 Welcome to Learning English, a daily 30-minute program from the Voice of America. I'm Ashley Thompson. And I'm Dan Novak. 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. On today's program, you will hear reports from Mario Ritter Jr., Brian Lin, and Dan Friedle. Later, Faith Perlow presents this week's everyday grammar lesson. She looks at the grammar and figurative language in a famous American song. But first, here is Mario Ritter Jr. Learners are studying what went wrong when a Japanese Coast Guard aircraft and a passenger jet crashed into each other on Tuesday at Haneda Airport in Tokyo. Officials want to find out what caused the crash, but there are also many questions about the fire that broke out when the planes collided on the runway. The body of the passenger jet, an Airbus 350, was made of carbon composite fibers. Passenger aircraft bodies have traditionally been made of aluminum. The crash may become an important test of the safety of composite materials for some uses in aircraft. Officials from Air Traffic Control at the airport describe some of the events leading to the crash. The larger Japan Airlines, JAL Passenger Jet, was given permission to use the runway where the Coast Guard plane, a Bombardier-8, was preparing for takeoff. When they struck each other, an orange fireball exploded from the aircraft, and the passenger jet continued down the runway covered in flames. When the plane stopped, crew members and all 379 passengers slid down emergency shoots within 20 minutes. All survived. The captain of the Coast Guard plane got out, but five members of the crew died in the crash. Safety experts are praising the airline's crew and the passengers for escaping the burning plane. The crew shouted, warning the passengers to run away from the plane. composite materials have been used for many years inside commercial aircraft. But the first commercial plane to have its body, or fuselage, and wings reinforced with carbon fibers, was the Boeing 787. It went into service in 2011. About 1,100 of the planes have been produced. The Airbus A350 followed in 2018. About 570 have been sold. Aircraft designers use composite materials because they strengthen plastics and other materials. Boeing says the material can save 20% of the weight of aluminum. The reduced weight saves fuel. Boeing and the Federal Aviation Administration, FAA, tested the strength of composites to get certification for the 787 jet. But concerns remain about gases released from such materials when they burn. John Goglia is a former member of the National Transportation Safety Board, which investigates aircraft accidents. He said there has always been a concern about composites if they catch fire. John Goglia noted that the gases released when composites burn are dangerous. They can even be dangerous after the fire is put out because the fibers might remain in the air. The FAA has said for more than 20 years that there are dangers related to composite materials. FAA officials say the main health dangers include sharp pieces of material, dust, and poisonous gases caused by burning substances that hold the material together. Although the inside of the passenger plane filled with smoke after the explosion, all 379 passengers were able to escape. John Cox, a safety expert, noted, that fuselage protected them from a really horrific fire. It did not burn through for some period of time and let everybody get out. Goglia said there is no real evidence whether composite materials or aluminum are better at resisting fire long enough to protect people. However, one passenger on the JAL flight said the smoke stung very much. Todd Curtis, a safety expert and former Boeing engineer, warned that injuries from dangerous smoke could take a long time to show up. Passengers involved in accidents usually are in shock and often do not recognize their injuries. Another concern, experts noted, was the amount of time it took firefighters to put out the fire. Pictures show the JAL flight's burned wreckage near one of the runways. The body was almost completely destroyed by fire. In 2013, a fire at London's Heathrow Airport involving an Ethiopian Airlines Boeing 787 was difficult to stop. Safety expert Curtis said, putting out the fire took much more effort than a typical airliner fire. Curtis said he worried at the time about composite fuselage fires. Those concerns, he said, have not gone away. I'm Mario Ritter, Jr. A 13-year-old American boy has become the first person ever to beat the popular video game Tetris. The young gamer Willis Gibson completed 157 levels of Tetris before the game technically surrendered. Gamers call this kind of ending a kill screen. The Tetris program had no more plays to make, and so it crashed, freezing the video game. Gibson lives in the Midwestern state of Oklahoma and goes by the gaming name Blue Scooty. He can be heard repeatedly shouting, oh my god, on a video recording as he beat the game. I can't feel my fingers, Gibson says in the video. Gaming experts had long considered Tetris unbeatable. This is partly because the video game does not have a clear ending point. Tetris came out in 1984 and quickly became a worldwide favorite. Its creator, Alexey Pudgetnov, was a computer programs engineer at the Russian Academy of Sciences in the former Soviet Union. During the game, players move and join together seven different shapes of falling blocks. The goal is for players to fit the blocks together to form solid lines inside a box. The blocks fall faster as players progress through higher levels of the game. On December 21st, Gibson reached level 157 and dropped a final piece into place. This caused a single line of blocks to disappear and the game to enter a permanent freeze. This is unbelievable, Vince Clemente, CEO of Classic Tetris World Championship, told Reuters news agency. Players didn't think anyone would ever make it that far and now the game has officially been beaten by a human being. For some time gamers have known Tetris would eventually reach an ending point and technically shut down, but in the past only a computer program could force such a game ending shutdown. Other fans of the game were quick to share Gibson's excitement. Classic Tetris World Champion Justin Yu, who goes by the name Fractal161, declared in his own video, he did it, he did it. Tetris Chief Executive Maya Rogers joined in the celebration. She said in a statement it was fitting Gibson had beat the game just ahead of 2024 when Tetris was entering its 40th anniversary. Congratulations to Blue Scooty, Rogers said. She added that the extraordinary event defied any previous known limits of the game. Gibson uses a rolling controller playing method popularized in 2021. It permits players to operate the controls in different ways to be able to keep playing longer to reach higher levels. I'm Brian Lin. Some important tree species native to the Northwestern states in the US are no longer growing well because of climate change. As conditions change in states such as Washington, Oregon, and California, trees such as the Douglas fir, western red cedar, giant sequoia, and redwood may need to move with the help of humans. Some of the trees do not do well when temperatures rise. Trees suffer during times of drought. The goal is to move the trees to areas where the climate might be more suitable. Forest scientists are generally in favor of moving the trees so they do not die out. However, not all of the scientists agree on the best way to do it. There are three ways to move trees. Assisted population migration, assisted species migration, and range expansion. Assisted population migration involves scientists moving a tree's seeds within its current growing range. Assisted species migration involves scientists moving a species far from its existing area. In this case, that would include moving redwoods and sequoias from California to Washington. The third way, range expansion, moves trees just outside their current growing range. Each way has different results for the trees and other animals and insects that depend on the trees. Michael Case is a forest ecologist at the Nature Conservancy in Virginia. He said there is a huge difference among the different migration methods. He said the risk of failure increases whenever you plant something in an area where it is not locally found. He said the risk is not only to the trees. There is also the risk of causing problems in the ecosystem. Case is working on an assisted population migration program with Douglas Furr and Western hemlock trees. He is testing whether the trees, originally from drier parts of the Northwest, can do well in Western Washington where there is a drought. His organization believes that assisted population migration has fewer risks. The U.S. Forest Service also takes part in assisted population migration programs. Dr. David Lytle is the agency's deputy chief for research and development. He said the agency is very, very cautious about moving plants outside of their historic range. Douglas Ptolemy is a professor of entomology and wildlife ecology at the University of Delaware. He said one worry about species migration is that local caterpillars might not eat the leaves of trees that are new to the area. The caterpillars serve as food for birds and other animals, so they must have a good food source. Although the concerns are documented, the City of Portland, Oregon is working on a species migration project for 11 tree species. The project includes three oak trees, California black oak, Canyon live oak, and Interior live oak. Ptolemy said oak trees are among the most important in North America. When you move them out of range, he said, the things that are adapted to eating them no longer have access to them. The City responded to questions from the Associated Press and said it is using guidelines from universities, state and federal sources, and more in its project. Another group working on species migration projects in the Northwest is called Propagation Nation. To propagate means to produce a new plant through the use of seeds or parts of another plant. That organization is planting non-local trees around the Seattle, Washington area in hopes that they will start growing in places where Western Red Cedar, Western Hemlock, and big leaf maple are having trouble. David Millarch is the leader of a group in Michigan that supports keeping old trees alive. It is called Archangel Ancient Tree Archive. Millarch said the hope is to permit redwoods and sequoias to grow in areas to the North. The hope is not to replace native trees. He said his group hopes the trees will still be here in 100 to 200 years and not join the list of trees that are going extinct. The organizations that are not practicing widely accepted methods for moving species feel like the risks are worth it. But Robert Slesak is not sure about either practice. He oversees population migration sites run by the US Forest Service in California, Oregon and Washington. He said he has concerns about assisted species migrations and assisted population migrations that lack experimental rigor. Rigor describes an activity that has been tested with high standards. He said all of the ideas about how to move trees should follow experiments that have already produced strong results. Everyone knows we need to do some kind of action related to climate, but there is a real risk of making it worse. I'm Dan Friedel. Many Americans have returned to work or school as the holiday season comes to an end. Some traveled far to be with loved ones for Christmas and New Year's Day. Last month we looked at the song Take Me Home, Country Roads. For many people from the state of West Virginia and the Appalachian Mountains, the song reminds them of home. John Denver recorded the hit song in 1971. Lana Del Rey recently recorded her version of the song. In today's everyday grammar, we will continue looking at parts of Del Rey's version of the song and connect it to grammar and figurative language. Let's look at the last section of the song. All My Memories Gather Round Her Miners' Lady, Stranger to Blue Water Dark and Dusty, Painted on the Sky Misty Taste of Moonshine, Teardrop in My Eye I hear her voice in the morning hour she calls me. The radio reminds me of my home far away. Driving down the road I get a feeling that I should have been home yesterday, yesterday. In the first two verses of each section, West Virginia is humanized once again using personification. Personification is the humanization of a non-living thing. The use of the subject and object pronouns she and her give a female quality to the state. That personification of West Virginia as a woman also appears in the chorus of the song when it is referred to as Mountain Mama. Her voice and she calls me add to the female characteristics of the state. Miners' Lady and Stranger to Blue Water are other personified comparisons in the song. West Virginia is known for its coal and limestone mines throughout the state. The European immigrants came to West Virginia in the late 1800s and early 1900s to work in the mines. Stranger to Blue Water is a reference to West Virginia's geographic location as a landlocked state. A stranger is an unfamiliar person. The phrase is noting that the state is not near an ocean and is unfamiliar to blue ocean waters. And finally we have more adjectives. Today we look at descriptive adjectives, not comparative adjectives. Dark and dusty, painted on the sky. Misty taste of moonshine, teardrop in my eye. Dark and dusty refer to the miner's lady line and coal mining. Coal is a dark natural substance found in the earth. West Virginia and other parts of the Appalachian region are rich in this resource. It also creates dusty particles that fill the air. That combination paints or covers the sky. The line misty taste of moonshine also has a descriptive adjective. Misty has several meanings. Mist, the noun form of the word, means water in the form of very small drops floating in the air. So misty means full of mist. It can also describe something that is not clearly seen or remembered. Finally it can describe eyes that are full of tears. In fact, misty-eyed means the same thing as tearful. Moonshine is a kind of alcohol that is made illegally. Making moonshine was especially common in the hills of Appalachia during prohibition, which lasted from 1920 to 1933. The alcohol was moved by car at night and the bootleggers could only see by the light of the moon. That is where it got its name. It is not common to describe a taste or flavor as misty, but there are a few possible meanings. Since moonshine was strong, drinking it could leave one's eyes misty or filled with tears. The misty flavor of moonshine could also refer to the illegal way of producing and transporting the alcohol without anyone knowing. Today we looked at the rest of the song, Country Roads. We found even more personification by comparing West Virginia to a woman with words like, minor's lady and her voice. We found even more adjectives that were used to describe parts of Appalachian culture, like dark and dusty for coal mining and misty taste of moonshine to describe a strong alcohol flavor that could bring tears to one's eyes. I'm Faith Perlow. You just heard Faith Perlow present this week's everyday grammar lesson. She joins me now to talk a bit more about it. Hi Faith, welcome back. Thanks for having me back, Ashley. This week you wrote about more personification and adjectives found in the song, Take Me Home, Country Roads. Can you tell us more about personification? Of course. Personification is a type of figurative language used in poems, songs, or stories. Figurative language helps us to use language in a more creative way and not just use the literal meaning of something. So personification helps us to describe non-living things using human traits. This helps us to create a more interesting picture in our minds when we read. So in the song, Country Roads, the writers give human characteristics to the American state of West Virginia by referring to it as a woman. It does so using words like she, her, and even calling the state a mother or mama. Many countries and areas in the world are characterized with the female gender. Think of Mother Russia or Lady Liberty. Interesting, so why is personification used? Well, for one thing, it is fun to use language creatively. Another reason we use personification is to help readers empathize or create an emotional connection with an object and to enhance our understanding of the description of it or its role. Personification also creates more connection between other characters in the story and the non-living thing. And like I said before, it helps us to create images in our minds when we read. Well, thanks for sharing a bit more about personification today with us, Faith. And thanks for joining me on the show. You're welcome, Ashley. And that's our program for today. Join us again tomorrow to keep learning English through stories from around the world. I'm Ashley Thompson. And I'm Dan Novak.