Saving the Environment

One way that people in general have done to save our depleting environment is by cleaning up after BP's massive oil spill. The oil spill started on April 20, 2010 and killed 11 workers. The leak started spilling oil out into the Gulf of Mexico at a rate of 1,000 barrels a day, which is approximately 42 gallons of oil  a day. Then, the estimate was raised to 5,000, and then from there to 12,000, and then after that on to a terrifying rate of 100,000 barrels a day. That is 4.2 million gallons of oil each day. After BP stopped the oil leak, the pipe had leaked around an average of 50,000 to 60,000 barrels of oil a day for a few months, I don't even want to calculate that! The oil spill encouraged hundreds of volunteers and workers to help clean up the whole mess, which was greatly harming sea life, the beaches, fishermen, and even affected some birds. People were helping by taking donations for affected fishermen and taking hair and fur donations for making booms for containing the oil. In these ways the people helped to clean it up and restore the GUlf of Mexico back to the way it was and also to stop harming the sea life.
 
Another way that people are helping our community is by driving hybrid cars.Many car companies have started to come out with hybrid vehicles, which use less gas and are mainly powered by electricity. THe most commonly known hybrid, the Toyota Prius, has been a sensation all over the world. From Japan, to America, and even Europe, the Prius is one of the top sold hybrid vehicles. Hybrids will get more mile to the gallon, which means less gas to fuel the car and being able to go farther on a single tank of gas. After the Prius, companies such as Honda and Nissan, as well as The Big Three of GM, Chrysler, and Ford have jumped into the mix. Next year, GM plans to reveal its new electric vehicle, the Chevy Volt. This car runs almost purely on electicity, being able to go a whopping 200 miles on a single tank! Other car makers are also coming out with electricle cars, such as Nissan's Leaf. The eco craze has even spread to exotic car companies such as Ferrari. Using less fuel in our cars is a huge step towards saving our planet's ozone. The less emissions we produce, the less we harm the environment.


One way that we can help our community is closely linked to the topic above, and that is that we should carpool. When there are less cars on the streets, there are less emissions being absorbed into the air. As a class, we should try to find other stundents that live near us so that we may go with them to school instead of going separately to the same place. Carpooling will help the ozone even more and we may also save extra trips for our parents, so that they may go straight to work or they don't have to drop us off, saving their time and saving the earth. Its a win-win situation for everyone. The next step after carpooling would be for us to carpool in electric cars!!

Summer Vacation

This summer, I went to China for vacation. The first place I went to was Hong Kong, which was very busy. After Hong Kong, our family went to Beijing. We went to many places in Beijing, including Tian An Men Square, the Sunmer Palace, and the Temple of Heaven. One place inparticular was really cool. We went to the Great Wall of China. Inerestingly, at the end, after we finished going on to the wall and got back down, there was an area where there were bears. They never said what kind of bears they were, but they were really cool. It costed $3HK to feed them a little basket of carrots, and around $8HK equals $1, so it was pretty cheap. The cage type think was lower than the ground so that they could not get out. There were wooden platforms to sleep on, and stairs that they could walk up and down on, but the main attraction was the pole structure that stood in the front of the feeding area. Most of the bears were just sleeping, but two of them were attracting many people. One was standing on top of the pole structure, which is about 20 ft high compared to where they could stand,  and the other was standing on the ground. You could throw carrots into their mouths, and if you were not too off they would stretch their necks and catch it, which sometimes it looked like it was impossible. The one on the floor was just picking up all the leftovers of the people who threw bad. We were there for about a half an hour, buying 5 or 6 baskets to feed them.
After we visited Tian An Men Square, we had some spare time, so we went to the zoo to see some Giant Pandas. They were really large, and there was information on the walls about their rarity and about how some of them appeared at the 2008 Olympics. They were really interesting, mostly because almost all of them were sleeping. It was really funny because some would roll over, but some of them just did nothing. One panda was actually eating when we were there, and w got to see how they ate the bamboo leaves. The panda would just grab it with its paws and start to eat the shoot. When he finished, he got up, grab another, and then just plopped back down. After visiting the pandas, my sister really wanted to stop by the penguin exhibit, so we did, but it wasn't really that interesting.