Description: This is
a VOA Special English Technology Report.
See text below
Text:
More than three billion people are at risk from
indoor air pollution because of the heating or
cooking fuels they use. Most live in Africa, India
and China. They use biomass fuels like wood, crop
waste, animal waste or coal. These solid fuels may
be the least costly fuels available. But they are
also a major cause of health problems and death.
For more than thirty years, the Aprovecho Research
Center has been designing cleaner, low-cost cooking
stoves for the developing world. Dean Still is the
director of the group which is based in the United
States. He notes a World Health Organization
estimate that more than one and a half million
people a year die from breathing smoke from solid
fuels.
Mister Still says: "And half of the people on planet
Earth every day use wood or biomass for cooking.
These are the people on Earth who have less money,
and the richer people use oil and gas. It's been
estimated that wood is running out more quickly than
oil and gas. And so it is very important for the
poorer people to have very efficient stoves that
protect their forests and that protect their
health."
Every year Aprovecho holds a "stove camp" at its
testing station in Cottage Grove, Oregon. Engineers,
inventors, students and others come together to
design and test different methods and materials for
improving stoves.
Over the years, the group has made stoves using mud,
bricks, sheet metal, clay, ceramics and old oil
drums. Most of the stoves look like large, deep
cooking pots. They have an opening at the bottom for
the fire and a place on top to put a pot.
Through the years, Dean Still says his group has
experimented with countless stove designs.
He says the goal is to make a very inexpensive stove
that costs about five dollars. It would make very
little smoke. So it would be safe for health, and
reduce global warming and deforestation.
Aprovecho has now partnered with a stove
manufacturer in China.
The company is making Aprovecho's first mass
produced stoves.
They are said to use forty to fifty percent less
wood than an open fire, and produce fifty to
seventy-five percent less smoke. A company called
StoveTec is selling them through its Web site for
less than ten dollars. Dean Still says that more
than one hundred thousand have been sold so far.
And that's the VOA Special English Development
Report.
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personally reviewed this video and found it appropriate for
the news section of English Global Group. This
is a Voice of America video which covers an interesting
topic in Special English. I would appreciate some feedback from both
students and teachers about this video. You can comment in
the window below using any of a number of different services
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