Đọc hiểu lớp 8 · Tổng hợp Đọc hiểu 1

Bees play an important part in the growth of crops. About 4,000 wild bee species are native to North America. Other bee species on the continent were imported from Europe to produce honey. Bees also serve as crop pollinators. These pollinators carry material from one plant to another. This helps the plants produce seeds. Farmers became dependent on this bee activity. But for the past 40 years, the native bee population has been decreasing. Since the winter of 2006, many honeybees have disappeared. Scientists call this “Colony Collapse Disorder.” VOA recently went to the town of Lockeford, in the Central Valley of California. Researchers there are mixing plants to try to bring back the bees. Margaret Smither-Kopperl is a botanist, a scientist who studies plants. She leads the Lockeford Plant Materials Center. It is one of more than 24 centers around the country operated by the United States Department of Agriculture. The centers are working to rebuild and support healthy ecosystems. For the past several years, Ms. Smither-Kopperl has planted different kinds of flowers, grasses and other plants. She is trying to create a combination of plants that bees will like. “On the right I have a planting of native grasses. And, then, in the other field, where you can see that it’s green, we’ve planted eight different commercial pollinator mixes.” Life is not easy for bees. They must deal with pesticides and smaller animals that live on or in them, such as bee mites. But the biggest difficulty is the destruction of areas where they live and eat. Jessa Kay Cruz works at The Xerces Society, a conservation group. She says growth in agriculture industries and the growth of cities have left bees too few natural areas where they seek their food: Pollen and nectar. These two plant substance make up 100 percent of a bee’s food. So, Ms. Cruz says, bees are totally dependent on some kinds of flowers for their survival. Ms. Cruz also says humans need bees to help crops grow. “About 85 percent of the world’s flowering plants require a pollinator basically in order to reproduce. In our agricultural ecosystems, about one in every three bites of food or drink that we consume requires pollinators.”

We present the last of three parts of the short story "The Fall of the House of Usher," by Edgar Allan Poe. The story was originally adapted and recorded by the U.S. Department of State. I was visiting an old friend of mine, Roderick Usher, in his old stone house, his palace, where a feeling of death hung on the air. I saw how fear was pressing on his heart and mind. Now his only sister, the lady Madeline, had died and we had put her body in its resting place, in a room inside the cold walls of the palace, a damp, dark vault, a fearful place. As we looked down upon her face, I saw that there was a strong likeness between the two. “Indeed,” said Usher, “we were born on the same day, and the tie between us has always been strong.” We did not long look down at her, for fear and wonder filled our hearts. There was still a little color in her face and there seemed to be a smile on her lips. We closed the heavy iron door and returned to the rooms above, which were hardly less gloomy than the vault. And now a change came in the sickness of my friend’s mind. He went from room to room with a hurried step. His face was, if possible, whiter and more ghastly than before, and the light in his eyes had gone. The trembling in his voice seemed to show the greatest fear. At times he sat looking at nothing for hours, as if listening to some sound I could not hear. I felt his condition, slowly but certainly, gaining power over me; I felt that his wild ideas were becoming fixed in my own mind.