A few weeks ago, I was giving some students advice on improving vocabulary and pushing them past their basic English skills. I told them to read the world news and to give them an example, I opened up www.cnn.com and clicked on the first article that was related to China.
This is what came up:

An Article on Pollution and Cancer in China

After reading it, one of the students gasped in astonishment and then said “That’s the river that runs through my hometown! It’s very close to my home!”

I guess that was a good lesson on why people should keep up to date on the news.

I found an article recently on the New York Times website that I think is definitely worth reading. It’s all about China, industrialization, and the pollution that is occurring as a result.

Here in China, when the topic of pollution comes up, the most common response that I hear (I’m not sure what others hear elsewhere) is that China is a developing country and as countries like the United States and Great Britain developed, they too created serious environmental problems, but they didn’t do anything to remedy the situation until after they had modernized and developed. China is still in the process of developing now.

However, one thing that is very clear from statistics is that China seems to be creating a lot more pollution and at a much faster pace. I suppose that when G.Britain and the U.S. developed, there probably wasn’t anyone really measuring their factory emissions though. Earlier today, Kate pointed out that at that point in time, the scientific knowledge and techniques had not yet been created to control and reduce the amount of pollution. Yet, today we have that technology.

Well, I’ll share the link to the article and let you see for yourself. I’m not sure how long this link will be good, so I’m sorry if it’s gone in a week or so.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/26/world/asia/26china.html