составить топик текста: THIS FRAGILE PLANET

The word environment means simply what is around us.
Some people live in a town environment;
for others, their environment is the countryside.
But the air we breathe, the soil on which we stand and walk, the water we drink are all part of the environment.

Nowadays people understand how important it is to solve the environmental problems that endanger people's lives.
The most serious environmental problems are:

 pollution in its many forms (water pollution, air pollution, nuclear pollution);

noise from cars, buses, planes, etc.;

destruction of wildlife and countryside beauty;

shortage of natural resources (metals, different kinds of fuel);

the growth of population.

PROTECTION OF THE AIR AGAINST CONTAMINATION

The people cannot live without air even several minutes.
Animals and plants also need air.
The air protects the Earth against space radiation.

On our planet there are many factories.
They use much oxygen for burning and throw a lot of smoke and carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.
In big cities the air is contaminated by smoke from the car engines.
This smoke has tiny poisonous particles.

When the air is dry the smoke rises high into the sky and the winds carry it away.
But when the air is cold and wet the smoke stays for long near the surface of the Earth.
Then the smoke hurts eyes, covers all things with a layer of soot, destroys the surface of buildings, does great harm on plants and animals, and causes diseases with people.

In order to protect the air against contamination, special filters are put on the factory chimneys.
Special filters are used in the cars too.
It is also necessary to water pavements and roads to protect the air against the dust.

AIR POLLUTION

When the Americans decided to clean up the Statue of Liberty in 1986, the first thing they had to do was to make a hole in her nose and take away the acid rain that had collected inside.
The polluted air of New York had mixed with the rain and damaged the statue badly.
And you certainly know that most of the pollution in big cities comes from cars and buses.

More and more often people are told not to be in direct sunlight, because ultraviolet radiation from the sun can cause skin cancer.
Normally the ozone layer in the atmosphere protects us from such radiation, but if there are holes in the ozone layer ultraviolet radiation can get to the earth.
Many scientists think that these holes are the result of air pollution.

Nuclear power stations can go wrong and cause nuclear pollution.
This happened in Windscale in Britain, in Three Mile Island in the USA and Chernobyl in Ukraine.
Nuclear pollution cannot be seen but its effects can be terrible.

To make air clean again we need good filters at nuclear power stations, at factories and plants and also in cars and buses.

Both clean air and clean water are necessary for our health.
If people want to survive they must solve these problems quickly.
Man is beginning to understand that his environment is not just his own town or country, but the whole earth.
That's why people all over the world think and speak so much about ecology.