There are limited natural fresh water resources on Nauru. Rooftop storage tanks collect rainwater, but the islanders are mostly dependent on three desalination plants housed at Nauru's Utilities Agency. Nauru's climate is hot and very humid year-round because of its proximity to the equator and the ocean. Nauru is hit by monsoon rains between November and February, but does not typically experience cyclones. Annual rainfall is highly variable and is influenced by the El Niño-Southern Oscillation, with several significant recorded droughts. The temperature on Nauru ranges between and during the day and between and at night.
As an island, Nauru is vulnerable to climate and sea level change. Nauru is the seventh most global warming threatened nation due to flooding. At least 80 per cent of the land of Nauru is well elevated, but this area will be uninhabitable until the phosphate mining rehabilitation programme is implemented.
Nauru is divided into fourteen administrative districts which are grouped into eight electoral constituencies.
Noun
A noun is a kind of word (see part of speech) that is usually the name of something such as a person, place, thing, animal, or idea. In English, nouns can be singular or plural.
Nouns often need a word called an article or (like "the" or "that"). These words usually do not go with other kinds of words like verbs or adverbs. (For example, people do not also describe nouns). In English, there are more nouns than any other kind of word.
Every language in the world has nouns, but they are not always used in the same ways. They also can have different properties in different languages. In some other languages, nouns do not change for singular and plural, and sometimes there is no word for "the".
Examples of nouns: "time, people, way, year, government, day, world, life, work, part, number, house, system, company, end, party, information".
The word noun comes from the Latin "nomen" meaning "name." Words like nouns were described in early days by the Sanskrit grammarian and ancient Greeks like Dionysios Thrax.
In English sentences, nouns can be used as a subject, object, or complement. They often come after prepositions, as the 'object of preposition'.
Nouns can sometimes describe other nouns (such as a soccer ball). When they do this, they are called modifiers or adjuncts.
There are also verb forms that can be used in the same way as nouns (such as 'I like "running".') These are called "verbals" or "verbal nouns", and include "participles" (which can also be adjectives) and "infinitives".
Nouns are classified into common and proper. Pronouns have commonly been considered a different part of speech from nouns, but in the past some grammars have included them as nouns as do many modern linguists.
Proper nouns (also called proper name) are specific names. Examples of proper nouns are: "London, John, God, October, Mozart, Saturday, Coke, Mr. Brown, Atlantic Ocean." Proper nouns are individual things with names, not general nouns.
Proper nouns begin with an (capital) letter in English and many other languages that use the Roman alphabet. (However, in German, all nouns begin with an upper case letter.) The word "I" is really a pronoun, although it is capitalized in English, like a proper noun.
Some common nouns (see below) can also be used as proper nouns. For example, someone might be named 'Tiger Smith' -- even though he is not a tiger or a smith.
Common nouns are general names. Sometimes the same word can be either a common noun or a proper noun, depending on how it is used; for example:
In English and many other languages, nouns have 'number'. But some nouns are only singular (such as "furniture, physics") and others are only plural (such as "clothes, police"). Also, some nouns are countable (for example, "one piece, two pieces") but others are uncountable (for example, we do not say "one furniture, two furnitures").
The plural form of most nouns is created simply by adding the letter(s) -(e)s.
Despite plural forms being written using the letter(s) -(e)s, the pronunciation of the letter(s) will pronounced as /-s/, /-z/, or /-ız/ depending on which type of phoneme, or unique sound, comes before it. These variations of the plural morpheme are called allomorphs.
Some dictionaries list "busses" as an acceptable plural for "bus". Presumably, this is because the plural "buses" looks like it ought to rhyme with the plural of "fuse," which is "fuses." "Buses" is still listed as the preferable plural form. "Busses" is the plural for "buss," a seldom used word for "kiss."
There are several nouns that have irregular plural forms. Plurals formed in this way are sometimes called mutated (or mutating) plurals.
Many of the above irregular plural forms stem from Old English, which had more complex rules for making plural forms.
And, finally, there are nouns that maintain their Latin or Greek form in the plural.
Nouns are words for things, and since things can be possessed, nouns can also change to show possession in grammar. In English, we usually add an apostrophe and an "s" to nouns to make them "possessive", or sometimes just an apostrophe when there is already an "s" at the end, like this:
Most adjectives become nouns by adding the suffix -ness. Example: Take the adjective 'natural', add 'ness' to get 'naturalness', a noun. To see a list of 100 adjectives used in Basic English, click here.
A noun phrase is a phrase where the head word is a noun. In English, the word order of most noun phrases is that determiners, adjectives, and modifying nouns in respective order must appear before the head word, and relative clauses must appear after the head word.
Nature
The words nature and natural are used for all the things that are normally not made by humans. Things like weather, organisms, landforms, celestial bodies and much more are part of nature. Scientists study the way the parts of nature work. Things that have been made by people are said to be man-made or called artifacts.
There are natural sciences that study different parts of nature, for example the science of ecology is about plants and animals as a whole, while biology studies every type of living thing.
From one point of view, humans are a prime example of nature, and are the most widely studied natural inhabitants of the planet earth. Humans interact with each other in their natural environment on a day-to-day basis. Every part of nature everything from the air outside to the dirt on the ground is interdependent. Medicine studies humans in health and sickness.
From another point of view, humans and nature can be said to be in conflict. Nature is often seen by humans as natural resources. People cut down trees, mine ores, and grow crops. Fires, cars, and factories make a lot of smoke and harm many places. People who like to leave nature unharmed and those who feel they need to use more of nature often fight about what they should do. In the modern world, with many more people and many big cities, these problems are becoming more serious.
Nature, in the broadest sense, means the physical world as a whole. This is the meaning that physics, the study of nature (etymologically), takes.
A useful definition of "natural" is
Natural resource
A natural resource is what people can use which comes from the natural environment. Examples of natural resources are air, water, wood, oil, wind energy, natural gas, iron, and coal.
The dividing line between natural resources and man-made resources is not clear-cut. Hydro-electric energy is not a natural resource because people use turbines to convert the energy from moving water. Petroleum and iron ores are natural, but need work to make them into usable refined oil and steel. Atomic energy comes from metallic nuclear fuels, like fissionable uranium and plutonium, but natural rocks need technical work to make them into these nuclear fuels.
We often say there are two sorts of natural resources: renewable resources and non-renewable resources.