Match the words with their synonyms and give your translations. Make up sentences with these words

	thrive (in)	A	Na
	evolutionary rescue	B	person forced to migrate from one’s home region due to sudden environmental changes
	nimble	C	to reduce the harmful effects of something
	whopping	D	extremely large
	to ravage	E	able to move quicky and esily
	saline	F	act of gradual adaptation to new environment
	tidal	G	relating to the regular rising and falling of the sea
	sodium	H	to damage something very badly
	to mitigate	I	containing or consisting of salt
	climate refugee	J	to grow strongly and vigorously

5.4. Work in pairs. Student A reads the text A and student B reads text B (p. 39). Then ask each other questions to find out:

a) the researched problem _________________________________;

b) why so much attention is paid to it ________________________;

c) the object of the research ________________________________;

d) the research results _____________________________________;

e) time-consequence correlation _____________________________;

f) ways to improve the situation ___________________________.

TEXT A

IS HIGH-SPEED EVOLUTION AN ANSWER TO CLIMATE CHANGE?

Even as humans dither and deal and ignore the hard truth, evolution — nobody's fool — is already hard at work preparing for a warmer, climatologically wilder world.

To conduct their study, the scientists at McGill University in Montreal worked with a go-to species often used in genetics labs: baker's yeast. They simulated environmental stresses by exposing the yeast to high concentrations of salt, pressuring them to adapt or die in the same way that climate change forces higher animals to make similar choices. By the end of the experimental period, many of the yeast colonies had indeed successfully adjusted to the high-sodium conditions, thriving in an environment that once would have killed them.

Such nimble adaptation is known by geneticists as evolutionary rescue, and the researchers believe that the fact that the yeast do so well has hopeful implications for humans. “The same general processes are occurring whether it's yeast or mammals,” Gonzalez said in a statement. Still, the study has some caveats.

For one thing, while adaptation that takes place over just a few months seems lightning quick, the fact is that in yeast-years, that short period represents 50 to 100 generations. In evolutionary terms that's still fast, but if you scale things up even as far as a plant species with a generational turnover of one year, you're still talking about a century to make the needed adaptations; whether that's fast enough to keep up with the planet's rapidly changing climate is hard to say. As for humans, 100 generation means a whopping two and a half millennia – by which time the glaciers would be long gone and places like Pittsburgh could be beach front.