 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 stories from Dan Novak and Jill Robbins. Brian Lin presents this week's Education Report. We close the show with today's lesson of the day from John Russell. But first, Dan Novak has this report. President Joe Biden's administration says it will investigate Chinese-made smart cars as possible security risks. The administration says the cars can gather important information about Americans driving them. The investigation could lead to new regulations. The new rules might prevent China from using the latest technology in cars. Officials say they are concerned that features like driver assistance technology could be used to collect information on Americans. The administration is not proposing to ban imports of Chinese smart cars. But Biden said he is taking steps to protect Americans' data. China's policies could flood our market with its vehicles, posing risks to our national security, Biden said in a statement Thursday. The proposed investigation is the latest action by the Biden administration related to what officials consider the growing threats from China. For example, Biden signed an executive order late last month. It requires the Department of Justice to create new rules to protect government-related data about individuals. Biden and other officials also noted that China has put in place some restrictions on American cars and other foreign vehicles. Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo said connected cars are like smartphones on wheels and are a serious national security risk. These vehicles are connected to the internet. They collect huge amounts of sensitive data on the drivers, she told reporters recently. Data collection is not the only concern she and other officials said. Connected vehicles could also be remotely used or controlled. Raimondo said it's scary to contemplate the cyber risks and espionage risks that these have. A spokesperson for China's foreign ministry said that Biden's actions are discriminatory practices clearly targeted at certain countries. The United States imports few Chinese cars partly because the U.S. places high taxes on vehicles imported from China. But officials are concerned that taxes are not enough. Some Chinese companies avoid U.S. taxes by setting up factories in countries such as Mexico. The Commerce Department will seek information from the auto industry and the public about the risks and possible steps to reduce them, the administration said. Officials will then develop possible regulations to govern the use of technology in vehicles from China and other countries of concern, including Russia and Iran. We're doing it now before Chinese manufactured vehicles become widespread in the United States and potentially threaten our privacy and our national security, Raimondo said. Electric vehicles and other cars increasingly use computer technologies to operate navigational tools and to provide driver assistance features. Computers also are used to reduce operating costs and carbon emissions, the administration said. The cars connect to personal devices, other cars, U.S. infrastructure and their manufacturer. The Biden administration said that creates national security risks. The administration of former President Donald Trump put in place high import taxes on many Chinese products. Biden continued those policies. They have effectively prevented Chinese automakers from entering the U.S. market. But U.S. officials and industry leaders worry that Chinese companies might choose to accept the additional costs as China increases its export push. Chinese car makers also aim to build more vehicles overseas. For example, electric vehicle company BYD announced plans last year for its first European factory in Hungary. The Alliance for Automotive Innovation represents major car makers and technology manufacturers around the world. It said it supports Biden's goal to protect public safety, but also warned of interfering with low risk exchanges such as safety technologies essential to vehicles on the road today. The European Union is also concerned about rising imports from China. The EU opened a trade investigation last year into Chinese government support for its electric vehicle industry. The investigation is ongoing. I'm Dan Novak. American educators and lawmakers are calling for complete bans on smartphone use by students in schools. Most U.S. schools already have rules restricting phone use in class, but administrators and teachers say the measures are difficult to enforce. Educators across the United States say students are using their phones to do many things that can distract their attention during class. These include sending messages, gaming, listening to music, watching videos, checking social media, and shopping. Studies in recent years have confirmed high smartphone usage by young people in America. But an increasing number of educators and experts are now beginning to agree that total bans are necessary to solve the problem. Teachers and lawmakers in a growing number of states have also called for complete phone bans or suggested new ways to limit their use in class. James Granger is a science teacher at a Los Angeles, California high school. He recently told the Associated Press, students used to have an understanding that you aren't supposed to be on your phone in class. Those days are gone. Granger requires students attending his class to place their phones in a special container. The only solution that works is to physically remove the cell phone from the student. Granger said. The latest state intervention on phones in schools came last month in Utah. Governor Spencer Cox, a Republican, urged all school districts and the Board of Education to remove cell phones from classrooms. He explained that studies had repeatedly shown students do better in school when their phones are not available. The studies, Cox noted, found that learning improves, distractions are decreased, and students are more likely to talk to each other if their phones are taken away. We just need a space for six or seven hours a day where kids are not tethered to these devices, Cox told reporters. He said his urging, which does not have the force of law, is part of a larger legislative push to protect children from social media harms. Patrick Truman is a high school teacher in Maryland who bans student phone use during class. Cell phone use is out of control, he told the AP. By that I mean that I cannot control it, even in my own classroom. Truman bought a container that can hold 36 phones, but he says that still, every day, students find ways to hide their phones so they can still use them. Last year, Florida became the first state to strongly restrict phones in schools. A law took effect in July that requires all public schools in the state to ban student cell phone use and block social media services during class. Some school districts went a step further and banned phones for the whole school day. Oklahoma, Vermont, and Kansas also recently introduced what is becoming known as phone free schools legislation. Two U.S. senators, Tom Cotton, an Arkansas Republican, and Tim Cain, a Virginia Democrat, introduced federal legislation in December. The legislation would require a government study on how phone use by students affects their mental health and school progress. The National Center for Education Statistics reports that nationally 77% of U.S. schools say they currently banned phones for non-school use. Education experts, however, say that number is misleading. That is because it does not mean students are actually following the rules or that all schools are enforcing them. Many educators and experts say that for a school phone ban to work, school administrators must be the ones to enforce it. Some students say such policies take away their autonomy and cut off their main method of communication with family and friends. Education has also come from parents who fear they could be cut off from children if there is a school emergency. Kim Whitman is a leader of the Phone Free Schools Movement, a group that advises schools. She told the AP she urges educators to make exceptions for students with special educational and medical needs. I'm Brian Lin. Brian Lin joins me now to talk more about his education report. Hi Brian, thanks for joining me. Sure Ashley, thanks for having me. This week's report dealt with increasing calls by American education officials to completely ban the use of cell phones in schools. Of course, this issue is nothing new. So why is the idea of a total ban receiving new attention now? So yes, there has been a lot of debate not only in the US but in countries around the world about how much, if any, children should be able to use phones during school hours. And I'd say the clear message coming out of this report was that teachers and administrators are really frustrated at the moment because whatever rules they have in place are just not working to solve the problems the phones are causing in the classroom and enforcement is also difficult. So many teachers feel like a complete ban will have the best chance at succeeding and it's also much simpler than establishing more complex restrictions. What were some of the biggest problems the teachers said they are having with their students in class? One of the biggest was many teachers saying that even though they had banned cell phone use in their own classrooms, many students would simply ignore the rule and hide their phones in a place where they could still use them. And this is one reason a lot of educators in the report said the burden of enforcement has to rest with administrators because some students just do not listen to the teachers and don't take the bans seriously. So while they may not obey administration rules either, right now teachers are saying they just need more help. Well, thanks again, Brian, for joining me. You're welcome. Thank you, Ashley. Next, we hear another winning entry from our Teach Us About Ukraine writing contest. It is called Popasna, a town which does not exist. It is read by VOA Learning English's Jill Robbins. My name is Katarina Bezrok and I teach online in Ukraine. Ukraine once said that you should appreciate and enjoy everything that surrounds you. Until the spring of 2022, I did not take these words seriously. It seemed that our cozy and developing town, Popasna, in the Luhansk region, would exist forever. The newly refurbished school, called Lyceum 25, would teach our children and grandchildren. The unity of Hearts Bridge would always be there for lovers. And there would be walks in the forest and swims in the pond. But the war came to our town, a small village with a large railway junction between Luhansk and Donetsk. There was a train repair workshop, a locomotive depot, and a bread factory in town. With its fertile black soil, the area was also home to several agricultural businesses. Why do I use the words was and were? Because everything in Popasna is now gone. And the soil is now black with the residue of bombs and artillery shells. Russian troops attacked Popasna in February and occupied the town on May 8, 2022. The fighting destroyed much of the town, and Russian officials said they would not rebuild Popasna and simply erased it from maps. It was not the first time that Popasna had been occupied. The town suffered under Soviet rule in 1932 to 1933. That was the time the former Soviet Union government's policy led to the deaths of 416 people in Popasna. During World War II, the Nazis operated a prison during their occupation of Popasna. The town was heavily damaged, but was rebuilt after the war. Returning businesses included a bakery, food plant, sewing factory, and a dairy. The 1955 rebuilding also brought rail and transport services, a glass factory, nine schools, five libraries, and a stadium. By 1974, Popasna's population was more than 30,000. Having such experience with rebuilding, I believe that our town will rise again. And nothing shall burn the living record of our memory. I'm Jill Robbins. In this next report, Mario Ritter Jr. tells us about a recent study that examined the special sounds that whales make. We learn that the creatures have a special voice box that permits them to make sound underwater. Pay careful attention to the verb vibrate. We will talk more about it after the report. It is one of the loudest sounds in the ocean, the singing of whales. Now, scientists think they have an idea of how baleen whales do it. They say the large air-breathing sea animals use a special voice box that enables them to make sound underwater. Scientists say the discovery is based on a very small study, but it will direct future research into how whales communicate. The new findings are in a study published recently in the scientific publication Nature. Cohen Elemonds of the University of Southern Denmark and other international scientists studied the voice boxes, or larynxes, of three dead whales from the beaches of Denmark and Scotland. The three were humpback, minky, and say whales. All three are part of the family of baleen whales, a group that includes the blue whale, the largest animal that ever existed on Earth. In the laboratory, the scientists blew air through the voice boxes under controlled conditions to see what tissues might vibrate. They also created computer models of the say whale's vocalizations and matched them to recordings of similar whales taken in the wild. Whales' ancestors were land animals that moved into the oceans about 50 million years ago. Elemonds said the animal's voice box changed over tens of millions of years in order to make sounds underwater. Baleen whales do not have teeth or vocal cords like humans and other mammals. Instead, they have U-shaped tissue in their voice boxes that permits them to breathe a lot of air very quickly. Their voice boxes also contain a large cushion of fat and muscle not seen in other animals. Whales sing by pushing the tissue against the fat and muscle cushion. Milliamonds said baleen whales depend on the production of sound to communicate in the dark of the deep oceans. For example, humpback females and their calves communicate with each other by voice. And humpback males sing to attract females, he added. Jeremy Goldbogen is a professor of oceans at Stanford University who was not involved in the research. He said this is the most comprehensive and significant study to date on how baleen whales vocalize, a long-standing mystery in the field. The whale voice boxes tested were from younger animals, not adult males, who do the singing. Because of that, whale expert Joy Riedenberg said further experiments on adult males are needed to confirm the study's findings. Riedenberg works for the Center for Anatomy and Functional Morphology at the Icon School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York City. She noted that the research is probably as close as we can get to reproducing how whales sing. Right now our technology involves sticking a scope into a whale to see what exactly is vibrating, she said. Since you're never going to be able to do that in a wild animal, these experiments are the next best thing. As loud as whales songs are, the study suggests that whales cannot produce sounds louder than noise from the shipping industry, Elemonds said. They're really affected by shipping noise and it significantly reduces their ability to communicate, he said. There's just no way for them to get louder. Because some whales sing as a mating call, the shipping industry's interference with those songs is a concern, said Michael Noad. He is director of the Center for Marine Science at the University of Queensland in Australia. He also was not part of the nature study. For whale populations that are really dispersed, like the Antarctic Blue Whales, they might not be able to find mates in a noisy ocean environment, he said. However, whales like humpbacks that gather in big numbers are more likely to ignore such noise pollution. I'm Mario Ritter, Jr. Before the report, we asked you to pay careful attention to the verb vibrate. Can you remember when you heard it? You heard the verb a couple of times in the report. The first example was this. In the laboratory, the scientists blew air through the voice boxes under controlled conditions to see what tissues might vibrate. You also heard the verb in a quote from whale expert, Joy Regenberg. Let's listen to that again. Right now, our technology involves sticking a scope into a whale to see what exactly is vibrating, she said. Vibrate means to move back and forth very quickly, often producing sound. We spell vibrate like this, V-I-B-R-A-T-E. You might notice that the two examples we listened to involved different structures. We have might vibrate and is vibrating. In other words, we have the structure modal plus verb, and then we have the progressive form of the verb is vibrating. The modal might changes the meaning of verbs by expressing possibility or ability. So if we are talking about a possibility, we could say that whales have tissues that might vibrate. But if we are talking about a certainty, then we could say that whales have tissues that vibrate. In contrast, we use the progressive form of verbs for things that are ongoing. So you might say that scientists have special tools to look inside whales and see which tissues are vibrating. The general idea of this lesson was to explore how one verb might be used in slightly different forms. While the differences we talked about today might seem small, they are really important to understand. And that's the lesson of the day. I'm John Russell. 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.