· Wild bears can survive only in the zoos.

· The world’s most numerous bears are being wiped out.

· The brown bear will survive in Europe if they are augmented by bears from other populations.

· Human attitude is the thing on which the survival of the bear depends.

· The decline in the bear population is closely related to the snaring of wild boar and poisoning of wolves.

· Central Europe has larger populations because bears can get food raiding rubbish bins.

· Russia has the largest population because the bear is protected by law.

· Conservation helps to improve the position of the bear.

· The polar bear is poorly studied so the polar bear is in trouble.

Use the following words and expressions in the reports of your own.

To be bleak; to be numerous; to disappear; the survival of some species; to be adapted to survival; to be exterminated; tiny populations; to be augmented; to ensure breeding success; attacks on livestock; to be wiped out; strict protection; re-stocking programmes; conservation; to be extinct; to reduce the ability to breed.

3.Formulate the message of the article.

An illusion of progress by Kirkpatrick Sale

Our sick society and stupid economics are dragging the planet to the edge of apocalypse.
Earth’s survival depends on a completely new way of thinking.

Imagine that a small child with many bruises is brought into a doctor's office. The physician is told she has been repeatedly beaten. The first question asked would surely be: `Where does it hurt?' Then there would be an examination and the application of whatever remedies are possible. But only a callous or immoral doctor would refrain from asking other questions. `How did it happen? Who did it? How long has this been going on? Why? How can we prevent it from happening again?'

Now imagine there is a society that suffers many injuries by way of environmental assaults; some of the injuries would be obvious and open raw sores, others more hidden but deeper wounds. The first questions we should probably ask would once again be along the lines of: `Where does it hurt? What are the problems? What is being done to violate the air, water, soil, forests, seas, animals — the society's very sustenance?' And then, like the doctor, we would examine those practices in detail and set about remedying them. We might even ask: `Who did it?' And maybe we might even find the people responsible, and make them pay for the consequences of their activities and promise never to act similarly again. Perhaps.

The degenerative planet

This analogy would fit fairly accurately the situation in the 1960s when the environmental movement — triggered by Rachel Carson's 1962 book Silent Spring — began. And it also works for today — 41 years later. We have, more or less, learned what specific damage we are doing to our world — global warming, intense weather, ozone depletion, deforestation, overpopulation, air and water and soil pollution, toxic waste, nuclear energy, resource depletion, acid rain, desertification, topsoil erosion, species extinction, chemical poisoning, overfishing... We have identified the major ailments, publicised them from time to time, and on occasion tried to fashion modest remedies for them.

I hasten to say `on occasion'. Because almost all the ailments that get our attention are those that endanger people; we ignore a great many others that threaten other species — coral reefs, say, or rainforests. And many even of those that endanger us are not seriously addressed by our system; there are now, for example, almost 90,000 man-made chemicals — the great majority of which have never been tested for human safety.

And I hasten to emphasise `modest'. Because most of the remedies we have come up with have been Bandaids for gaping wounds. For 41 years we have been calling attention to our environment — an immense amount of legislation passed, many agencies and bureaucracies established, a huge set of codes and restrictions spelled out, great casebooks full of court cases assembled, environmental lobbies and citizens' groups active across the world, hundreds of billions of pounds spent on studies and cures and correctives. But the hard truth is that most of the assaults on the environment go unchecked, and our total negative impact on the earth has not lessened in all this time; in fact, that impact has increased. As the Living Planet Report (an analysis by an international team of scientists) showed last year, the earth's natural ecosystems have declined by 33 per cent over the last 30 years.

Worse still, the environmental pressure that humans have placed on earth — our total ecological footprint — has magnified. As the Harvard biologist EO Wilson recently declared: `[Our impact] is already too large for the planet to sustain. It's growing larger, and the earth has lost its ability to regenerate'.