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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 …

This is the VOA Special English Agriculture Report , from voaspecialenglish.com | http Pigweed is a weed that spreads fast and grows up to two meters tall. It can overpower cotton and other crops. It comes from the amaranth family and is also known as Palmer amaranth or Palmer’s pigweed. A cultivated version of amaranth is grown for food and medicine in Africa and Asia. In the United States, some people buy amaranth as a gluten-free substitute for wheat flour. But wild pigweed is a big problem in cotton-growing states in the South. And now the plant is spreading into the Midwest. In many cases the pigweed is killing genetically modified cotton and soybeans. For years farmers could control it by spraying with Roundup, or glyphosate, made by Monsanto. But weed scientist William Curran at Pennsylvania State University says over the past three or four years, pigweed has become resistant to glyphosate. Now, farmers in some areas can no longer depend on that popular herbicide alone to defend against pigweed. He says farmers can try other herbicides. Or they can mix another herbicide with Roundup and use the mixture when they would normally spray their fields. “The reality is even though have this weed, this one one weed that is resistant, there’s still a lot of other weeds that Roundup still kills.” Farmers in the American Northeast face a growing threat from another weed. Scientists call it horseweed; farmers call it mare’s tail. Like pigweed, this plant has also developed the …

This is the VOA Special English Education Report , from voaspecialenglish.com | http About eighteen thousand refugees from Burma have come to the United States each year since two thousand seven. Some have settled in Howard County, Maryland, between Baltimore and Washington. A local school began teaching English to the children of the refugees. But while the children learned the language, their parents did not. Currently almost fifty Burmese youngsters attend Bollman Bridge Elementary School. Laurel Conran teaches English to speakers of other languages. One of her students is Tha Neih Ciang. Another student is Tha Neih’s mother, Tin Iang. The teacher practices English with the mother at the mother’s workplace. Many Burmese refugees work at Coastal Sunbelt Produce. The company supplies fruits and vegetables to restaurants and other businesses. Laurel Conran started English classes there to help refugees from the country also known as Myanmar. The program is a six-week session held every Wednesday from twelve to one o’clock. Each week Ms. Conran goes to Coastal Sunbelt. As the Burmese workers eat lunch, they also practice their new language skills. They sit with an English-speaking volunteer in small groups.Lisa Chertok is a manager at the company and also has a child at Bollman Bridge. She helped Ms. Conran develop the lessons: “When the Burmese employees got here, they were very, very shy. Now I find that they are more responsive as employees. They’re more communicative …

This is the VOA Special English Agriculture Report from voaspecialenglish.com | http Many people have lettuce in a salad at the beginning of a meal. The ancient Egyptians and Romans had it at the end. Either way, gardening experts say lettuce is one of the easiest vegetables to grow in a garden.There are hundreds of kinds of head and leaf lettuces besides the most popular choices, like iceberg, Boston, bibb and romaine. The best time to plant the seeds is during cool weather. Gardening advisers at the University of Illinois Extension say the best planting temperature is fifteen degrees Celsius. You can use a seed tray to start the seeds indoors. The container should be deep enough to hold at least three centimeters of soil. Leave about one centimeter of space between the soil and the top of the container. The container should have holes in the bottom so extra water can flow out. Cover the seeds lightly with soil. If the soil is not already a little wet, give it some water, but not too much. Too much water could drown the seeds. Next, cover the seed tray with paper. Remove the paper when the seedlings are tall enough to touch it. You can transplant the seedlings into the garden when they are about two to three centimeters tall. Do this when the weather is not too hot and not too cold. Take out as much of the soil as you can with the seedlings. Plant them in the ground in a hole that is bigger than the lettuce roots. Keep the plants watered, but not too heavily. Planting …

This is the VOA Special English Health Report, from voaspecialenglish.com | http The journal Science chose an AIDS study as the twenty-eleven “Breakthrough of the Year.” The study found that antiretroviral drugs can greatly lower the risk of spreading HIV, the virus that causes AIDS. It showed that infected people with early treatment were ninety-six percent less likely to infect their partners.The study was a clinical trial known as HPTN 052. Myron Cohen led an international team that began the study in two thousand seven. But Dr. Cohen says the work really began twenty years ago: “We had a strong suspicion based on all the biological studies we had done that when we treat people and lower the concentration of HIV in the blood and secretions, we were rendering them less contagious. But we didn’t understand the magnitude of the benefit.”Dr. Cohen heads the Institute for Global Health and Infectious Diseases at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases paid for the study.It involved heterosexual couples in nine countries in Africa, Asia and the Americas. The results have already had an effect on government policies. Those changes include treating HIV-infected people when their immune systems are still relatively healthy. Dr. Cohen says the study “has generated policy changes at the level of the United States and the World Health Organization and UNAIDS. And it’s inspired new community-based clinical trials …

This is the VOA Special English Economics Report from voaspecialenglish.com | http In early January, President Obama appointed Richard Cordray as director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. This new government agency says it has already made home loans and credit card agreements easier for Americans to understand. But the Obama administration said the bureau cannot supervise financial products like home loans without a director. The president used a measure known as a recess appointment to fill the position. He nominated Mr. Cordray last July. But the opposition Republican Party blocked a vote in the full Senate.Mr. Obama announced the appointment during a visit to Ohio. It was his first political campaign trip of the year. He told the crowd that the severe economic crisis three years ago did not happen because of too many financial rules. Mr. Obama said: “Does anyone think the reason why we got into such a financial mess, the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression, the worst economic crisis in a generation, that the reason was because of too much oversight of the financial industry? Of course not. We shouldn’t be weakening oversight, we shouldn’t be weakening accountability, we should be strengthening it!”Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell criticized the president’s appointment. Many Republicans oppose the new agency, saying its goals are not clear. They also want a group of people to lead the agency instead of a single director. The Consumer …