Burning coal for energy adds planet-warning carbon dioxide (CO2) to Earth’s atmosphere. As the planet heats up, experts warn that simply cutting greenhouse gas emissions (排放) will not be enough to avoid global warming. CO2 must also be removed from the atmosphere.
Existing experimental machines that pull CO2 directly from the air are too expensive to be widely used. But a new effective technology to remove CO2 already exists. It is not expensive and easy. It is forests. Planting trees and watching forests are effective ways to clean the air.
Forests used to cover large areas of the Appalachian Mountains in the eastern United States. In the state of West Virginia, coal mining let the land there bare, without trees. Over the years, coal mining and cutting forests took over 90 percent of the red spruce (云杉) forests.
Chris Barton works for the University of Kentucky. He started a group called Green Forests Work, aiming to put trees back on the roughly 400,000 hectares of land.
However, Barton explains the land has problems. “If you planted trees on these places, they just didn’t grow. The ground was too hard. Water didn’t infiltrate (渗透). The trees can’t root. Oxygen can’t circulate in those environments.” Using heavy equipment, workers tear the ground. In this way, the trees put down roots.
Barton says not everyone believes the solution is a good idea. “We’ve had a lot of doubtful look at us twice from people. But after we do it, there’s no question that it was the right thing to do.” And it has worked. Forests are coming back to the grounds.
Scientists say that, in West Virginia alone, restoring red spruce forests to the area could send what is equal to 56 million barrels (桶) of oil into the ground. But it will take time — a long time. Around the world, experts say, nature offers powerful tools to fight climate change. But patience is needed. Nature works, but slowly, in its own time.
1. What is the economical and effective way to remove CO2 from the air?A.Inventing new and powerful machines. |
B.Cutting greenhouse gas emissions. |
C.Making use of natural gases instead of coal |
D.Planting trees and protecting forests. |
A.Destroy. | B.Repair. | C.Cry. | D.Cover. |
A.Oxygen is not enough for trees to grow there. |
B.Too many rocks had made it hard to plant trees. |
C.Coal mining has spoiled the land through years. |
D.There is no water for trees to grow there. |
A.a painful process | B.a slow process |
C.a creative process | D.a learning process |
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【推荐1】Lisa Gautier receives nearly a dozen parcels of human hair every day. With her San-Francisco-based non-profit organization Matter of Trust, Gautier turns donated hair into mats used to soak up oil spills on land, and booms(long tubes)used for spills at sea.
A standard way to clean up oil from land is to use mats made from polypropylene(聚丙烯). But polypropylene is a non-biodegradable plastic, and producing it ultimately means more drilling for oil. Hair, by contrast, is an environmentally friendly resource that can soak up around five times its weight in oil, according to Matter of Trust, and it is abundant.
Oil spills can pollute drinking water, endanger public health, harm plants and wildlife, and damage the economy. According to Gautier, the spills that hit the headlines only make up 5% of global oil pollution.
Megan Murray, an environmental biologist at the University of Technology Sydney, develops sustainable technologies to tackle oil spills. Her research indicates that as well as being biodegradable, human hair is often just as effective as polypropylene, and in some circumstances even better. “The hair mats are very beneficial to land spills,” says Murray but adds that when raw oil is spilled on beach sand, it is very difficult to absorb it using any of the materials she has tested. Another advantage of hair is that it costs less than conventional materials and is “globally available as a recycled material,” she says.
However, Murray cautions that hair mats are not a perfect solution, because they are single-use, and can only be dealt with by burning or by burying into soil which then isn’t suitable for growing food. She is now researching methods to extract the oil from a used hair mat, meaning both can be reused.
As the hair mat designs aren’t under patent, other groups have begun producing their own mats and booms. Gautier is pleased to see the movement growing. “Anyone can make a hair mat,” she says. “It creates green jobs, it cleans water, it reduces waste in landfill, and it’s promoting renewable resources.”
1. What do we know about polypropylene according to the passage?A.It is environmentally friendly. |
B.People need more oil to produce it. |
C.It can soak up around five times its weight in oil. |
D.People seldom use mats made from it to clean up oil from land. |
A.Hair mats do no harm to soil after being burnt. |
B.People spend more to make hair mats than conventional materials. |
C.The effect of hair mats on terrestrial(陆地上的)spills is not very good. |
D.Hair mats are not a perfect solution because they can’t be recycled now. |
A.Most oil-spill events have received widespread media coverage. |
B.Lisa Gautier donated her hair to soak up oil spills on land and at sea. |
C.Megan Murray goes all out to make the hair mats and the oil extracted from them reused. |
D.There are many other materials used to treat oil spills on beach sand besides hair. |
A.Human Hair Is Being Used to Clean Up Oil Spills |
B.A Perfect Recycled Material—Human Hair |
C.Take Action to Make Hair Mats And Booms |
D.How to Tackle Oil Spills |
At the end of the year, it designs events to help children celebrate Christmas without increasing the amount of waste they create. Hanna Seligmann works for the foundation. “So let’s figure out what is in our bag of trash.” She shows adults and children how to reduce waste during the holiday gift-giving season. “You can sort it as a cardboard item or you can sort it as a plastic item.” “We encourage using things that are already in your house like newspaper, old magazines, using a gift within a gift.” Urging people to recycle is important in the Washington, D.C., area, because Potomac River, one of the most famous rivers in the country lies there.
“Over time we realized that really just doing trash cleanups was the symptom of the problem, not getting to the root cause. And so it was just a little over a decade ago that we started the initiative (倡议) itself.” says Seligman.
The Trash Free Potomac Watershed Initiative is an effort by the Alice Ferguson Foundation to support clean agricultural methods. It includes educational programs teaching children about the kinds of pollution that can enter the watershed.
One activity is called the Trash Timeline Game. It teaches children that the things they throw away do not decompose, at the same rate. For example, paper dissolves in about four weeks. An apple core may take two months to rot. A metal can take up to 100 years.
1. The Alice Ferguson Foundation ________.A.devotes itself to keeping citizens engaged in going green |
B.deals with relationship between people |
C.teaches people how to form groups |
D.concerns itself about children’s holidays |
A.buying plastic items |
B.celebrating Christmas |
C.figuring out how much waste was produced |
D.educating people to reduce less waste while enjoying Christmas |
A.Environmental education. | B.Doing trash cleanups. |
C.Saving water. | D.Celebrating holidays less. |
A.Give off. | B.Break down. | C.Come out. | D.Pack up. |
【推荐3】Spray bacteria may prevent its spread
Desertification is a big problem for China. Overgrazing by livestock has destroyed much of the layer of lichen, algae and mosses—the cryptobiotic crust (隐生物壳) that binds the sand and soil to the ground.
Planting hardy grasses helps keeping sand in place, but the wind can still blow away particles (颗粒) between the grasses.
Grown in nearby ponds, the cyanobacteria are trucked into the desert every few days and spray over the dunes, where they form sticky substances that hold soil particles in place and prevent them from being blown away. Cyanobacteria get their energy from sunlight through photosynthesis, and as part of the chemical reactions involved, they absorb carbon from the atmosphere and provide the organic matter the soil needs to be productive.
Hu’s long-running trials shows that after eight years, dunes treated with cyanobacteria developed a biological crust nearly 1 centimetre thick when on the shady side of dunes.
The method is vital if semi-arid regions are going to recover on a reasonable timescale, says Brian Whitton, an ecologist at Durham University, UK.
Hu says the cyanobacteria are now being used to hold the verges of roads and railways in northern China as well as the margins of farmland. Her team plans to seed 133 square kilometres over the next five years.
A.So Chunxiang Hu of the Chinese Academy of Sciences’s Institute of Hydrobiology in Wuhan has developed an alternative approach. |
B.That might change soon, though. |
C.“Unless you do something to help, you’re probably talking centuries for it to recover naturally,” he says. |
D.If left unchecked, sands can slowly engulf roads and railways. |
E.On the sunny side, the crust was about half as thick. |
F.People have been trying to use bacteria in this way since the 1980s, says Matthew Bowker, a soil ecologist at Northern Arizona university. |
【推荐1】New data presented this week at the annual Associated Professional Sleep Societies (APSS) suggest that a student's preferred sleeping schedule has a lot to do with his or her grade-point average in school. In one study, researchers at the University of Pittsburg revealed that poor sleep habits among high schoolers led to lower grades, particularly in math.
It's no surprise that poor sleep habits may negatively impact academic performance. And dozens of studies have linked an increase in nightly sleep to better cognition and alertness. The new research, however, goes a step further, quantifying the impact of erratic or inadequate sleep on grades. These findings are more convincing than saying that if you get more sleep, you'll feel better," says Jennifer Cousins, a lead researcher of the study.
The study involved data from 56 adolescents (34 female) between the ages of 14 and 18 years. They were asked to fill out sleep diaries for one week and wear a special activity monitor on their wrists, which recorded when the students were asleep or awake. Overall, teens with poor sleep habits received lower grades than students who stuck with a more regular sleep routine.
Interestingly, Cousins also found that different sleep habits had different effects on the students' school performance:those who woke up more often during the night did worse in math, for example, while those who slept peacefully through the night tended to get better grades in English.
These findings bring up new questions about teasing out(探讨)the details of what is important about sleep that impacts learning," says Cousins. "Does more sleep improve our ability to deal with abstract concepts found in math, or does sleep quality increase creativity? We don't know the answers, and don't want to draw those conclusions yet. But this helps us understand more about how sleep helps the things we do in daily life. "
Authors of the study point out that the results provide overwhelming evidence of the importance of sleep during a period of development that is critical for adolescents and recommend sleep education as a prevention tool to help increase awareness of the importance of sleep and of the negative consequences of poor sleep.
1. The underlined word "erratic" in the second paragraph probably means______.A.adequate | B.different |
C.stable | D.irregular |
A.lower grades in math are related to more awakenings at night |
B.the longer you sleep, the better your grades in English will be |
C.the findings will cause new insoluble problems about sleeping and learning |
D.different sleep habits have similar effects on students' learning |
A.People should understand the importance of sleep for students. |
B.Whether greater sleep quality help increase students' creativity is not known yet. |
C.Students' grades mainly depend on their sleep quality. |
D.The study helps researchers understand how sleep affects learning. |
A.The More Sleep, the Better Cognition |
B.The Poorer Sleep Habits, the Lower Grades |
C.The More Sleep, the Better You Will Feel |
D.The More Peacefully You Sleep, the Higher Grades You Will Get |
【推荐2】Ancient documents are an important part of ancient civilization. Unfortunately, such documents are often vulnerable (易受……伤害的) to aging and related damage, which greatly reduce their legibility (易读性).
An international group of computer scientists have teamed up to strike up the conversation with ancient people through their writing that have been broken down by time. They have developed a computer-assisted method to help us have a conversation with people from the distant past.
Appreciating ancient documents, even when in good condition, can require a reader to dig into the role of a cryptologist (密码学家). That’s because the combination of a writer’s handwriting legibility, lettering styles, old-fashioned spelling and grammar conventions or abbreviations (缩写) can make even a native language seem unfamiliar. Besides, the same document’s legibility can be reduced even more by faded ink, widened lettering due to exposure to wetness, and so on.
Typical digital reconstruction changes a document into black text on a white background in an attempt to reveal the text through noise filtering (过滤) and contrast improvement. However, in this current method, the image is much more of a restoration effort, keeping much of the look and virtual feel of the document.
Researchers applied a complex integration of several digital color interpretation techniques and Gaussian mixture models to identify and separate features of text, paper, and historical objects. This allows for the specific selection of different layers of information based on slight spectral (光谱的) differences. So a user could decide whether a notation (符号), page decoration, coffee mug ring stain or another feature was critical to the understanding by adding or removing layers.
In some cases, the technique could preserve features that would otherwise be lost, such as the vague watermarks of a paper manufacturer, which could offer vital insights to historians. “For example, Leonardo da Vinci’s famous works were written on pages with watermarks from various paper suppliers that allowed document historians to group them into likely writing periods,” said Usman Habib, an expert on digital restoration.
According to the paper, the processing can be accomplished on a standard desktop computer, and it takes just a few minutes. This would make it a great tool for historical document researchers and people attempting to figure out old family recipes.
1. What does the international team mainly aim to do?A.Categorize documents of the past. |
B.Share developments in computer science. |
C.Analyze causes of ancient works’ breakdown. |
D.Restore historical writing digitally. |
A.Risky but rewarding. | B.Complicated and challenging. |
C.Repetitive but fruitless. | D.Straightforward and accessible. |
A.It helps remove the trouble of doing repair work. |
B.It saves time by applying contrasting backgrounds. |
C.It preserves the original appearance of the documents. |
D.It raises the quality of images through noise filtering. |
A.Translating the text into different languages. |
B.Generating alternative copies of documents. |
C.Identifying the dates of the related historical objects. |
D.Getting rid of unnecessary layers of information. |
A.Critical. | B.Unclear. | C.Favorable. | D.Intolerant. |
【推荐3】In 1845, a deadly disease struck the farms of Ireland, killing all the Lumper potato plants. In another place or time, the death of a single crop species might not have been so important. But in Ireland, in 1845, people depended almost on the potato for food. The death of one species caused a terrible famine. Now, some scientists are worried that such a famine could happen again.
Over the centuries, farmers have discovered thousands of different species of food crops. Some can be grown in very hot or cold climates. Others are not affected by certain diseases. However, you won’t find many of these species in your local supermarket. To feed the seven billion people on Earth, most farmers today are growing only species of plants that are easy to produce in large numbers. Meanwhile, thousands of other species are becoming extinct.
For example, in the Philippines, there were once thousands of varieties of rice; now fewer than 100 are grown there. Experts believe that over the past century, we have allowed more than half of the world’s food varieties to disappear.
One solution to this problem is to collect and store the seeds (种子) of as many different plant varieties as we can before they disappear. The idea was first suggested by Russian scientist Nikolay Vavilov. In the 1920s and 30s, he collected around 400,000 seeds. More recently, others are continuing the work he began.
In the U.S. state of Iowa, Diane Ott Whealy wanted to protect historic plant varieties. She started a place called Heritage Farm, where people can store and trade seeds.
More importantly, the people at Heritage Farm don’t just store the seeds; they plant them. By doing this, they are reintroducing foods into the marketplace that haven’t been grown for years. These food species are not just special in flavor. They also offer farmers food solutions for the future, from the past.
1. What caused many people to die in Ireland in 1845?A.Food pollution. |
B.Poisonous potatoes. |
C.An incurable disease. |
D.Lack of enough food. |
A.Species of food crops. | B.Potato plants. | C.Farmers. | D.Seeds. |
A.To show many food species have disappeared. |
B.To explain how to increase food production. |
C.To stress the importance of food diversity. |
D.To prove the necessity of growing rice. |
A.It’s dangerous to grow new food species. |
B.The work started by Nikolay Vavilov was useless. |
C.Storing seeds and planting them are both important. |
D.Foods grown from older seeds are cheaper but taste bad. |