousand years to establish itself. A chemical impact will only last as long as the chemical survives. However changes in the biochemical cycles will take hundreds or thousands of years for global impacts to adjust even if mechanisms are available.

Finally some changes are irreversible. To this categiry belongs for example the extinction of biological species. Even if we will in the long run be able to manage the environment to stop the continued degradation, it is already clear that our children will live in an environment that is a little less rich and a little less diverse than ours.