English Recordings

Evolution has repeatedly made this trade-off. By comparing the DNA of carnivorous plants with other species, scientists have found that they evolved independently on at least six separate occasions. Some carnivorous plants that look nearly identical turn out to be distantly related. Both kinds of pitcher plants—the tropical genus Nepenthes and the North American Sarracenia—grow deep pitcher-shaped leaves and employ the same strategy for capturing prey. Yet they evolved from different ancestors.
In several cases scientists can see how complex carnivorous plants evolved from simpler ones. Venus flytraps, for example, share an ancestor with Portuguese sundews, which only make passive flypaper glands on their stems. They share a more recent ancestor with Drosera sundews, which not only make flypaper glands but can also curl their leaves over their prey. Venus flytraps appear to have evolved an even more elaborate version of this kind of trap, complete with jawlike leaves.
Unfortunately, the adaptations that enable carnivorous plants to thrive in marginal habitats also make them exquisitely sensitive to environmental changes. Agricultural runoff and pollution from power plants are adding extra nitrogen to many bogs in North America. Carnivorous plants are so finely tuned to low levels of nitrogen that this extra fertilizer is overloading their systems. "They eventually burn themselves out," says Ellison.
Humans also threaten carnivorous plants in other ways. The black market trade in exotic carnivorous plants is so vigorous now that botanists are keeping the location of some rare species a secret. Venus flytraps are being poached from North Carolina by the thousands to be sold at roadside stands. The North Carolina Department of Agriculture has been dabbing wild Venus flytraps with harmless dye that's normally invisible but glows in UV light so that inspectors who come across Venus flytraps for sale can quickly determine if the plants were raised in a greenhouse or poached from the wild. But even if the poaching of carnivorous plants can be halted (a very big if), they will continue to suffer from other assaults. Their habitat is disappearing, to be replaced by shopping centers and houses. Fires are being suppressed, allowing other plants to grow quickly and outcompete the Venus flytraps. Good news, perhaps, for flies. But a loss for all who delight in the sheer inventiveness of evolution.

'on top of that'

I was a taxi driver for 3 years and I'm a hard worker. On top of that I can speak 2 languages.

The phrase 'on top of that' means in addition or also. Notice the following:

1. We missed the bus, and on top of that it started raining.

2. I'm very busy. I work full-time and on top of that I take evening classes.

"When you wish to achieve results that have not been achieved before, it is an unwise fancy to think that they can be achieved by using methods that have been used before"

puffy lips
anodyne
stillborn
running sore
diarrhoea
knee-jerk
soporific
digestion
maimed
palpitation
adrenal glands
dislocation
to afflict
morbidity
chest cavity
intermission
peritoneum
contaminated
virulent
distraught
scatological
to lacerate
hernia
mongrel
cripple
to grovel
PTSD (posttraumatic stress disorder)
salve
maggot
to comfort
cerebral cortex
to enact
ailment
hip replacement
to intimate
catamenia, or menses
leprosy
to asphyxiate
senescence

Do you often eatchocolate?
Koala's March is a bite-sized cookie snack with a sweet filling inside. It is made by Lotte, and the product was first released in Japan, and was released in March 1984 as "Koala Yummies" in the United States.
Koala's March is in the shape of a koala with a picture of a koala on the outside of the cookie doing various activities. There are various flavors available for the filling, such as honey, cafe latte, and banana. The two most common flavors are strawberry and chocolate, and are the only flavors available in the US along with white chocolate creme filled chocolate cookies. The snack also comes in pineapple flavor, though it is rarer than the other flavors. Koala's March supports the Australian conservation group Australian Koala Foundation.

to pen
to supplant
inexorable
to woo
conversely
tardy
infatuation
signet ring
omission
tanner
insularity
of no moment
conveyance
to pinion one's arms behind them
jollity
to quench the fire
to beset
perusal
crescendo
forte
consummate
tattle
strenuously
gilded
lane
flattery
protean
to stand next in station to one's sovereign
to deform
to linger in poverty
to weep for
amalgamation
master passion
tentative
voluptuary
courtier
setback
tinge
to avail
hotchpotch

Pitcher plants grow by the thousands in the bogs at the Harvard Forest in central Massachusetts. One late spring day Aaron Ellison took me on a tour, stopping from time to time to watch patiently as I pulled a sinking leg out of the muck. "You haven't had a real bog experience till you're up to your crotch in it," said Ellison, a senior ecologist at the forest. Little orange flags fluttered across the bogs. Each one marked a pitcher plant impressed into the service of science. In the distance a student was feeding flies to the flagged plants. The researchers raise these insects on food spiked with unusual forms of carbon and nitrogen so they can later harvest the pitcher plants and measure how much of each element from the flies has been absorbed into the plants. Because pitcher plants grow slowly (they can live for decades), the experiments can take years to yield results.
Ellison and Gotelli are trying to figure out what evolutionary forces pushed these plants toward a taste for meat. Carnivorous plants clearly benefit from eating animals; when the scientists feed pitcher plants extra bugs, the plants get bigger. But the benefits of eating flesh are not the ones you might expect. Carnivorous animals like ourselves use the carbon in protein and the fat in meat to build muscles and store energy. Carnivorous plants instead draw nitrogen, phosphorus, and other critical nutrients from their prey in order to build light-harvesting enzymes. Eating animals, in other words, lets carnivorous plants do what all plants do: grow by grabbing energy directly from the sun.
Alas, they do a lousy job of it. Carnivorous plants turn out to be very inefficient at converting sunlight into tissue. That's because they have to use a lot of energy to make the equipment they need to catch animals—the enzymes, the pumps, the sticky tentacles, and so on. A pitcher or a flytrap cannot carry out much photosynthesis because, unlike plants with ordinary leaves, they do not have flat solar panels that can grab lots of sunlight. Ellison and Gotelli suspect that only under special conditions do the benefits of carnivory outweigh the costs. The poor soil of bogs, for example, offers little nitrogen and phosphorus, so carnivorous plants enjoy an advantage there over plants that obtain these nutrients by more conventional means. Bogs are also flooded with sunshine, so even an inefficient carnivorous plant can carry out enough photosynthesis to survive. "They're stuck, and they're making the best of it," says Ellison.

The bladderwort has an equally sophisticated way of setting its underwater trap. It pumps water out of tiny bladders, lowering the pressure inside. When a water flea or some other small creature swims past, it bends trigger hairs on the bladder, causing a flap to open. The low pressure sucks water in, carrying the animal along with it. In one five-hundredth of a second, the door swings shut again. The cells in the bladder then begin to pump water out again, creating a new vacuum.
Many other species of carnivorous plants act like living flypaper, snagging animals on sticky tentacles. Pitcher plants use yet another strategy, growing long tube-shaped leaves into which insects fall. Some of the largest have pitchers up to a foot deep and can consume a whole frog or even a rat unlucky enough to fall into them. Sophisticated chemistry helps make the pitcher a death trap. Nepenthes rafflesiana, a pitcher plant that grows in jungles on Borneo, produces nectar that both lures insects and forms a slick surface on which they can't get a grip. Insects that land on the rim of the pitcher hydroplane on the liquid and tumble in. The digestive fluid in which they fall has very different properties. Rather than being slippery, it's gooey. If a fly tries to lift its leg up into the air to escape, the fluid holds on tenaciously, like a rubber band.
Many carnivorous plants have special glands that secrete enzymes powerful enough to penetrate the hard exoskeleton of insects so they can absorb nutrients from inside their prey. But the purple pitcher plant, which lives in bogs and infertile sandy soils in much of North America, enlists other organisms to digest its food. It is home to an intricate food web of mosquito larvae, midges, protozoans, and bacteria, many of which can survive only in this unique habitat. The animals shred the prey that fall into the pitcher, and the smaller organisms feed on the debris. Finally, the pitcher plant absorbs the nutrients released by the feeding frenzy. "Having the animals creates a processing chain that speeds up all the reactions," says Nicholas Gotelli of the University of Vermont. "And then the plant dumps oxygen back into the pitcher for the insects. It's a tight feedback loop."

by the Brothers Grimm

Once upon a time in the middle of winter,
when the flakes of snow were falling
like feathers from the sky,
a queen sat at a window sewing,
and the frame og the window was mede of black embony.
And whilst she was sewing and looking out
of the window at the snow,
she pricked her finger with the needle,
and three drop og blood fell upon the snow.
And the red looked pretty upon the white snow,
and she thought to herself,
would the I had a child as write as snow,
as red as blood,and as black as the wood og the window-frame.

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