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WEEK 10: SUMMARY PRACTICE 2

Practice 1
Participial Phrases describing Consequences and Impact: From the list below, find the participle(s) that
best completes each sentence. Underline the consequence or impact described by the participle.
There may be more than one correct answer per sentence.

contributing damaging (10) enabling establishing

forcing giving interrupting killing
leading to leaving negating persuading
producing putting reducing threatening

1. As humans clear forested areas to provide fields for crops and farm animals, the native
vegetation disappears, ___________ the process by which natural nutrients are recycled
back into the soil.
2. ___________ forest reserves, areas in which all economic exploitation of the tropical rain
forests is illegal, will preserve millions of unknown and probably unique natural species,
___________ scientists the opportunity to study them and the ecosystems that support
them.
3. In the Mekong River Delta, most of the winter-spring crop has already been harvested,
but saltwater continues to extend its reach, ___________ the summer-fall crop in
jeopardy.
4. In 1984, toxic gas escaped from a chemical plant in Bhopal, India, ___________
approximately 2,000 people and ___________ tens of thousands with long-term, often
fatal, health problem.
5. In nineteenth century Europe, the old agricultural system was disintegrating,
___________ unskilled laborers out of work and ___________ many to immigrate to the
United States.
6. International organizations have provided funding for family-planning programs,
___________ a number of countries to lower their birthrates significantly.
7. Old electrical power plants release large quantities of carbon dioxide into the air,
___________ significantly to the problem of global warming.
8. Poorly planned economic development can frequently damage the ecology of a region,
___________ any benefits that the development might have promised.
9. Rice growing on artificial wetlands and cattle farming have expanded rapidly,
___________ much greater amounts of methane, a gas that retains heat twenty times
more efficiently than carbon dioxide does.
10. Soaring temperatures in the central part of Vietnam have unleashed a plague of rice-
eating insects, ___________ thousands of hectares of paddies.
11. To expand agriculture in the Aral Sea basin, the government diverted enormous
quantities of water from the region’s two main rivers, ___________ the flow of water into
the sea by almost 90 percent.
 12. Typhoon Ketsana headed west toward Laos after battering central Vietnam with powerful
winds and heavy rain, ___________ behind blue and sunny skies but dangerously rising
floodwaters.
13. Unemployment and poverty have greatly increased in the last few years, ___________
more and more people to move into the cities.
14. Water levels in the Mekong River Delta have fallen to their lowest points in nearly 20
years, ___________ the livelihoods of tens of millions of people who depend on the river
basin for farming, fishing and transportation.

Practice 2: Read the following passage and write a summary.

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EAP Academic Reading hatn@hanu.edu.vn

New York Times

Seth Mydans
Vietnam Finds Itself Vulnerable if Sea Rises 29-SEPT-09

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/24/world/asia/24delta.html?_r=2&ref=asia

CAI RANG, Vietnam — For centuries, as monsoon rains, typhoons and wars have swept
over them and disappeared into the sunshine, the farmers and fishermen of the Mekong
Delta have drawn life from the water and fertile fields where the great river ends its 2,700-
mile journey to the sea. The rhythms of life continue from season to season though, like
much of the country, the delta is moving quickly into the future, and industry has begun to
pollute the air and water. But everything here, both the timeless and the new, is at risk now
from a threat that could bring deeper and longer-lasting disruptions than the generations of
warfare that ended more than 30 years ago.
In a worse-case projection, a Vietnamese government report released last month says that
more than one-third of the delta, where 17 million people live and nearly half the country’s
rice is grown, could be submerged if sea levels rise by three feet in the decades to come.
In a more modest projection, it calculates that one-fifth of the delta would be flooded, said
Tran Thuc, who leads Vietnam’s National Institute for Hydrometeorology and Environmental
Sciences and is the chief author of the report. Storm surges could periodically raise that
level, he said, and experts say an intrusion of salt water and industrial pollution could
contaminate much of the remaining delta area.
The risks of climate change for Vietnam go far beyond the Mekong Delta, up into the
Central Highlands, where rising temperatures could put the coffee crop at risk, and to the
Red River Delta in the north, where large areas could be inundated near the capital, Hanoi.
Climate experts consider this nation of an estimated 87 million people to be among the half-
dozen most threatened by the weather disruptions and rising sea levels linked to climate
change that are predicted in the course of this century. If the sea level rises by three feet,
11 percent of Vietnam’s population could be displaced, according to a 2007 World Bank
working paper. If it rises by 15 feet, 35 percent of the population and 16 percent of the
country’s land area could be affected, the document said.
Once again, this nation, which has spent much of its history struggling to free itself from
foreign domination, finds itself threatened by an overpowering outside force. “Climate
change isn’t caused by a developing country like Vietnam, but it is suffering the
consequences,” said Koos Neefjes, a policy adviser on climate change with the United
Nations Development Program in Hanoi. The government report emphasizes that the
predictions represent the threat, based on current models, if no measures are taken in the
coming decades, like building dikes. But the potential disruptions and the tremendous cost
of trying to reduce their impact could slow Vietnam’s drive to emerge from its postwar
poverty and impede its ambitions to become one of the region’s economic leaders.
In addition to rising seas in the Mekong Delta, climatologists predict more frequent, severe
and southerly typhoons, heavier floods and stronger storm surges that could ultimately drive
hundreds of thousands of people from their homes. Climate refugees could swell the
population of Ho Chi Minh City, on low-lying land just north of the delta, as war refugees did
when it was known as Saigon. But the city itself is also at risk, says the government study,
prepared by the Ministry of Natural Resources and Environment. Up to one-fourth of the
city’s area would be threatened by rising floodwaters if the sea level rose by three feet.

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EAP Academic Reading hatn@hanu.edu.vn

“Ho Chi Minh City could have a double impact if sea levels rise and living conditions in the
delta are not sustainable,” Mr. Thuc, the lead author of the government report, said in an
interview. His report assesses only the climatological risks, he said, and a great deal more
work needs to be done to try to determine their social and economic impacts and the
probable effect on population displacement.
Because of the uncertainties of climate change and the variables of mitigation measures, it
is impossible to rank nations precisely on a scale of risk, Mr. Neefjes said. However, the
2007 World Bank working paper studied 84 coastal developing countries and found Vietnam
to be the most threatened in terms of percentage of population affected, and second only to
the Bahamas in terms of percentage of land area affected, if no mitigating measures are
taken. “Among all of the indicators used in this paper, Vietnam ranks among the top five
most impacted countries,” the paper says. It did not include some small island nations like
the Maldives and Tuvalu that are also threatened with severe inundation. A report by the
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change listed the Mekong Delta, Bangladesh and the
Nile Delta in Egypt as the world’s three “hot spots” for potential migration because of their
combination of sea-level rise and existing population.
As a region, Southeast Asia is disproportionately vulnerable, with only 3.3 percent of the
world’s land mass but more than 11 percent of its coastline, the Asian Development Bank
said in a report it released this year. But Vietnam has at least recognized the problem and
begun to address it, Mr. Neefjes said. “Faster than any developing country, it has actually
developed a sensible national program to start responding,” he said. Those plans include
an attempt to integrate environmental concerns into the development plans of ministries and
enterprises, modifications that could conflict with their ambitions for growth, he said.
Experts said Vietnam’s primary approach — the hugely expensive construction and
reinforcement of thousands of miles of dikes — would bring its own set of problems. In the
delta, they said, the barriers will probably inhibit the self-cleansing mechanism of rivers and
trap millions of cubic yards of industrial waste, hundreds of thousands of tons of industrial
rubbish, and millions of tons of pesticides and fertilizer that are used in fish farms and
shrimp farms. “If one-third of the delta’s area is flooded by seawater, losses would be
huge,” Vo Hung Dung, director of the Chamber of Commerce and Industry’s Can Tho city
branch, said last month in the newspaper Tuoi Tre. “But if the entire delta is polluted by
wastewater, the losses could be many times higher.”
Here on the tiny Hau River, which winds through shaded groves of palm, bamboo and
mangrove just south of Can Tho in the heart of the delta, there seems to be little awareness
of these concerns. Nguyen Thanh Chanh, 29, who fishes with his wife in a small boat, said
that he sometimes listened to the radio and sometimes drank with friends at the end of the
day, but that he had never heard any talk of climate change. Life is already hard, and the
rivers already flood during the monsoon season from June to November, from the swollen
currents of the Mekong, from heavy rains and from tidal flooding.
An estimated 85 percent of the people in the delta are supported by agriculture. “Those
who farm go to the fields, and those who fish go to the rivers,” said Huynh Thuy, 47, a
farmer. “They don’t worry much about the future.”
For more information on these issues, please visit:
http://www.presscenter.org.vn/en/content/view/921/27/
http://www.monre.gov.vn/monreNet/default.aspx?tabid=252
http://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/assessment-report/ar4/wg2/ar4-wg2-chapter6.pdf