Today's Headlines:

Denmark's drug-taking rooms for addicts

Dementia rates higher near busy roads, says study

Meet the baby red pandas at a US zoo

Transcript:

This is Copenhagen's seedy red light district – a well-known area to buy drugs. It's home to one of the city's so-called 'fix rooms'… a place where addicts can legally take class A drugs safely under supervision and without the fear of prosecution. This place opened three years ago funded by the city with public money. There's always a nurse here to supervise the users. But the fix room is clearly not a treatment facility to get addicts off drugs and many people will come in and out of the fix room and go back to their difficult and sometimes dangerous lifestyles.

A study of 2 million Canadians found around 10% of dementia cases in urban areas could be linked to exposure to heavy traffic. The researchers found that living within 50 metres of a major road increased the risk of dementia by 7 to 11%. At 100 metres the increased risk was 4%. This research doesn't prove that heavy traffic causes dementia. It makes a fascinating link that requires further investigation. For now, the best advice to reduce your dementia risk is to exercise and eat healthily.

Red panda cubs Harriet and Hazel see the snow for the first time at their Cincinnati Zoo and Botanical Garden home. They keep nice and warm thanks to their bushy tails and have plenty of energy to frolic around. Awwww….

Words and phrases and definitions:

seedy
dirty, connected with illegal or morally wrong activity

urban areas
towns, cities or suburbs

cubs
young animals (bears, foxes, lions)

Exercise:

Use one of the words or phrases from Lingohack to complete each of these sentences. Note that you may have to change the form of a word or phrase to complete the sentence correctly.

seedy / urban areas / cubs

1. Congestion is one of the biggest problems facing cities, and with statistics projecting that close to 70% of the world's population will live in __________ by 2050 it is likely to get worse.

2. According to the Cheetah Conservation Fund, some 1,200 cheetah __________ are known to have been trafficked out of Africa over the past 10 years.

3. Brian forgot to book the hotel when we went to San Francisco, so we ended up having to spend the night in a __________ hotel in a run-down area in the city.

Answers:

1. Congestion is one of the biggest problems facing cities, and with statistics projecting that close to 70% of the world's population will live in urban areas by 2050 it is likely to get worse.

2. According to the Cheetah Conservation Fund, some 1,200 cheetah cubs are known to have been trafficked out of Africa over the past 10 years.

3. Brian forgot to book the hotel when we went to San Francisco, so we ended up having to spend the night in a seedy hotel in a run-down area in the city.