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This is the VOA Special English Agriculture Report, from voaspecialenglish.com | http Companion planting is the idea that some kinds of plants can help each other grow. Plants that are compatible together generally have similar needs in terms of nutrients, soil and moisture levels. Advice about which plants are compatible is sometimes based more on tradition than proof. But experts say there is evidence to support certain combinations. These can improve harvests, reduce disease and help with pest control by attracting helpful insects. For example, some kinds of soil bacteria take nitrogen from the air and make it into a form that plants can use. The plants hold the nitrogen in their roots. Legumes are especially good at this nitrogen-fixing. Then any crops that share the same space as the legumes can get the nitrogen as the roots decompose. Beans and potatoes can also share territory well because their roots reach different levels in the soil. Deep-rooted vegetables get nutrients and moisture from lower down in the soil, so they do not compete with plants with shallower roots. But some plants placed together may harm each other’s development. For example, tomatoes do not like wet soil but watercress does, so you would probably want to keep them separated. Some kinds of produce should be kept apart even after being harvested. This is because of ethylene gas. Ethylene is a plant hormone that can cause some foods to ripen too quickly. Apples release ethylene gas. Apricots …

This is the VOA Special English Education Report, from voaspecialenglish.com | http Imagine that you have lost your job. You could start a sewing business at home if you had a better sewing machine and a little money to advertise. But you cannot get a loan from a bank. In recent times, many people in similar situations have received loans from student microfinance groups. Such groups make small loans for business or personal use. Twelve of the organizations are part of a national network called the Campus Microfinance Alliance. The alliance provides financial aid, technical advice and training programs for its member groups. Each group has between ten and seventy volunteers, many of them college students. They have enabled hundreds of people across the United States to launch small businesses. Vanessa Carter is director of the alliance. She says bad economic times have sped the growth of the college microfinance movement. “This really got started because students were walking off campus, it was the height of the economic recession, and they were seeing boarded up businesses and the effects of high unemployment first hand.”In Iowa, a student microfinance group at Grinnell College helps people both locally and internationally. The group started in two thousand seven. At that time, Grinnell student Jeff Raderstrong and some friends raised more than six hundred dollars from other students. The Saturday-night Grinnell tradition of missing a meal to help others enabled the …

This is the VOA Special English Technology Report, from voaspecialenglish.com | http A labor group has begun investigating working conditions at the Chinese factories where many Apple products are made. Apple officials ordered the investigation after the New York Times described poor working conditions at the factories. The Foxconn Technology Group owns the manufacturing plants in Shenzhen, Chengdu and Zhengzhou. Angela Cornell is a professor at the Cornell Law School in Ithaca, New York. She says many issues were raised last year after a number of suicides at the Foxconn factories. One issue is the number of hours that employees are required to work. Other concerns involve pay, living conditions and even reports of violence against workers. The New York Times reported that employees sometimes worked seven days a week. The newspaper said some stood so long that they had trouble walking. Widespread criticism of Apple followed publication of those reports. Mark Shields organized a campaign calling for better working conditions. “Workers lives are really hard and really severe, and there’s terrible stories about people losing the use of their hands because of horrible repetitive motion injuries, and suicide rates that are so high that they have got to hang nets off the sides of the buildings to prevent workers from killing themselves.” Professor Cornell says the conditions at the Foxconn factories had to have been really bad. “Just imagine how dire the working conditions …

This is the VOA Special English Health Report, from voaspecialenglish.com | http Some people act sick to get out of work. Others act sick to get work. For medical actors like Ted Bell, the stage is an examination room with a future doctor, nurse or other health care professional. On a recent day, he was playing a fifty-five-year-old patient with stomach pains that began three months ago. He was describing the problem to a nursing student at the University of Maryland School of Nursing. Ted Bell was playing a schoolteacher. But in a way he really does teach. He helps future doctors, nurses and other health care professionals learn to work with patients. In real life, Mr. Bell is a retired civil engineer. He now works as what is known as a “standardized patient.” He stays busy working as one of about seven hundred standardized patients in the Baltimore-Washington area. Pay starts at seventeen dollars an hour. It can go as high as thirty-five dollars an hour depending on the project. Becoming a standardized patient does not require medical knowledge. The schools provide the training. Nor does it require acting experience. In fact, standardized patient Tom Wyatt is a professional actor — yet he does not even think of his work with the students as acting. He says, “I use some of the acting skills, but honestly when its going well, I’m not really acting, I am reacting. I’m listening to them and reacting naturally and honestly to what they’re saying to me and what they’re …

This is the VOA Special English Education Report, from voaspecialenglish.com | http Dyslexia is a problem that interferes with the ability to recognize words and connect sounds with letters when people read. People with this learning disorder may also have problems when they write. Dyslexia is not related to eyesight or intelligence. The problem involves areas of the brain that process language. Brain scientists are studying whether they can predict which young children may struggle with reading, in order to provide early help. John Gabrieli at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology is leading a study of five-year-olds in about twenty schools in the Boston area. He says, “We partner with schools that have kindergartens. And in this study what we do is, for all the children whose parents permit them to participate, we give them a brief set of paper-and-pencil tests to look at which children appear to be at some risk for struggling to read.” So far, fifty of the kindergarteners have been examined in a machine that shows brain activity. The goal is to study five hundred children using fMRI, or functional magnetic resonance imaging. The scanner uses a high-energy magnetic field and radio waves to “look” inside the body. Written tests are not always able to identify dyslexia or other problems. Professor Gabrieli says children can differ a lot in their abilities from day to day. He says brain scans may offer a more scientific way to identify problems. And with reading …

This is the VOA Special English Economics Report, from voaspecialenglish.com | http Businesses are structured in different ways to meet different needs. The simplest form of business is called an individual or sole proprietorship. The proprietor owns all of the property of the business and is responsible for everything. For legal purposes, with this kind of business, the owner and the company are the same. This means the proprietor gets to keep all of the profits of the business, but must also pay any debts. Another kind of business is the partnership. Two or more people go into business together. An agreement is usually needed to decide how much of the partnership each person controls. One kind of partnership is called a limited liability partnership. These have full partners and limited partners. Limited partners may not share as much in the profits, but they also have less responsibility for the business. Doctors, lawyers and accountants often form partnerships to share their risks and profits. A husband and wife can form a business partnership together. Partnerships exist only for as long as the owners remain alive. The same is true of individual proprietorships.But corporations are designed to have an unlimited lifetime. A corporation is the most complex kind of business organization.Corporations can sell stock as a way to raise money. Stock represents shares of ownership in a company. Investors who buy stock can trade their shares or keep them as long as the company …