Yet occurrences of shortages and droughts are causing famine and distress in some areas , and industrial and agricultural by-products are polluting water supplies. Since the world' population is expected to double in the next 50 years, many experts think we are on the edge of a widespread water crisis.

But that doesn't have to be the outcome. Water shortages do not have to trouble the world — if we start valuing water more than we have in the past. Just as we began to appreciate petroleum more after the 1970s oil crises, today we must start looking at water from a fresh economic perspective. We can no longer afford to consider water a virtually free resource of which we can use as much as we like in any way we want.

Instead , for all uses except the domestic demand of the poor , governments should price water to reflect its actual value. This means charging a fee for the water itself as well as for the supply

costs.

Governments should also protect this resource by providing water in more economically and environmentally sound ways. For example, often the cheapest way to provide irrigation (3IM) water in the dry tropics is through small-scale projects, such as gathering rainfall in depressions and pumping it to nearby cropland.

No matter what steps governments take to provide water more efficiently, they must change their institutional and legal approaches to water use. Rather than spread control among hundreds or even thousands of local, regional, and national agencies that watch various aspects of water use, countries should set up central authorities to coordinate water policy.

Until about a century ago, the deep-ocean floor was completely inaccessible, hidden beneath waters averaging over 3 600 meters deep. Totally without light and subjected to intense pressures hundreds of times greater than at the Earth's surface, the deep-ocean bottom is a hostile environment to humans, in some ways as forbidding and remote as the void of outer space.

Although researchers have taken samples of deep-ocean rocks and sediments for over a century, the first detailed global investigation of the ocean bottom did not actually start until 1968, with the beginning of the National Science Foundation's Deep Sea Drilling Project (DSDP). Using techniques first developed for the offshore oil and gas industry, the DSDP's drill ship, the Glomar Challenger, was able to maintain a steady position on the ocean's surface and drill in very deep waters, extracting samples of sediments and rocks from the ocean floor.

The Glomar Challenger completed 96 voyages in a 15-year research program that ended in November 1983. During this time, the vessel logged 600 000 kilometers and took almost 20 000 core samples of seabed sediments and rocks at 624 drilling sites around the world. The Glomar Challenger's core samples have allowed geologists to reconstruct what the planet looked like hundred of millions of years ago and to calculate what it will probably look like millions of years in the future. Today, largely on the strength of evidence gathered during the Glomar Challenger's voyages, nearly all earth scientists agree on the theories of plate tectonics and continental drift that explain many of the geological processes that shape the Earth.

The cores of sediment drilled by the Glomar Challenger have also yielded information critical to understanding the world's past climates. Deep-ocean sediments provide a climatic record stretching back hundreds of millions of years, because they are largely isolated from the mechanical erosion and the intense chemical and biological activity that rapidly destroy much land-based evidence of past climates. This record has already provided insights into the patterns and causes of past climatic change—information that may be used to predict future climates.

Around the world, people are spending record amounts of money to use its networks to talk and e-mail and exchange immense amounts of information. The pace of technological innovation is positively breathtaking. Trillions of dollars have been invested in its growth. Instead, the industry is in the midst of a financial meltdown. It has become a significant factor holding back the economic recovery, not just in the United States but also globally. The stock market's current funk stems in significant part from concern over telecom stocks, which drove the late 1990s rally but since their peak have generated paper losses of more than $ 1 trillion, by some estimates.

In the boom years, there seemed no limit to telecom's prospects-—Success bred suecess, confidence led to more confidence, growth produced growth. Now the same feeding-on-itself dynamic is at work in reverse, dragging with it not only weak companies but the strong as well. The problem traces its origins back to Wall Street, where lenders and investors, eager to get in on the next Microsoft, simply provided too much money to too many companies to build too many competing networks. What few realized, however, was that with so many companies following roughly the same strategy, it was unlikely that all that capacity would be needed or that any one company would achieve the critical mass necessary to survive and prosper.

In desperation, companies began to try to "buy" market share by cutting prices—unlimited minutes for $39.99 a month, free phones, no roaming charges, long-distance priced the same as local. In time, however, everyone was forced to do it, creating a price war that eventually left many companies with barely enough revenue to pay operating expenses, let alone interest on their huge mounds of debt. According to industry executives and analysts, things are likely to get worse before they get better. As more companies "restructure" their finances under the bankruptcy process, they will be able to reenter the competition with their balance sheets wiped clean of most of their debts, allowing them to offer even lower prices than competitors still trying to make their interest payments. To remain competitive, the non-bankrupt companies will have to match the lower prices, putting them on the path to bankruptcy.

Telecom wouldn't be the first to go through such a boom-and-bust cycle. During the railroad boom of the late 1880s, so much money was invested building so many parallel tracks—or tracks to places that would never support profitable service—that the entire industry went bankrupt. Much the same story is told of the airline industry, which because of so many losing years has yet to turn a net profit. If the history of these other industries is any guide, telecommunications surviving giants will compete aggressively, but never to the point of lowering prices so much that they can't continue to pay their lenders and provide a modest profit to their owners.

It SEEMS to me that what any man's beliefs are depends upon how he spends his life. I've spent a good part of mine as a professional baseball player and the game that I play for a living is naturally a very important thing to me. I've learned a lot of things on the baseball diamond about living — things that have made me happier and, I hope, a better person. I've found that when I make a good play and take my pitcher off the hook, it's just natural for me to feel better than if I made a flashy play that doesn't do anything except make me look good for the grandstands. It works the same way off the ball field, too. Doing a good turn for a neighbor, a friend, or even a stranger gives me much more satisfaction than doing something that helps only myself. It's as if all people were my teammates in this world and things that make me closer to them are good, and things that make me draw away from them are bad.

Another belief very important to me is that I am only as good as my actual performance proves that I am. If I cannot deliver, then my name and reputation don't mean a thing. I thought of this when in the spring of 1951 I told my team that I would not play in 1952. I reached this decision because I realized that I wouldn't be able to give my best performance to the people who would pay my salary by coming through the turnstiles. I don't see how anyone can feel right about success or fame that is unearned. For me, most of the satisfaction in any praise I receive comes from the feeling that it is the reward for a real effort I have made.

Many ball players talk a lot about luck and figure that it is responsible for their successes and failures, on and off the field. Some of them even carry around a rabbit's foot[1] and other good-luck charms or they have little rituals that they go through to make sure of things going the way they want them to. I've never been able to go along with people who believe that way. I've got a feeling that there's something much deeper and more important behind the things that happen to me and whether they turn out good or bad. It seems to me that many of the things which some people credit to luck are the results of divine assistance. I can't imagine an all-wise, all-powerful God that isn't interested in the things I do in my life. Believing this makes me always want to act in such a way as to deserve the things that the Lord will do for me.

The average man who uses a telephone could not explain how a telephone works. He takes for granted the telephone, the railway train, the linotype, the airplane, as our grandfathers took for granted the miracles of the gospels. He neither questions nor understands them. It is as though each of us investigated and made his own only a tiny circle of facts. Knowledge outside the day' s work is regarded by most men as a gewgaw. Still we are constantly in reaction against our ignorance. We rouse ourselves at intervals and speculate. We revel in speculations about anything at all — about life after death or about

such questions as that which is said to have puzzled Aristotle, why sneezing from noon to midnight was good, but from night to noon unlucky. " One of the greatest joys known to man is to take such a flight into ignorance in search of knowledge. The great pleasure of ignorance is, after all, the pleasure of asking questions. The man who has lost this pleasure or exchanged it for the pleasure of dogma, which is the pleasure of answering, is already beginning to stiffen. One envies so inquisitive a man as Jewell, who sat down to the study of physiology in his sixties. Most of us have lost the sense of our ignorance long before that age. We even become vain of our squirrel's hoard of knowledge and regard increasing age itself as a school of omniscience. We forget that Socrates was famed for wisdom not because he was omniscient but because he realized at the age of seventy that he still knew nothing.

Suzy was always an imaginative, verbal, excited child. When she was very little she never saw just one dog but, throwing i arms out wide, she'd say, "There were a zillion dogs out there feared that she would soon lose the ability to distinguish what v real from what was fantasy. So we talked about lies and the tri and God's commandments about telling the truth. As the till approached for her to enter school, I thought that I should to some firmer steps to teach Suzy about truth. I determined the ro time she came in with a huge fib I'd find a way to really teach h<

That very afternoon, she was playing in the backyard a came running in excitedly yelling, "Mother, there's a bear in t backyard. A big brown bear! "

"Suzy, what have I told you about telling the truth? Now up to your room and you talk to God about this. "

Suzy disappeared to her room and was very quiet for while. I went in to see how she was feeling, and with a beati smile, she said, "I talked to God and he said he thought it was bear at first, too. "

Wirifield Firm

John and I were on our way to St. Louis, Missouri, for a quic trip of job interviews and apartment hunting. His job promotio required him to move, and, even though we weren't engaged yel he asked me to move with him.

We had discussed getting married and already looked ; rings. John even asked my parents for their blessing (a little old-fashioned, but it scored points with the soon-to-be in-laws) Everything was set, though we weren't officially engaged.

As we boarded our plane, I found our seats and put my be into the overhead bin. Behind schedule, we sat waiting for parture and noticed one of the pilots leave the plane. When \ returned we were ready for takeoff.

About twenty minutes into the flight the captain made usual announcements: altitude, weather, arrival time, my name.

What? Did I just hear my name? My heart started pounding Did / do something wrong? Did my bags not make the fligh What was going on? Even with all of these thoughts racir through my mind, I somehow heard every word:

"Attention please. Attention Lynette Baker. Lynette,lelms would like to know if you would spend the rest of your life rith him. If you accept, please press the 'call' button and the attendants will be with you shortly. "

My heart continued its thumping and my eyes filled with jars. When John opened a small ring box and smiled, I whispered, "Yes. "

He placed the ring on my hand and we embraced as the their passengers cheered. But wait...I was supposed to push the ill button. I couldn't reach it with my seatbelt still fastened, so my 2W fiance gladly pressed it for me. All three attendants rejonded, one carrying a bottle of champagne.

As we landed and approached our gate, the captain again eluded us in his announcements.

"Congratulations to the newly engaged couple. On behalf of  entire crew, let me wish you the best. "

As we exited the plane, John thanked the flight attendants for clping with his plan. It was then that we learned that the pilot id left the plane earlier to get our bottle of champagne!

One of my early teaching jobs involved teaching at an all native school. This school had "the worst of the worst, " the ; dents that even public alternative schools had expelled. The ; dents who straggled in the door every day were living lives of desperation, labeled as failures and never expected to amouni anything. Our school had an on-premise day care, so we had a of teen mothers who were trying to break free of their cycle poverty. Every student who came to us realized we were the chance they had to make something of their lives.

As a fairly new teacher, I was terrified of them. They w mostly African-Americans from the inner-city, and I was a teacher who grew up in the affluent suburbs. I had visions of they were like gleaned from countless hours of television c movies. I was sure these kids were violent, amoral people,  somehow I envisioned myself as their savior, the person wi would turn their lives from violence and poverty to peace a prosperity. I couldn't have been more wrong.

My first day there, the students knew they add me in a con

i took advantage of every misstep I made. The first scene in mgerous Minds could have been my classroom, and I had no Marine moves to get their attention. I was scared and nervous, 1 I wondered why I ever thought I could teach these incurables. As I was about to leave, certain that I would turn in my ignition that afternoon, one of my students came over and i, "Oh, you 11 be okay. They's just testing' you. "With a smile, he interred out.

I have never been a person to turn down a challenge, so I ne back the next day and the next and the day after that. After hile, the challenges came less often, and I knew I had "made when I heard one of our students tell another, "You got Miz lson?Yeah, she cool. "

My country has a variety of plant life, including food crops such as rice and vegetables, wild plants such as the forests that protect our mountains, plants raised for their beauty, for example, flowers, and plants cultivated for their medicinal properties. All of these plants are important to us and to the balance of the ecosystem^ but if I had to choose just one, I would choose tea.

One reason that I think tea is important to the people of my country is that it is an important crop. My country is well-known for its tea and we export great quantities of it every year. It is very important to our economy. Another reason that I think it is important is that different kinds of tea have different properties, some of which are very good for our health. But perhaps the most important reason that tea is so important to my people is that it is a significant part of our culture. Many people drink tea every day. We not only drink the tea but talk over tea. Furthermore, tea is important in many of our traditions and in our history.

The above reasons are why I choose tea as the most important plant to the people in my country. It plays a big part in our lives today and has done so throughout history. Nothing can replace tea in my country and that is why it is so important to us.

There are undeniable advantages to both life in a big city and in a small town. The former offers more excitement and convenience while the latter offers a cleaner, quieter and often friendlier place to live. However, despite the advantages of small town life, I prefer to live in a big city for several reasons.

I First, life in the city is more convenient. More goods are available and stores are open later. Also, there is better public transportation so it is easier to get around. I can find almost anything I want easily in the city. Second, there are more ways to

^ .spend leisure time in the city. There are many places I can go to meet friends and have fun. Finally, and most importantly, the city offers more educational and career opportunities. The city often attracts the best teachers and the best companies. There is also a wider choice of jobs so it is easier to move up the career ladder.

For all of these reasons, I prefer to live in the city. Although I sometimes miss the fresh air and quiet life of a small town, nothing can make up for the opportunities that the city offers me. If one wants to be successful, I believe the best place to live is the city.