Welcome to Learning English,
A daily 30 minute program from the Voice of America.
I'm Dan Novak.
And I'm Dan FRIEDELL.
This program is designed for English learners,
so we speak a little slower and we use words and phrases,
especially written for people learning English.
Coming up on the program,
Brian Lin reports on massive flooding in Libya
that has left 10,000 people missing.
Katie Weaver has a story on the U.S.
antitrust trial brought against Google.
Dan Novak has the education report on students
continuing struggles with math coming out of the pandemic.
Later, Katie and Mario Ritter, jr.
Bring us the English lesson of the day.
But first, here's Brian Lin.
Officials in Libya say
as many as 10,000 people are missing
after severe flooding in the northeastern part of the country.
The flooding
began when Mediterranean storm Daniel
dropped heavy rain on the area beginning Sunday night.
As of Tuesday, more than 1000 bodies
had been recovered in the city of Derna alone.
Emergency workers say they expect
the number of dead to climb sharply.
Flooding led to the collapse of at least two dams outside
Derna, a coastal city of about 89,000 people.
Local officials said a wall of water
that passed through the city erase everything in its way.
Witness Ahmed Abdallah told the Associated Press,
a local minister of civil air travel in the country's
east, visited Derna and told Reuters
news agency bodies were lying everywhere,
including the sea in valleys and under buildings.
The minister said local officials
estimated about 25% of Derna
had disappeared, with many, many buildings destroyed.
Storm Daniel hit other eastern Libyan towns,
including Benghazi, the second
largest city in the country.
Tamer Ramadan is head
of a delegation from the International Federation
of the Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies.
He told Reuters the number of missing had hit 10,000
and the total number of deaths would be huge.
United Nations aid chief Martin
Griffiths said in a message on Xe, formerly known as Twitter,
that emergency teams had been deployed to help on the ground.
Turkey and other countries
immediately sent aid to Libya,
including search and rescue vehicles,
rescue boats, power generators and food.
People living in Derna
reported hearing loud explosions Sunday
night as the storm arrived
and they realized dams outside the city had collapsed.
Videos posted online showed
large areas of mud and wreckage where floodwaters carried away
neighborhoods along banks of the Wadi Derna River.
The river runs from the mountains through the city and into the sea.
Local emergency workers,
including troops, government workers and volunteers,
dug through the wreckage and used boats to search for bodies.
Eastern Libya's health minister Osman
Abdul Jalil, told the AP that many bodies are believed
to be trapped under wreckage or had been carried out to sea.
Military Commander Khalifa Hifter
currently leads the east Libya government.
He captured Derna in 2019
after months of fierce fighting.
Hifter's government based in Benghazi
is fighting the Western government based in the capital, Tripoli.
Each side is backed
by powerful militias and foreign powers.
Egypt, Russia, Jordan
and the United Arab Emirates support Hifter.
Turkey, Qatar and Italy support
the West Libya administration.
There were early signs the two sides were willing
to work together on aid efforts.
The government of western Libya sent a plane carrying 14
tons of medical supplies and health workers to Benghazi.
Another plane carrying humanitarian aid and rescue teams
from Egypt, Turkey and the United Arab Emirates
also landed in Benghazi.
I'm Brian Allen.
The U.S.
Department of justice accused
Google Tuesday of using its Internet search engine
to push out competitors and limit new ideas.
Kenneth Tenser is the Justice Department's head lawyer.
He said this case is about the future of the Internet
and whether Google's search engine
will ever face meaningful competition
over the next ten weeks.
Federal lawyers and state attorneys
general will try to prove that Google
unfairly controls the market in its favor
by making its search engine
the first choice in software and on devices
that people use every day.
The case is similar to the antitrust trial
brought against computer software maker
Microsoft in 1998.
At that time, the government
accused Microsoft of using its strength in software
to force computer makers to use its other products,
including the Internet Explorer Web browser.
The case ended
with restrictions to prevent Microsoft
from having total control of the marketplace.
Many Google products,
including the Chrome Web browser, Gmail, YouTube
and online maps, are extremely popular,
but none have controlled the market and become as valuable
as its Internet search engine.
The government accuses Google
of paying billions of dollars yearly to make its search engine
the first choice on the iPhone and Web browsers
such as Apple's Safari and Mozilla's Firefox.
The Legal action notes
that Google also requires its search engine
to be a part of the Android operating system
used by smartphone of many manufacturers.
Denser said This is Google
saying take it or leave it.
He said that Google's moves prevented
Apple from developing a search engine of its own.
Google argues that
it faces many competitors, although it controls
about 90% of the Internet search market.
The company says it faces competition from search engines
such as Microsoft's Bing and DuckDuckGo
and Web sites like Amazon and Yelp.
These websites let users ask questions
about what to buy or where to go.
The company also argues that it faces
competition from new technology,
like artificial intelligence. A I.
Microsoft, for example,
is adding a AI abilities from its partner Open
API to its Bing search engine.
That move an early February
forced Google to equip its search engine
with results that come from AI aided processes.
Google says users can always use
any other search engine, but continuous improvements to its search
engine are the reason why users keep coming back.
It is a
process that made the name Google synonymous
with looking things up on the Internet.
However, critics say
the quality of search results has decreased.
They note that Google uses
its engine to sell advertisements.
The company brings attention to its products
over those of competitors.
Today, the stock market value of Google's parent company,
Alphabet, is $1.7 trillion.
The company employs 182,000 people.
Most of the money Google makes comes from $224
billion in yearly ad sales.
The sales come through a network of digital services
that are linked by the search engine, which answers
billions of requests a day.
I'm Katie Weaver.
Across the United States,
schools are working hard to help students catch up in math
test scores after the pandemic showed
just how behind students are on average.
Education experts say American students math knowledge
is about half a school year behind where it should be.
Children lost ground on reading tests, too,
but the math declines were more severe.
Experts say online learning
made it more difficult for math instruction.
It was harder for teachers to guide students over a screen
or see weaknesses in their skills at home.
Parents were more likely to read with their children than to practice math.
The result?
Students math skills declined around the nation,
and students are not recovering as quickly as educators hoped.
Educators worry about how they will perform
in high school and whether science, technology
and medical fields will be available to them.
Students had been making progress
on national math tests since 1990.
But over the past year,
fourth and eighth grade math scores
fell to the lowest levels in about 20 years.
The information comes from the National Assessment
of Educational Progress, known as the Nation's Report Card.
It's a generation's worth
of progress lost, said Andrew Ho.
He is a professor at Harvard University's
graduate School of Education.
Jennifer Mathews teaches eighth grade
at Moultrie Middle School in Mount Pleasant, South Carolina.
She said her students have shown little interest
in understanding her pre-algebra and Algebra one lessons.
They don't allow themselves to process the material.
They don't allow themselves to think.
This might take a day to understand
or learn, she said.
Many students lack
an understanding of math concepts,
basic fractions, for example,
continue to confuse many of them, she said.
Using federal pandemic money,
some schools have added tutors.
Some have started new approaches
to teaching to help in the recovery.
But that money will run out by next September.
Before many children have caught up.
Like other school systems across the country,
Jefferson County schools in Birmingham, Alabama,
saw students math skills fall from 2019
to 2021, using pandemic aid.
The system placed math coaches in all middle schools.
The coaches help teachers learn new
and better ways to teach students.
About one in five public schools in the United States have a math coach.
Federal data says the efforts appear to be working.
State testing shows math scores have started to increase
for most of the Jefferson County Middle Schools.
Adding to the difficulty of catching kids up
is the debates over how math should be taught.
Some say schools should center procedural learning,
like teaching kids to memorize how to solve problems step by step.
Others prefer conceptual understanding
in which students learn underlying math relationships.
Kevin Diekema
is president of the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics.
He said many people do not think of math as a fun subject.
But when people start to understand what's going on in whatever
you're learning, but especially in math, you develop
a new appreciation for it.
Sarah Powell is a professor at the University of Texas
at Austin who research is math instruction.
She said teaching math should not be either
one way or another way.
A change too far in the conceptual direction, she said,
risks losing students who have not fully
learned basic math skills,
even at a nationally recognized magnet school.
The effects of the pandemic on students math skills is clear.
At the Town View School
of Science and Engineering in Dallas, the incoming
ninth graders in Lance Brushes Summer program
needed to relearn the meaning of words like term and coefficient.
Brash was not surprised
that the students were missing some skills after their middle school years.
During the pandemic,
the hope is that by taking a step back,
students can begin to move forward.
I'm Dan Novak.
Dan Novak
joins me now to talk more about his story.
Welcome, Dan.
Mr. Friedel, good to see you.
Your story was about students continuing
struggles in math coming out of the pandemic.
You mentioned in the story that students
lost progress in reading, too,
but it wasn't as bad as math.
Why is that the case?
I'm guessing it has to do with online learning.
Yeah. There are a few reasons.
Education experts point to
as to why math scores especially suffered because of the pandemic.
And a huge part of it is online learning.
Students that already struggle with math really need face to face learning.
And when classes were online, there just wasn't as much of that
hands on teaching that makes math more enjoyable.
So the switch to online classes really hurt those students.
There are also few ways
for kids to really practice math,
especially higher level math outside of the classroom.
You're exactly right.
At home, kids can practice reading all the time,
whether they're reading a book or a web page or a text message.
They can also read with their parents.
But a lot of parents
just don't have the math knowledge to help their kids with their math work.
Dan, do we know what can help students get back on track?
Many schools have hired math coaches or math tutors to help students.
In the story I mentioned, Jefferson County, Alabama, which has math coaches
in all of its middle schools and test scores there are going up.
And just from personal experience, I would not have been able to survive
high school geometry or calculus without a tutor.
That extra help outside of the classroom is really valuable.
Thanks for coming on the show. Dan.
You're welcome.
VOA Learning
English has launched a new program for children.
It is called Let's Learn English with Honor.
The new course aims to teach children American English
through asking and answering questions
and experiencing fun situations.
For more information, visit our website.
Learning English taught VOA News.com.
Welcome to Lesson of the Day.
I'm Mario Ritter, Junior and Katie Weaver is with me today
to discuss some terms in a recent
VOA Learning English story.
Thanks for joining me, Katie.
Of course, I am happy to be here.
Not too long ago in Australia, medical officials
reported an unusual discovery
during an operation on a patient's brain.
In this story, pay
attention for a medical word that describes
what a patient might be experiencing.
What were some of those problems
and which words
suggest reactions that people might have
when faced with an unusual situation?
Ready?
Here's the story.
A brain doctor in Australia received a huge surprise
during an operation on a patient's brain last year.
Gosh, What is that?
It's moving. Take it out of my hands.
That is what Australian neurosurgeon
Hari Pria Bandy said about finding a worm
or parasite last year in a patient's brain.
Bondi was looking for the unexplained cause of symptoms
in a 64 year old woman.
She found the cause after drilling a small hole
in the woman's skull and looking at her brain.
Bondi performed the operation at Canberra
Hospital in 2022.
She discussed the discovery this week
after publishing a study with Dr.
Sanjaya Senanayake in Emerging infectious diseases.
The doctor
said the worm was a roundworm native to Australia.
It was about eight centimeters before the discovery.
It was not known to affect humans.
The worms are often found in carpet pythons,
a kind of large snake found in Australia
and on some Pacific islands.
Senanayake was on duty at the hospital
last year when the worm was found.
I got a call saying, We've just removed
a live worm from this patient's brain, he said.
The woman started medical treatment
earlier in 2022
after saying she was experiencing
depression and forgetfulness.
Brain images showed changes
over a three month period.
Bondi's investigation was expected
to show an infection or a cancerous tumor.
Instead, she found the worm.
Everyone in that operating theater was absolutely
stunned, Senanayake said of the wriggling thing
before the operation.
The patient had come to a hospital in New South Wales
with stomach sickness, pain
and sweats at night.
Bondi said the patient
did not show any problems from the worm removal.
Her mental health is improving, too,
but some problems continue.
She was so grateful to have an answer for what has been causing her
trouble for so very long, Bondi said.
The patient has not been back to the hospital.
Doctors gave her some medicine to kill parasites.
Bondi said the doctors are continuing
to watch the patient's overall health.
We're keeping a close eye on her.
Senanayake told an Australian broadcaster.
The doctors believe the woman may have accidentally eaten the worms eggs.
She lives in the same area as the carpet python.
The python sheds the
worms and their eggs in its waste.
They believe it is possible that the woman gathered
some aid of plants to eat and then they had the worms eggs on them.
I'm Dan FRIEDELL.
Okay.
Before the report, we asked that you pay special attention
to the health experiences
that the patient had.
What were some of those, Katie?
The main medical word that came up
was symptom AMS.
Doctors always ask patients
about their symptoms or signs of sickness.
When trying to find out what the problem is,
they need the patient to explain
what they are experiencing.
In this case, the patient said she had stomach sickness,
pain and sweats at night.
These can all be symptoms
or signs of disease or some kind of health problem.
A report of symptoms is just
part of the evidence doctors seek in investigating
a patient's health condition.
We can judge a lot about a situation
by observing people's reactions
and how they describe their experiences.
In this story, people watching the surgery were stunned.
Stunned is a strong word
because it means you are so surprised that you are physically affected.
It's a big shock and you are unable to react.
I can imagine their surprise at seeing a worm
wriggling on the operating table.
Another reaction word in
this story was grateful.
The patient was grateful to have an answer.
It is so difficult to know something is wrong with you
but not know what the problem is.
When you get an explanation, it is a big relief.
I understand how thankful the patient felt.
Now let's have a little quiz.
Katie will read a sentence from the story and you decide
whether it relates to a symptom or a reaction.
This is what one of the doctors
involved in the follow up after the operation said.
We're keeping a close eye on her.
Okay.
Why is the doctor keeping an eye on the patient?
Well, the doctor wants to look for symptoms affecting the patient
even after the surgery
to make sure everything is all right.
It is not a reaction,
but a plan to keep looking in the future.
Well said, Katie.
And that's today's lesson of the day.
And that's our program for today.
Join us again tomorrow to keep learning English
through stories from around the world.
I'm Dan Novak. And I'm Dan FRIEDELL.