The yogurt that’ s past its sell-by date. The banana in your lunch that turned brown. The leftovers in the fridge that you forgot to eat. For most people, all that food goes right into the garbage can.
Eight to ten percent of global greenhouse gas emissions (放) are related to food waste, according to a report by the U. N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. “When you throw away an egg or a sandwich,” says Yvette Cabrera, food waste vice director at the Natural Resources Defense Council ( N. R. D. C. ) ,“you’ re also throwing away all the resources that went into producing those things.”
That includes not only all the water, land, and fertilizer (化肥) that went into producing that food, but also the massive amounts of fossil fuels used to power the farms, transport the food, and create the packaging.
Then there’s the issue of what happens to food after it’s thrown out. More food ends up in U.S. landfills than any other type of trash. Food rotting in landfills produces methane (甲烷), a greenhouse gas that’s roughly 25 times more powerful at trapping heat in the atmosphere than carbon dioxide, which is produced by burning fossil fuels.
Food waste is a difficult problem to solve, though, in part because it happens for different reasons depending on the country. In developing nations,40 percent of food is lost before it ever reaches people’s homes, because many of those countries lack the technology and tools to preserve food.
It's another story in wealthier countries, where most of the food is wasted in people’s kitchens. Americans, for example, throw out a quarter of their groceries each year, on average, according to the N. R. D. C. That's like going to the grocery store, leaving with four bags of groceries, and then throwing one of them into the garbage before you get home.
1. What does the passage mainly talk about?| A．The problem of food waste. | B．The awareness of food saving. |
| C．The necessity of food diversity. | D．The ways of preservation. |
| A．The leftovers in the fridge. | B．The packaging for products. |
| C．The thrown egg or sandwich. | D．The resources to produce food. |
| A．Provide a persuasive example. | B．Add more background information. |
| C．Discuss a more serious consequence. | D．Summarize the previous paragraphs. |
| A．Storage. | B．Transportation. |
| C．Processing. | D．Consumption. |
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【推荐1】A 16-year survey on the arctic Norwegian island of Svalbard found the reindeer（驯鹿）there have declined in weight by an alarming 12 percent. The reduction in average body-mass is being blamed on global warming.
In research presented lately at a meeting of the British Ecological Society in Liverpool, scientists will explain how rising temperatures are making female reindeer difficult to obtain nutrients during important periods of being pregnant.
Snow in Svalbard typically covers the ground for eight months of the year, which, combined with low temperatures, limits grass growth to June and July. But as summer temperatures have increased by around 1.5℃, grasslands have become more productive, allowing female reindeer to gain more weight by the autumn and therefore to conceive（孕育）more calves.
However, warmer winters have brought with them greater rainfall which freezes when is settles on the snow, therefore locking out the reindeer from the life-supporting food below. As a result, female reindeer are becoming starved, causing them to give birth to much lighter young. The average mass of an adult reindeer in 1998, when the survey began, was 55kg, but by 2016 IT had dropped to 48kg.
Professor Steve Albon, an ecologist at the James Hatton Institute in Aberdeen , said that, because the mammals have a relatively high surface-area-to-volume ratio（表面积与体积比）, they are no particularly energy efficient.
Reindeer can often access the inadequate food sources beneath the snow by clearing IT away with their antlers（鹿角）, but they cannot break through the hard ice. Without access to the food in winter, calves are being born far lighter than they should be. Numbers of reindeer have also increased rapidly in the past 20 years, meaning that those which are born are facing greater competition for food. “The implication（含义）are that there may well be more smaller reindeer in the Arctic in the coming decades, but possibly at the risk of catastrophic die-offs because of increased ice on the ground,”said Professor Albon Despite the gloomy findings, reindeer appear to be suffering less from the impact of climate change than some other arctic species.
1. Which of the following may be the most important reason for the smaller reindeer?| A．Heavy snow. |
| B．Greater rainfall. |
| C．Hard ice. |
| D．Global warming. |
| A．grass growing more rapidly in summer |
| B．more rainfall in the arctic area in winter |
| C．female reindeer’s gaining more weight in winter |
| D．female reindeer’s suffering from hunger in winter |
| A．Exciting. |
| B．Optimistic. |
| C．Disappointing. |
| D．Doubtful. |
| A．By analyzing the research. |
| B．By classification of reindeer. |
| C．By comparing opinions of experts. |
| D．By telling stories of different species. |
【推荐2】We’re often reminded of the importance of preserving the planet as we see it for future generations—and children at St Oswald’s Primary School in Chester certainly agree.
Nine-year-old Isobel Kelleher from the school’s Hummingbirds class thinks adults need to take note.“Sometimes they can be busy and I don’t think they think they can make a difference，but if everyone does a little bit it all adds up，”she tells HuffPost UK.“We started looking at plastic pollution in our oceans and the things like plastic bags and broken down pieces of plastic that are polluting them.”she says.“Fish can eat the plastic and they can die，or we might even eat the fish ourselves.”
Mr Timms，Isobel’s teacher，has been spearheading a new project at the school which lets children loose creatively to raise awareness of the need to be more environmentally friendly.The entire Hummingbirds class，which is made up of 9 and 10-year-old pupils，has been busy writing poems and creating online video adverts to warn adults about the serious situation of our oceans and wildlife.
Mr Timms thinks children have an important role to play in teaching us how to take care of the things around us.“We sometimes overlook how much we can really learn from children.”he says.“It has been really hard to believe having parents come in saying that their children have been asking them to stop using plastic，and to recycle more，and even stopping them using plastic straws.”
Mr Timms is proud of his Hummingbirds class.“The message that they would like to send to the world is simple:stopping this isn’t someone else’s job，and it won’t be OK if we just leave it.”
1. What can we infer about adults according to Isobel Kelleher?| A．They just pretend to be busy. |
| B．They haven’t done their part well. |
| C．They can do nothing to stop pollution. |
| D．They have started to care about oceans. |
| A．To help adults to learn more about their kids. |
| B．To remind adults to be friendly to environment. |
| C．To persuade students to stop using plastic bags. |
| D．To teach students how to write poems creatively. |
| A．To prove kids are creative in teaching. |
| B．To attract people to support his work. |
| C．To have adults care about education. |
| D．To show the effects of the project. |
| A．An inspiring school project. |
| B．An appeal to stop plastic bags. |
| C．Serious situations of our planet. |
| D．Adults’ignorance of environment. |
【推荐3】You know those nutrition guidelines the government issues every few years? It turns out that following them isn't just good for your health. It's good for the planet, too.
“What we found is that impacts vary across nations, but in the highimpact nations, in general, you can see that, if you follow a nationally recommended diet, despite the fact that these diets don't mention explicitly—or most of them don't explicitly mention—environmental impacts, that you are going to have lower environmental impacts due to that. So that's sort of fairly clear across all the highincome nations.” said Paul Behrens, an environmental scientist at Leiden University in the Netherlands.
The food we eat takes a big toll on the environment. A third of the icefree land on Earth is used for agriculture, and according to some estimates, producing food accounts for roughly a fifth of all humancaused greenhouse gas emissions. Fertilizer runoff also leads to other problems, like the algae blooms in Lake Eerie and the Dead Zone in the Gulf of Mexico.
However, following dietary guidelines would reduce those impacts, especially in wealthy countries like the US. “Most of the reductions come from meat and dairy，” which have an outsized impact on land use and pollution, and are a major source of greenhouse gases.(That's partly due to cow farts. Seriously.) Following the suggestions would also mean eating fewer calories, since many people here eat more than they need.
Overall, in highincome countries, Behren's team estimates that following the rules could result in as much as a 17 percent reduction in land use, a 21 percent reduction in nutrient pollution, and a 25 percent drop in agricultural greenhouse gas emissions. Cutting down on how much food we waste—which is roughly a third in the US—could help even more. The results are in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Of course, people are notoriously bad at following diets. But: “These nationally recommended guidelines do actually have a knockon effect on other areas of policy making. So if I'm developing a new healthyeatingforschools program then that's going to be based off a lot of detail that I get from the nationally recommended guidelines. So while it might not necessarily be the case that people follow directly … they actually are quite influential on the preparation of other advice.”
It seems that a smaller environmental footprint and a healthier lifestyle could go hand in hand.
1. Which of the following statement will Paul Behrens approve of?| A．Following a nationally recommended diet can have similar impacts in different countries. |
| B．Following a nationally recommended diet can do good to our health. |
| C．Not all the countries have recommended diets in an explicit manner. |
| D．Some highincome nations don't mention the diet explicitly for its impacts can be ignored. |
| A．shows signs of | B．has a bad effect on |
| C．takes full advantage of | D．makes up for |
| A．Food production can lead to about 20 percent of humancaused greenhouse gas with only a third of the icefree land used. |
| B．It is estimated that following dietary guidelines can lead to decrease in more land use than in nutrient pollution. |
| C．Paul Behrens' new program concerning healthy eating for schools is likely to be based on national nutrition guidelines. |
| D．Some wealthy countries tend to reduce meat and dairy though the other areas of policy making isn't effected much. |
【推荐1】The fertile land of the Nile delta is being eroded (侵蚀) along Egypt’s Mediterranean coast at an astonishing rate, in some parts estimated at 100 metres per year. In the past, land washed away from the coastline by the currents of the Mediterranean Sea used to be replaced by sediment (沉淀物) brought down to the delta by the River Nile, but this is no longer happening.
Up to now, people have blamed this loss of delta land on the two large Aswan dams in the south of Egypt, which hold back almost all of the sediment that used to flow down the river. Before the dams were built, the Nile flowed freely carrying huge quantities of sediment. But when the Aswan dams were constructed to provide electricity and irrigation, and to protect the huge population centre of Cairo from annual flooding and drought, most of the sediment with its natural fertilizer accumulated up above the dam in the southern upstream half of Lake Nasser, instead of passing down to the della.
Now, however, there turns out to be more to the story. It appears that the sediment-free water picks up sand as it erodes the river bed and banks on the 800-kilometre trip to Cairo. Daniel Jean Stanley of the Smithsonian Institute noticed that water samples taken in Cairo indicated that the river sometimes carries more than 850 grams of sediment per cubic metre of water — almost half of what it carried before the dams were built.
International environmental organizations are beginning to pay closer attention to the region, partly because of the problems of erosion and pollution of the Nile delta, but mainly because they fear the impact this situation could have on the whole Mediterranean coastal ecosystem.
But there are no easy solutions. In the immediate future, Stanley believes that one solution would be to make artificial floods to flush out the delta waterways, in the same way that natural floods did before the construction of the dams. He says, however, that in the long term an alternative process such as desalination (脱盐) may have to be used to increase the amount of water available.
1. What stopped the sediment coming down to the delta?| A．The Mediterranean Sea. | B．The River Nile. |
| C．The Aswan dams. | D．Lake Nasser. |
| A．To flush out the river beds. |
| B．To offer electricity and protection. |
| C．To make the water in the River Nile clean. |
| D．To keep the soil in the region nearby nutrient-rich. |
| A．There is no need to worry about the delta. |
| B．The methods of measurement need improving. |
| C．Whether the situation is good or not remains to be seen. |
| D．The dams’ consequences are beyond people’s expectation. |
| A．Difficulties to be settled. |
| B．Rewards for the challenge. |
| C．Severe influence of the situation. |
| D．Possible solutions to the problem. |
【推荐2】The release of GPT-4, the latest language model developed by Open AI, has raised concerns about its potential impact on the job market. In the finance industry, fears around AI disruption are particularly severe, as many jobs involve the processing of data that could easily be done by machines.
This has prompted questions about what it means for the CFA Institute, which offers chartered financial analyst qualifications to humans who pay a considerable fee to take the exams. If an AI algorithm (算法) can pass the CFA exam, it could threaten the CFA Institute’s revenue (收入) model and potentially affect several hundred thousand bank employees.
However, recent experiments have shown that GPT-4 is not yet capable of passing the CFA exam. The simulation scored only 8 out of a possible 24 points, demonstrating that faking logical thought is very different from fake reasoning through the application of arbitrary rules and definitions. Humans still retain an upper hand in this area.
The CFA exam relies heavily on memorization and pattern matching, rather than processing the meaning of each question. This has allowed humans to continue to excel at the exam compared to machines that rely on algorithms and logical deductions (推理).
While the development of advanced AI may pose a threat to some industries, including finance, it appears that in the case of CFA accreditation, humans still have the upper hand. For now, those working in financial regulations and those responsible for setting exams in this field can breathe a small sigh of relief knowing their jobs are safe — at least for a little while longer.
In conclusion, the release of GPT-4 has sparked concerns about its potential to disturb the job market, especially in finance. However, experiments have demonstrated that AI still has limitations, particularly in areas requiring fake reasoning through memorized answers. While this news may reassure those in the finance industry, there is no denying that AI technology continues to transform many aspects of work and life.
1. Why are there concerns about GPT-4’s impact on the job market in finance?| A．It is capable of passing the CFA exam and taking over jobs. |
| B．It could potentially replace humans in processing data. |
| C．The finance industry has been slow to adopt new technology. |
| D．Bank employees are actively protesting against AI adoption. |
| A．Logical reasoning and deduction. | B．Understanding financial regulations. |
| C．Data processing and analysis. | D．Memorizing and pattern matching. |
| A．They demonstrate that humans’ jobs are safe for the foreseeable future. |
| B．They suggest that banks will soon be replacing humans with AI. |
| C．They prove that AI has already surpassed humans in financial analysis. |
| D．They have no impact on the job market. |
| A．It could threaten the job security of regulators. |
| B．It could cause a decrease in the number of regulations. |
| C．It could increase the speed and efficiency of regulatory processes. |
| D．It could lead to increased instances of fraud and corruption. |
【推荐3】The icy waters surrounding Antarctica have long been called the Southern Ocean by scientists, the media, and even the US Board on Geographical Names. However, it never received the official recognition it deserved—until now. On June 8, 2021, the National Geographic Society, which has been making maps since 1915, announced that from now on, there would be five oceans: the Atlantic, Pacific, Indian. Arctic, and Southern Ocean.
They had been considering making the change for many years. However, it is only recently that the geographers decided that the Southern Ocean was not just an extension of the Pacific, Atlantic, and Indian Oceans. It had the unique characteristics required to deserve its own name.
Alex Tait, a geographer, says that the change reflects the Society's desire to draw public attention to protecting the Southern Ocean's unique and fragile marine (海洋的) ecosystem. "We've always labeled it, but we labeled it slightly differently than other oceans," Tait explains. "This change was taking the last step and saying we want to recognize it because of its ecological separation."
The new ocean will include most of the waters around Antarctica out to 60 degrees south latitude, excluding (排除) the Drake Passage and the Scotia Sea. Unlike the other oceans, whose boundaries are defined (界定) by the surrounding continents, the extent of the Southern Ocean is determined by the Antarctic Circumpolar Current (ACC) — the Earth's longest and strongest oceanic current.
The ACC was established 34 million years ago when Antarctica broke off from South America, enabling the water to freely flow around Earth's southernmost tip. Its water is colder and less salty than the ocean waters to the north and provides a unique habitat for thousands of species, including whales, penguins, and seals. Extending from the surface to the ocean floor, the ACC also significantly impacts Earth's climate. The powerful current, which draws in water from the Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian Oceans, acts like a carrier allocating heat around the planet.
1. Why is the Southern Ocean recognized?| A．It has no clear land boundaries. | B．It extends into the Pacific Ocean. |
| C．It has been separated ecologically. | D．It is home to various marine species. |
| A．By an oceanic current. | B．By its 60 degrees south latitude. |
| C．By its marine ecosystem. | D．By the surrounding continents. |
| A．Distributing. | B．Absorbing. | C．Providing. | D．Storing. |
| A．The geography has changed sharply | B．Earth now officially has five oceans. |
| C．A new ocean is appearing on the earth. | D．You have to change your concept about ocean. |
