Let's Get 7 in IELTS

A buyer's guide to harnessing the energy of the sun

By Rahul Tandon
BBC News, Calcutta

Dear all

For ur reference!!!

acquire : 獲得

By Jonathan Amos
Science reporter, BBC News

plotting areas of ground that may or may not need fertiliser applications.

Dear All

For ur Reference!!

achieve : 完成,實現

The government needs to step up efforts to reduce waste from business, according to a parliamentary committee.

The House of Lords Science and Technology Committee recommends using variable VAT rates to cut unsustainable consumption of raw materials.

Its report says pressure has so far concentrated on householders, who account for only 9% of the UK's waste.

Environment minister Joan Ruddock said the government does have measures that are inducing businesses to cut waste.

Those measures include the landfill tax escalator under which the tax on landfill will rise by £8 per tonne each year until 2011.

Did Russia invade Georgia or was its military operation there a case of humanitarian intervention?

This is the nub of the propaganda war that has been fought out between the Georgians (with increasingly vocal backing from the US and the EU) and the Russians (with the support of the separatist leaderships in South Ossetia and Abkhazia and countries like Serbia).

The World Tonight - along with much of the rest of the BBC and other news organisations - has given the conflict over the past two weeks extensive coverage. Before the fighting escalated many people - including journalists covering the story - had barely heard of the places that have become such familiar names.

Amber: Hello, I’m Amber with another edition of ‘How to …’ the series that gives you useful language to do things in English.
In an earlier programme we looked at simple ways to apologise – to say sorry when you’ve done something wrong. In this programme, we look at how to reply when someone says sorry to you for something they’ve done wrong. Now the good news is there are lots of short and friendly expressions that you can use to accept an apology. For example, if you’re with someone who’s really sorry for what they’ve done, you can just say: That’s OK.

Amber: For example:

Henry Ford certainly is a great guy. He introduced mass-production, putting the whole world on the wheels. But his contribution to the world is not just his Model T, which, like the old Singer sewing machine, was built all but for eternity. Both machines were, of course, almost fool-proof easy to handle, and best of all, capitalists could increase the wages of workers and cut the prices of their products at the same time, thanks to mass-production and its resultant global popularization.

Things began to change after the economic globalization, whose inception historians would date back to the end of the Second World War. The United States won the war, and women's obsession with nylon stockings surged across the world where GIs spread the gospel of semi-transparent sexy hose. Incidentally, GI, which stands for "government issue," means the American soldier, who was ubiquitous the world over in the latter half of the 1940s. The best present a German or Italian or Japanese girl could have from her GI friend was the nylon stockings.

Well, they lasted almost forever. That made American hose-makers worry about their business prospective. The good lasting nylon stockings would saturate the market sooner than later. So they had to turn out flimsier stockings to keep their market wide open. Pantyhose now available doesn't last long. Other manufacturers followed suit, producing increasingly costly wares that have a much shorter lifespan.