Welcome to Learning English, a daily 30-minute program from the Voice of America.

I'm Katie Weaver.

And I'm Mario Ritter Jr.

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 show, we have a story from Ecuador. A town in the country's Central Highlands is famous for its production of the frozen sweet treat called ice cream.

However, that industry is now threatened by daily power outages.

As Jill Robbins reports, officials there say dry weather is causing problems for hydroelectric

energy operations that the ice cream businesses depend on.

We also hear from Anna Mateo.

She tells about efforts to save stranded sea turtles.

Over the last 20 years, the number of stranded sea turtles has increased in the waters off the northeastern coast of the United States.

John Russell presents our program Education Tips.

This week, he talks to the Assistant Director of the English Language Institute at the University of Tennessee,

Knoxville. They discuss question asking and the development of critical thinking skills.

Finally, we will close the show with the lesson of the day. But now, here's Jill.

In Ecuador, power outages threaten ice cream businesses in the small town of Salcedo in the

country's central highlands. Ice cream production in Salcedo in the country's central highlands.

Ice cream production in Salcedo began in the middle of the 1900s.

Women working in a Roman Catholic religious center there would make a fruit drink with milk from the area's dairy farms. One of the female religious workers, called Nuns, began collecting the unused drink mixture.

She turned it into creamy popsicles, frozen treats that quickly became popular.

The nuns sold the popsicles in town to gather money for the poor. But the people of

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