Academic reading practice test 31 Ocean Acidification, A New Fair Trade Organisation, The First Antigravity Machine?

Academic reading practice test 31 Ocean Acidification, A New Fair Trade Organisation,  The First Antigravity Machine?

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Ocean Acidification

Caspar Henderson reports on some new concerns.

A few years ago, biologist, Victoria Fabry, saw the future of the world’s oceans in ajar. She was aboard a research ship in the North Pacific, carrying out experiments on a species of pteropod – small molluscs with shells up to a centimetre long, which swim in a way that resembles butterfly flight, propelled by small flaps. Something strange was happening in Fabry’s jars. ‘The pteropods were still swimming, but their shells were visibly dissolving,’ says Fabry. She realised that the animals’ respiration had increased the carbon dioxide (CO2) in the jars, which had been sealed for 48 hours, changing the water’s chemistry to a point where the calcium carbonate in the pteropods’ shells had started to dissolve.

What Fabry had stumbled on was a hint of ‘the other CO2 problem’.

A New Fair Trade Organisation

Trade has, so far, proved ineffective in solving the major problems faced by most nations. However, the answer to the injustices of the existing trade regime is not no trade, but fair trade. The existing regime forbids poor nations from following the path taken by the rich. With the exceptions of Switzerland, Belgium and the Netherlands, all the nations that have become independently wealthy did so with the help of a mechanism economists call ‘infant industry protection*: defending new sectors from foreign competition until they are big enough to compete on equal terms. The textile industry in Britain, for example, on which the Industrial Revolution was built in the nineteenth century, was nurtured and promoted by means of tariffs (or trade taxes) and the outright prohibition of competing goods. Between 1864 and 1913, the US was the most heavily protected nation on earth. Only when these countries had established technological and commercial superiority did they suddenly discover the virtues of unimpeded competition.

The First Antigravity Machine?

It was one of the biggest science stories of the 1990s. Even now, the facts behind it remain hotly disputed. And small wonder, for if the claims made for the small disc, the focus of the controversy, are true, it may be possible to break through one of the great barriers in the scientific world and control the most potent of cosmic forces: gravity. Huge innovations in flight and space travel could arise from that.

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