Protect Our Planet - Your Eco-Friendly Companion for Every Adventure

Are you (1) ________ of not knowing how to reduce your carbon footprint on your next trip? Or struggling to plan the (2) ________ travel experience that's eco-conscious? Our new app, "EcoMate," is designed to help you discover the best sustainable destinations, hotels, and activities. Whether you love nature hikes, eco-lodges, or green cities, "EcoMate" offers personalized suggestions (3) _______ to you. You can browse other travelers' reviews, get tips (4) ________ reducing waste, and (5) ________ eco-friendly reservations for flights, accommodations, and local experiences - all in one place! Want to (6) ________  hidden gem nature preserves or organic farms? Our app has you covered! With just a few taps, you can plan your perfect getaway while making a positive impact.
Download "EcoMate" now and make your next vacation a sustainable adventure!

Here are some of Holler’s best study strategies (7) ________ research, learning theory and years of meeting with students at the Counseling and Testing Center on the UWL campus.

1. Use daytime hours to study

Prioritize academics when you are more alert and have access to resources. In college, this might include tutors, professor office hours and labs. In high school, it might be teachers, parents, friends and (8)_________. Reward yourself during the evenings with social and personal time. With less on your "to do" list, you can also maintain a (9) ________ sleep routine, which is crucial to effective brain health.

2. Establish specific study times each day

Those study times also need purpose, which means "to do” lists. Create both a “must get done” and a “should work on” list each day. Make these academic tasks specific and attainable; so you will be less likely to (10)_________.

3. Review material close to when it was first presented.

Don’t wait until the midterm or final exam to study. Revisiting your notes with the lecture still fresh in your mind helps you both reinforce and clarify the information. Confidence in your notes during follow-up reviews is essential. The longer you wait before reinforcing the material, the more difficult it will be to connect to upcoming concepts.

4. Review in an active way.

“(11) ________” notes is the most common way students explain studying. Students are confident they “know their notes,” but become frustrated when “the test didn’t look like my notes!” Silently reading over notes, which are always in the same order and the same wording, often leads to an illusion of competence. You think you know the material, but have only memorized bits and pieces. Your instructor will be assessing how you can connect and apply multiple concepts.
Active study involves reading out loud, drawing diagrams, listing steps, working problems, etc. Explaining information in your own words is a higher-level thinking skill than silently re-reading. Students should write down key points after every lecture. Better still is to get in the habit of writing a three to four sentence summary. These lecture-by-lecture takeaways can serve as a study guide for an upcoming exam.

5. Set specific goals for study segments.

(12) ________ setting a vague goal like "look over my biology notes from yesterday," figure out exactly what you want to accomplish. For instance, maybe you want to "learn the seven steps of digestion." Just like going to the grocery store with a list helps you spend less time, less money, and get exactly what you need, starting a study session with specific tasks is an efficient use of your time and can lead to effective learning outcomes.

(Source: www.uwlax.edu/college-tips)

Adolescence is a crucial period for (18)________. These include adopting healthy sleep patterns; exercising regularly; developing coping, problem-solving, and interpersonal skills; and learning to manage emotions. Protective and supportive environments in the family, at school and in the wider community are important.

Multiple factors affect mental health. The more risk factors adolescents are exposed to, (19) ________. Factors that can contribute to stress during adolescence include exposure to adversity, pressure to conform with peers and exploration of identity. Media influence and gender norms can exacerbate the disparity between an adolescent’s lived reality and their perceptions or aspirations for the future.(20)________. Violence, harsh parenting and severe and socioeconomic problems are recognized risks to mental health.

(21) ________due to their living conditions, stigma, discrimination or exclusion, or lack of access to quality support and services. (22) _______; adolescents with chronic illness, autism spectrum disorder, an intellectual disability or other neurological condition; pregnant adolescents, adolescent parents, or those in early or forced marriages; orphans; and adolescents from minority ethnic or sexual backgrounds or other discriminated groups.

(Adapted from World Health Organization)

E-training

E-learning is the unifying term to describe the fields of online learning, web-based training, and technology-delivered instruction, which can be a great benefit to corporate e-learning. IBM, for instance, claims that the institution of its e-training program, Basic Blue, whose purpose is to train new managers, saved the company in the range of $200 million in 1999. Cutting the travel expenses required to bring employees and instructors to a central classroom account for the lion’s share of the savings. With an online course, employees can learn from any Internet-connected PC, anywhere in the world. Ernst and Young reduced training costs by 35 percent while improving consistency and scalability.

In addition to generally positive economic benefits, other advantages such as convenience, standardized delivery, self-paced learning, and a variety of available content, have made e-learning a high priority for many corporations. E-learning is widely believed to offer flexible “any time, any place” learning. The claim for “any place” is valid in principle and is a great development. Many people can engage with rich learning materials that simply were not possible in a paper of broadcast distance learning era. For teaching specific information and skills, e-training holds great promise. It can be especially effective at helping employees prepare for IT certification programs. E-learning also seems to effectively address topics such as sexual harassment education’, safety training and management training – all areas where a clear set of objectives can be identified. Ultimately, training experts recommend a “blended” approach that combines both online and in-person training as the instruction requires. E-learning is not an end-all solution. But if it helps decrease costs and windowless classrooms filled with snoring students, it definitely has its advantages.

Much of the discussion about implementing e-learning has focused on the technology, but as Driscoll and others have reminded us, e-learning is not just about the technology, but also many human factors. As any capable manager knows, teaching employees new skills is critical to a smoothly run business. Having said that, however, the traditional route of classroom instruction runs the risk of being expensive, slow and, oftentimes, ineffective. Perhaps the classroom’s greatest disadvantage is the fact that it takes employees out of their jobs. Every minute an employee is sitting in a classroom training session is a minute they’re not out on the floor working. It now looks as if there is a way to circumvent these traditional training drawbacks. E-training promises more effective teaching techniques by integrating audio, video, animation, text and interactive materials with the intent of teaching each student at his or her own pace. In addition to higher performance results, there are other immediate benefits to students such as increased time on task, higher levels of motivation, and reduced test anxiety for many learners.

(Adapted from Mini - Ielts. com)

Ensuring our future food supply

Climate change and new diseases threaten the limited varieties of seeds we depend on for food. Luckily, we still have many of the seeds used in the past-but we must take steps to save them.

Six miles outside the town of Decorah, Iowa in the USA, an 890-acre stretch of rolling fields and woods called Heritage Farm is letting its crops go to seed. Everything about Heritage Farm is in stark contrast to the surrounding acres of intensively farmed fields of corn and soybean that are typical of modern agriculture. Heritage Farm is devoted to collecting rather than growing seeds. It is home to the Seed Savers Exchange, one of the largest non government-owned seed banks in the United States.

[I] In 1975 Diane Ott Whealy was given the seedlings of two plant varieties that her great grandfather had brought to America from Bavaria in 1870: [II] Wanting to preserve similar traditional varieties, known as heirloom plants, Diane and her husband, Kent, decided to establish a place where the seeds of the past could be kept and traded. [III] The exchange now has more than 13,000 members, and the many thousands of heirloom varieties they have donated are kept in its walk-in coolers, freezers, and root cellars the seeds of many thousands of heirloom varieties and, as you walk around an old red barn that is covered in Grandpa Ott’s beautiful morning glory blossoms, you come across the different vegetables, herbs, and flowers they have planted there. [IV]

"Each year our members list their seeds in this,"Diane Ott Whealy says, handing over a copy of the Seed Savers Exchange 2010 Yearbook. It is as thick as a big-city telephone directory, with page after page of exotic beans, garlic, potatoes, peppers, apples, pears, and plums-each with its own name and personal history .For example, there’s an Estonian Yellow Cherry tomato, which was brought to the seed bank by “an elderly Russian lady” who lived in Tallinn, and a Persian Star garlic from “a bazaar in Samarkand.”There’s also a bean donated by archaeologists searching for pygmy elephant fossils in New Mexico.

Heirloom vegetables have become fashionable in the United States and Europe over the past decade, prized by a food movement that emphasizes eating locally and preserving the flavor and uniqueness of heirloom varieties. Found mostly in farmers' markets and boutique groceries, heirloom varieties have been squeezed out of supermarkets in favor of modern single-variety fruits and vegetables bred to ship well and have a uniform appearance, not to enhance flavor. But the movement to preserve heirloom varieties goes way beyond the current interest in North America and Europe in tasty, locally grown food. It’s also a campaign to protect the world’s future food supply. Most people in the well-fed world give little thought to where their food comes from or how it’s grown. They wander through well-stocked supermarkets without realizing that there may be problem ahead.We’ve been hearing for some time about the loss of flora and fauna in our rainforests.Very little,by contrast,is being said or done about the parallel decline in the diversity of the foods we eat.