At the beginning of the 20th century there were more than a million lions worldwide. Today there are less than 30,000 in the wild. The remaining lions are increasingly threatened by habitat loss, hunting activities to protect farms and cattle.
For generations, Masai tribesmen on the large African plains in southeastern Kenya have hunted lions-to protect their farms and cattle. Today they celebrate the lions’ life. Noah is an elder in the Masai community. “We have decided as a community of the Masai to lay down our spears, and there will be no more killing of lions in our community.” He is part of a group of Masai visiting the United States promoting (推广) the Predator (捕食性动物) Compensation Program.
Conservation International’s Frank Hawkins explains，“The Masai have been living with wildlife for many generations and it has been a conflicting relationship in many ways. They compete with the animals for food as lions eat their cattle. We’re trying to find ways in which the wildlife will become something useful to them.” They had the Predator Compensation Fund founded in 2003. After much discussion, a group of Masai farmers agreed to protect lions. In turn, if lions or other predators kill their cattle, the Masai owner will be paid market value for the dead animals from the fund.
One man said that in the past, when a lion killed cattle, they killed it on the spot. And now, after the start of the program, the Masai see the lion population growing. Since 2003. only four lions have been killed here.
1. What is this passage mainly about?| A．The wildlife in the world. |
| B．Lions and the Masai. |
| C．The reason why lions are killed. |
| D．The living ways of the Masai. |
| A．To protect people in the wild. |
| B．To help the Masai protect their farms and cattle. |
| C．To protect lions only. |
| D．To protect the wildlife. |
| A．because lions were dangerous for people there. |
| B．because dead lions were worth a lot of money. |
| C．because they wanted lions’ meat. |
| D．because they wanted to protect their farms and cattle. |
| A．Reasonable. | B．Cruel. | C．Poor. | D．Stupid. |
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【推荐1】As the Camp Fire continued, killing at least 85 people and displacing thousands more in Northern California, Madison waited there.
Gaylord, the Anatolian shepherd mix’s owner, was not able to get to her home in Paradise, when the fire began to spread, meaning Madison was left behind. For weeks, all Gaylord could do was pray for Madison’s safety, according to California-based animal rescue organization Paw Print Rescue.
Sullivan, a volunteer with the organization, had already helped locate Madison’s brother Miguel in a different city. But Madison was even more difficult to find. Sullivan spotted Madison a few times in a canyon (峡谷), apparently guarding his land, and put out fresh food and water regularly in hopes that the dog would turn up, according to a Facebook post by Sullivan. She even placed an article of clothing that smelled like Gaylord near the home “to keep Madison’s hope alive until his people could return,” Sullivan wrote.
When the evacuation (疏散) order was lifted last week and Gaylord went back to her home—which had been ruined by the fire—her prayers were answered: Madison was there, seemingly protecting what little remained of his family’s home. “Well, I’m so happy to report that Gaylord was allowed to return to her home today and THERE MADISON WAS!!!! He had stayed to protect what was left of his home, and never gave up on his people!” Sullivan wrote in the comment on her Facebook post. “I’m so happy I’m crying as I write this! He didn’t give up through the storms or the fire!” she added.
Soon afterward, Madison was reunited with Miguel for the first time since the fire broke out. An emotional Gaylord said in an interview with the network that she was overcome with joy to see Madison waiting for her. She also expressed how grateful she was to Sullivan. Gaylord said fighting through tears, “You could never ask for better animals. He is the best dog.”
1. What did Madison do during the Camp Fire?| A．He rescued Sullivan. |
| B．He waited for Gaylord. |
| C．He stayed with Miguel. |
| D．He ran away from Paradise. |
| A．To keep Madison warm. |
| B．To get Madison to turn up. |
| C．To help Madison remember his owner. |
| D．To encourage Madison not to give up. |
| A．In a different city. | B．In a canyon. |
| C．At a camp. | D．At his home. |
| A．Patience. | B．Unity. |
| C．Devotion. | D．Wisdom. |
【推荐2】Inside a fishbowl, the goldfish — a species of carp native to East Asia, bred for aesthetic delight and traditionally believed to bring good fortune — is among the easiest of pets to keep. But released into the wild, the seemingly humble goldfish, freed from glass boundaries, can grow to large proportions. They can even kill off native marine wildlife and help destroy fragile and economically valuable ecosystems.
“They can eat anything and everything,” said Christine Boston, an aquatic research biologist with Fisheries and Oceans Canada. Over the past several years, Ms. Boston and her colleagues have been tracking invasive goldfish in Hamilton Harbour, which is on the western tip of Lake Ontario (安大略湖), about 35 miles southwest of Toronto.
Their study, published last month in the Journal of Great Lakes Research, could help pinpoint goldfish populations for culling, said Ms. Boston, who is the lead author. “We found out where they are before they start spawning (产卵),” she said. “That’s a good opportunity to get rid of them.”
The fast-growing female goldfish, Ms. Boston noted, can also reproduce several times in one season. “They have the resources,” she added, “and they can take advantage of them.” Their football-shaped bodies can swell to a size that makes them too large a meal for predators (捕食者) — up to about 16 inches long. The feral goldfish are also destructive, uprooting and consuming plants that are home to native species.
Nicholas Mandrak, a professor of biological sciences at the University of Toronto Scarborough, studies in the “dramatically increase” of the wild population in the past two decades. Their spawning explosion, he said, resulted partly from people in densely-populated areas releasing pets in urban ponds. He added, environmental managers tend to forget the goldfish. “They just assume, ‘It’s been there for 150 years — there’s nothing we can do about it.’”
The problem is not unique to Canada. In Australia, a handful of unwanted pet goldfish and their offspring took over a river in the country’s southwest. And the discovery of football-size creatures in a lake in 2021 even led British officials to beg their citizens: “Please don’t release your pet goldfish into ponds and lakes!”
People wrongly believe that because goldfish are “small and cute” they won’t pose a problem when released into the wild, said Anthony Ricciardi, a professor of invasion ecology at McGill University in Montreal.
Goldfish, he added, are just a small part of a vast invasion of non-native species whose outcomes can be unpredictable, and in some cases, are worsened by climate change.
“Under human influence, beasts are moving faster farther in greater numbers, reaching parts of the planet they could never reach before,” he said. “We’re talking about the redistribution of life on Earth.”
1. Which of the statements about the goldfish is correct?| A．Their place of origin is Canada. | B．They are capable of reproducing. |
| C．They will grow well over 16 inches. | D．They only invade Lake Ontario. |
| A．Killing | B．Controlling | C．Catching | D．Observing |
| A．Citizens wrongly set free the fish. | B．Climate change has a negative impact. |
| C．The environmental management is absent. | D．The food increases in habitats. |
| A．Now goldfish are turning into wild monsters. |
| B．Now goldfish are on the way to become a global issue. |
| C．Now goldfish are attracting scientists to study in. |
| D．Now goldfish are threatening the Great Lakes. |
【推荐3】Unlike children and apes (猿), dogs generally know when people are being deceitful (骗人的), a new study suggests. According to the researchers at the University of Vienna, the dogs could follow their own intuition (直觉) when given misleading instructions by humans about where the food was.
The 260 dogs for the study were presented with two buckets (桶), one of which contained dog food that the dogs could access by knocking off a paper lid with their nose or paw. The dogs were at first trained to trust a person they had never met, called the “communicator”, to help them find the food from the correct bucket. The communicator would point to the food-filled bucket, look at the dog and then say “Look, this is good, this is very good!” to encourage the dog towards the food.
After establishing this trust between the communicator and the dogs, the researchers added the all-important part of deception into the mix. The dogs watched another stranger, known as “the hider”, move the dog food from one bucket (bucket A) to another (bucket B). This was done both with and without the communicator in the room—so the communicator was either witness to the switch or they weren't. In both of these conditions, the communicator would recommend bucket A to the dog, which was now empty.
Across the two conditions, more dogs followed their own visual experience of where the food had been hidden rather than the communicator's suggestion. About two-thirds of dogs ignored the communicator who had witnessed the food switch and went on to recommend empty bucket A.
According to Huber, dogs did not rely on the communicator anymore, which contrasts with previous studies involving apes and children under five years. In these previous studies, if a communicator had witnessed a switch but recommended an empty bowl of food, young children and apes would follow their misguiding advice.
“Dogs do not follow human wrong pointing gestures blindly, although sometimes they find them difficult to ignore,” they conclude. “Instead, they can adjust their behaviour flexibly depending on the trustworthiness of the people giving information and can recognize between helpful and unhelpful experimenters.”
1. Why does the author mention “children and apes” in the first paragraph?| A．To explain a rule. | B．To make a prediction. |
| C．To introduce a discovery. | D．To clarify a concept. |
| A．Misled the dogs. | B．Watched the dogs' behavior. |
| C．Raised the dogs. | D．Emptied the food-filled bucket. |
| A．By following what they had seen. | B．By using their sense of smell. |
| C．By taking the misleading advice. | D．By ignoring the researchers' order. |
| A．Dogs—The Best Food Seeker |
| B．Dogs Are Smarter Than You |
| C．Dogs—Humans' Best Companions |
| D．Dogs Know When You Are Telling Lies |
【推荐1】Australia recently declared the koala an endangered species in Queensland, the Australian Capital Territory, and New South Wales (NSW) because of its obvious population decline. In the state of NSW, koala conservation has become a key topic of discussion in the lead-up to the 25 March state election. However, the debate has focused on the expansion of protected areas and ignored the importance of koala conservation on private lands.
The major cause of the koala’s decline—in addition to climate change, wildfires, disease, and encounters with vehicles and dogs—is the loss and degradation(退化)of suitable habitat. In response, the NSW Government has expanded publicly protected areas in the state. Over the past 20 years—about three koala generations—NSW has officially confirmed an additional 1.5 million hectares(公顷)of protected land, some of which is high-quality koala habitat.
However, across Queensland, the Australian Capital Territory and NSW, 77% of the koala’s range is located on land that is owned or rented by private citizens or businesses, where degradation continues. Between 2003 and 2020, agriculture, forestry and infrastructure(基础设施)development have led to the act of cutting down or burning the trees within 760,500 hectare in NSW, including in regions such as the Cumberland Plain and Liverpool Plains, where koalas are known to live. Such development has reduced the gains made through new protected areas.
The current NSW Koala Strategy adopts a free approach without any restrictions, which leaves private landowners, renters and industry have the power to decide what should be done in much of koala habitat conservation.
An effective koala conservation strategy must include conservation measures in private protected areas, such as payments for ecosystem services, in addition to publicly protected areas. In other words, post-election agendas must strengthen protection of koala habitats on private lands.
1. What did the discussion before the state election fail to notice?| A．The voice of local citizens. | B．The expansion of protected areas. |
| C．The decrease of koala population. | D．The koala conservation on private lands. |
| A．the attack of diseases | B．the spreading wildfires |
| C．the worsening of living environment | D．the constant threats from climate change |
| A．Add some background information. | B．Summarize the previous paragraphs. |
| C．Introduce a new topic for discussion. | D．Offer some advice for the government. |
| A．Supportive. | B．Disapproving. |
| C．Tolerant. | D．Unclear. |
【推荐2】A decade ago biologists identified a remote protected area in northern Laos, called Nam Et-Phou Louey, as the country’s probable last heaven for wild tigers. To formally test this assumption, researchers set up 300 camera stations in 2013 and quickly confirmed two tigers’ presence. But the success was short-lived: over their four-year study, they never saw those or any other tigers again.
This result, reported last October in Global Ecology and Conservation, confirms that tigers are now functionally extinct in Laos. The researchers also found that leopards, formerly believed to still live in the park, have vanished as well. “For the remaining protected areas in Southeast Asia for tigers, this was an important one — maybe even a potential jewel in the crown,” says senior author David Macdonald, a wildlife expert at the University of Oxford. “To find that jewel has been dull is destructive. ”
Laos’s tiger loss is part of an alarming sign across Southeast Asia; the animals have already disappeared from Vietnam and Cambodia. In almost every study site Macdonald and his colleagues have surveyed, wild tigers — which number fewer than 4,000 worldwide — are in steep decline or completely absent. So are once common leopards. Habitat loss is partly to blame, but Macdonald says that the main driver is “the astonishing trend of poaching. Leading international nonprofit groups support anti-poaching efforts in Laos’s main protected areas, but as in many other countries, poachers still find ways to kill wildlife. Without protections against people doing large-scale hunting, the wildlife will go. ”
Tigers can live in human-dominated landscapes: India has the world’s second highest population, but it has favourable tiger conservation and now hosts two thirds of the planet’s remaining wild tigers. Macdonald says the respective examples of India and Laos offer lessons for countries such as Thailand, which still has about 200 wild tigers; protecting habitat is critical but so is fighting against poaching and reducing demand for big cat parts. “One way or another,” he adds, “people have to change.”
1. What’s David Macdonald’s attitude towards the research result?| A．Indifferent | B．Pessimistic | C．Positive | D．Objective |
| A．Leopards have been extinct in southeastAsia. |
| B．Poaching is the only cause of tiger loss in southeastAsia. |
| C．It’s urgent to take measures against poaching in many Asian countries. |
| D．Anti-poaching efforts in Laos’main protected areas has achieved a huge success. |
| A．absorbs | B．defends | C．holds | D．exposes |
| A．The future of wild tigers in Thailand is uncertain. |
| B．India is faced with a tough task in protecting wild tigers. |
| C．Macdonald thinks that the main reason for tiger loss is habitat decrease. |
| D．After 2013, biologists never identified any presence of tigers again in northern Laos. |
【推荐3】For years, David James, who studies insects at Washington State University, had wanted to examine the migration (迁徙)patterns of West Coast monarch butterflies (黑脉金斑蝶). The route the butterflies travel has been hardly known because the populations are too small to follow. For every 200 monarchs tagged (打标签)by a researcher, only one is usually recovered at the end of its trip, James says, and finding even 200 in the wild to tag is unlikely. Knowing the route is vital to conservation efforts, but James had no way to figure it out- until he got a phone call from Washington State Penitentiary in Walla Walla.
The prison was looking for new activities to improve the mental health of those serving long-term sentences. So James began working with prisoners to raise monarchs through the whole process of their transformation. The adult insects were then tagged and released from the prison. Over five years, nearly 10, 000 monarchs flew from the facility. Elsewhere in Washington, Oregon and Idaho, researchers released another few thousand.
The tags included email addresses, and soon after the first butterflies took off, James started receiving messages from people who had spotted them. The butterflies, the reports confirmed, wintered in coastal California. Twelve of them landed at Lighthouse Field State Beach in Santa Cruz. Several more headed to Bolinas and Morro Bay.
The work helps researchers identify ideal places to plant milkweed and other vegetation that are important to the life cycle of West Coast monarch butterflies. It also brought out the gentler side of some of the prisoners. “They were very worried that they were going to harm the butterflies, ”James says. Watching the monarch change their form also touched the men. “This butterfly changed, ” James recalls prisoners telling him, “and maybe we can too. ”
1. What was hard for David to do in his study?| A．Gain financial support. | B．Hire qualified workers. |
| C．Build a new laboratory. | D．Find enough monarchs. |
| A．To guarantee their safety. |
| B．To enable them to fly longer distances. |
| C．To track their travel routes. |
| D．To distinguish them from other species. |
| A．The patience the butterflies showed. |
| B．The hardship the butterflies underwent. |
| C．The transformation of the butterflies. |
| D．The devotion of James to the butterflies. |
| A．The impact of the research. |
| B．The findings of James’ study. |
| C．The release of the prisoners. |
| D．The life cycle of the butterflies. |
【推荐1】Reggie Carrillo is an environmental activist who lives in the Southwestern U.S. city of Phoenix, Arizona. He recently said that climate change affects the temperatures of city neighborhoods. “To understand climate change, to understand the urban heat island effect, you have to understand the history,” said Carrillo. He wants to share his knowledge with his neighbors to cool his community.
In Phoenix, some neighborhoods do not have many trees and open spaces. Temperatures are as much as seven degrees Celsius higher than in other areas of Phoenix with more trees. Those parts of the city were built with mostly roads and buildings but not much green space. That has helped create what Carrillo and others call an “urban heat island”.
Carrillo has learned about the city’s history by attending the Urban Heat Leadership Academy run by groups trying to conserve natural resources. It gets involved in cities like Phoenix and Atlanta, Georgia by planting trees and building community gardens.
The academy helps teach people like Carrillo about why their living areas are so hot. It also teaches them how to organize activities that will help cool things down. It is making public art to teach people about climate change and is giving out small trees for people to plant.
In Phoenix, Carrillo has learned that people who live in poor parts of the city often sleep with their windows closed on hot nights because they are worried about crime. He said “the rest of us need to know what people experience” so organizations like this can “combat the problem.” Carrillo hopes to build a walking area that will be known as a “cool corridor”, a place that has local plants that can help reduce temperatures.
Summer temperatures in Phoenix can be dangerous. Last summer, the highest temperature was over 46 degrees Celsius. The heat was blamed for over 300 deaths. So they are planting fruit trees including peaches, apples and oranges to get enough food in another part of Phoenix each day. What a great project!
1. What caused “urban heat island” in Phoenix?| A．Too many trees were cut down. |
| B．Not enough green space was left. |
| C．The ground temperature rose too quickly. |
| D．People destroyed natural resources randomly. |
| A．Donating trees to his neighborhood. |
| B．Building several gardens by himself. |
| C．Enriching people’s knowledge on heat island. |
| D．Founding the Urban heat Leadership Academy. |
| A．The poor parts of Phoenix are not safe to live in. |
| B．The city Phoenix is filled with violence and crime. |
| C．A cool corridor is built in order to beautify the city. |
| D．A walking area is a place where people plant local trees. |
| A．Phoenix City, hot or cool? |
| B．Temperature, dangerous or not? |
| C．Carrillo, the hero of Phoenix |
| D．Plants, the cooler of Phoenix |
【推荐2】Two days after eight e-sports (电子竞技) games were officially announced to be included in the 19th Asian Games, China’s Edward Gaming (EDG) team earned its first League of Legends World Championship title with a 3-2 win over South Korea in a tough battle on November 7th, immediately drawing cheers from people around the country. The topic “EDG wins” had been viewed more than 2.63 billion times as of press on Sina Weibo, ranking the top trending topic for a long time.
With the popularity of digital technology, new forms of cultural exchanges have been appearing, of which e-sports are the most popular. Unlike texts and videos, e-sports go beyond the barriers of language and are understandable around the world. E-sports mostly appeal to those in their early 20s, as shown by the carnival (狂欢) of college students. That in turn makes them a good bridge of communication between young Chinese people and their counterparts (对应的人) around the world.
More importantly, the e-sports industry is sustainable in spreading Chinese culture, as the large audiences mean huge commercial potential. In 2020 alone, the sales revenue of the domestic e-sports industry exceeded 278.69 billion yuan, and involved 280,000 enterprises which in turn created over 10 million jobs. According to a media report, nearly 95 percent of graduates from e-sports majors at the Communication University of China in Nanjing, succeeded in finding a job after graduation this year, with 62 percent of them devoted to the e-sports industry, including video game clubs, game design companies and game competition operation companies.
The inclusion of e-sports in major sporting events has been a much-discussed topic in recent years. With more Chinese gaming clubs and teams emerging, the industry is expected to further prosper and continue spreading Chinese culture to the world.
1. What did people on Chinese social media cheer for?| A．Eight e-sports would be included in Asian Games. |
| B．China’s e-sports industry was recognized by the world. |
| C．EDG won the League of Legends World Championship. |
| D．The 19th Asian Games were announced to be held in China. |
| A．They appeal to people of all ages. |
| B．They become a symbol of Chinese culture. |
| C．They result in the development of digital technology. |
| D．They strengthen the bond between young people around the world. |
| A．The high demands on e-sports players. |
| B．The difficulties of developing e-sports. |
| C．The importance of game design companies. |
| D．The contributions of e-sports industry to the economy. |
| A．Hopeful. | B．Ambiguous. |
| C．Doubtful. | D．Conservative. |
【推荐3】When David Edwards founded the oPhone, he hoped scent (嗅觉的) messages would become the next big thing in the digitization of our online lives.
The device looked like a high-tech cruet set (调味瓶)， and allowed a friend with an iPhone app to send you scent messages alongside photos. Send a picture of your dinner, tag it with four different tones, and whoever is on the receiving end can sniff it from the vase-like tubes of the oPhone.
The oPhone didn’t take off, and the company has now shifted focus to a “scent speaker” called the Cyrano, which similarly uses a range of scent capsules to emit “play lists” of smells.
Compared to our real world interactions, our online lives are lacking in scent. Our digital culture, so soaked in visual and aural stimuli, is odorless (没有气味的). So why didn’t his marriage of smell and picture messaging excite more interest?
From a technical point of view, smell is simply harder to mass communicate than sounds and pictures. “There are two main technological obstacles to making smell transmissible by digital means,” explains biophysicist and author of Perfumes: The A -Z guide, Dr Luca Turin.
“First, there are no odor ‘primaries’like RGB or CMYK. Second, it has proved impossible to stimulate the olfactory epithelium (上皮组织) directly by any means tried so far. This means that it is currently impossible to induce a sensation of smell without there being an actual chemical in the inhaled air (吸入的空气).”
“The more we’re plugged into the virtual world, the more we deeply appreciate thecontrast-moments in our human, experience，” says designer and olfactory artist Mindy Yang.
“Intuitively, we realize that we are starved of certain sensations. With the rise of digital culture, society has become more interested in the missing sense-c-what we smell.”
This interest in scent isn’t only happening within the worlds of perfume and fashion. Over the past few years a number of cultural projects have set out to focus on the power of sensory experiences, from the use of a smell map, to the Tate Sensorium, which in 2015 let users experience visual art alongside smells, tastes and sounds.
Whether it’s devices like the oPhone that仕y to introduce scent into digital messaging, organizations are growingly aware of our culture’s desire for sensory experiences. In a time of virtual reality and scentless social networks, it’s perhaps no wonder that we as a culture have such a desire for something that instinctively feels real and authentic-even if it was made in a lab.
1. What can we learn about the oPhone?| A．The oPhone has defended our interest in what we smell. |
| B．The oPhone hasn’t caught on yet since it was founded. |
| C．The oPhone has swapped visual and aural stimuli for scent. |
| D．The oPhone is a vase tube to sniff specific messages from. |
| A．The relevant tissue is impossible to stimulate directly. |
| B．Scent capsules should be applied to send out smells. |
| C．There exists no actual chemical in the inhaled air. |
| D．Sounds and pictures are easier to mass communicate. |
| A．To promote the oPhone which can send scent messages. |
| B．To reveal the problems of the invention of the oPhone. |
| C．To predict the trend of the digitization of our online lives. |
| D．To introduce the oPhone based on smell-digital-technology. |
【推荐1】A woman in Pulaski, Virginia, says she was stopped by a squirrel, who pulled on her leg repeatedly and led her to help its injured baby.
Tia Powell was walking in Kiwanis Park when she was “approached by a squirrel”, the Pulaski Police Department wrote on Facebook. The squirrel stood in her way on the path. After realizing that the squirrel did not mean any harm and wasn’t going to leave her side, Powell turned around and the squirrel led her down the path to a baby squirrel with an injured leg.
At one point, Powell wasn’t sure she could help and she began walking and the squirrel followed her again and actually pulled her trouser leg! So, she fed the squirrels a sandwich she had with her and watched them try to Jump up into a tree. When she realized the baby squirrel was still struggling to get up the tree, she decided to call in backup. Powell called the Pulaski Police Department.
Powell didn’t know how the baby squirrel got injured, but she thought a nearby street cat was the culprit (肇事者). So, the group of rescuers decided to move the squirrels to safer area. “We were able to get the baby and mother to a different area with more trees and it was able to climb all the way up and they looked very happy,” Powell said.
She went back a few days later to show her kids where it all went down. In the trees, Powell spotted two squirrels staring at her, and couldn’t help but wonder if they were the same squirrels she rescued.
1. Why did the squirrel stop Tia Powell?| A．To attack her side. |
| B．To save its baby. |
| C．To ask her the way. |
| D．To pull her trousers. |
| A．Turned and walked away. |
| B．Helped them into a tree. |
| C．Left a sandwich for them. |
| D．Reported them to the police. |
| A．The baby squirrel itself. | B．The mother squirrel. |
| C．A street cat. | D．Tia Powell’s kid. |
| A．Cheerful. | B．Doubtful. |
| C．Sensitive. | D．Unhappy. |
【推荐2】Many people think that communication is the source of most of their work-related conflicts but they'd be wrong. In a work context, more conflicts come from structural relationships and personal differences than communication itself.
Organizations create job descriptions, specialized work groups, and authority relationships, all with the intent to improve coordination (协调). But in doing so, they separate people and create the potential for conflicts. For instance, departments within organizations have diverse goals. Purchasing is concerned with the timely acquisition of materials and supplies at low prices; quality control's attention is focused on improving quality and ensuring that the organization's products meet standard…When groups within an organization seek diverse ends, there is increased potential for conflicts.
Have you ever met people to whom you took an immediate disliking? Most of the opinions they expressed, you disagreed with. Even insignificant characteristics-the way they cocked their head when they talked or smirked when they smiled-annoyed you. We've all met people like that, and many of us have to work with people like this.
Today's organizations are increasingly diverse in terms of age, gender and race. So, not surprisingly, employees differ on the importance they place on general values such as responsibility, equality and ambition. They also differ on job-related values such as the importance of family over work or freedom against authority. These differences often surface in work-related interactions and create significant interpersonal conflicts.
The above doesn't mean that communication can't be a source of conflicts. It can. Differing word connotations, insufficient exchange of information, poor listening skills, and the like, create conflicts. But the belief that “we can deal with our differences if we just communicate more” is not necessarily true. The evidence actually shows that the potential for conflicts increases when there is too much communication as well as when there's too little.
So when you're trying to manage conflicts, take a thoughtful look at their source. It's more likely that the conflict is coming from work-related requirements, personality differences, or dissimilar values, it is from poor communication. And that might influence the actions you take to resolve the conflict.
1. From Para.2, we know that in an organization, __________.| A．job descriptions can effectively improve cooperation |
| B．different goals of branches may cause disagreements |
| C．division of labor usually results inharmonious relationship |
| D．the setting of different departments is to encourage competition |
| A．fewer conflicts will appear if we communicate more |
| B．most people share similar values in the same organization |
| C．communication is just one of the reasons for most conflicts |
| D．we'd better calm down before taking action when in conflict |
A． | B． |
C． | D． |
【推荐3】Hardware in general, and smartphones in particular, have become a huge environmental and health problem in the Global South's landfill sites （垃圾填埋场）.
Electronic waste（ e-waste ） currently takes up 5 percent of all global waste, and it is set to increase rapidly as more of us own more than one smartphone, laptop and power bank. They end up in places like Agbogbloshie on the outskirts of Ghana's capital, Accra. It is the biggest e-waste dump in the world, where 10, 000 informal workers walk through tons of abandoned goods as part of an informal recycling process. They risk their health searching for the precious metals that are found in abandoned smartphones.
But Agbogbloshie should not exist. The Basel Convention, a 1989 treaty, aims to prevent developed nations from unauthorized dumping of e-waste in less developed countries. The e-waste industry, however, circumvents the regulations by exporting e-waste labelled as "secondhand goods" to poor countries like Ghana, knowing full well that it is heading for a landfill site.
A recent report found Agbogbloshie contained some of the most dangerous chemicals. This is not surprising: smartphones contain chemicals like mercury （水银），lead and even arsenic（砷）. Reportedly, one egg from a free-range chicken in Agbogbloshie contained a certain chemical which can cause cancer and damage the immune system at a level that's about 220 times greater than a limit set by the European Food Safety Authority（EFSA） . Most worryingly, these poisonous chemicals are free to pollute the broader soil and water system. This should concern us all, since some of Ghana's top exports are cocoa and nuts.
Some governments have started to take responsibility for their consumers' waste. For example, Germany has started a project that includes a sustainable （可持续的）recycling system at Agbogbloshie, along with a health clinic for workers. However, governments cannot solve the problem alone, as there is an almost limitless consumer demand for hardware, especially when governments green policies are focused on issues like climate change.
Only the manufacturers can fix this. A more economically sustainable and politically possible solution is through encouraging hardware manufacturers to make the repair, reuse and recycling of hardware profitable, or at least cost-neutral.
1. What can we infer from Paragraph 2？| A．Electronic products need improving urgently. |
| B．Electronic waste is too complex to get fully recycled. |
| C．Electronic waste requires more landfill sites across Ghana. |
| D．Electronic pollution is a burning question in Agbogbloshie. |
| A．Tightens. | B．Abolishes. |
| C．Gets around. | D．Brings in. |
| A．The violation of EFSA's standards. |
| B．The lack of diversity in Ghana's exports. |
| C．The damage to chicken's immune system. |
| D．The threat of polluted food around the world. |
| A．Manufacturers' developing a sustainable hardware economy. |
| B．Governments' adjusting their green policies about e-waste. |
| C．Reducing customers 'demands for electronic products. |
| D．Letting governments take on the main responsibility. |
