Because of the politics and history of Africa, wild animals there, which are interested in finding food and water not in politics, are in trouble. In the past, there were no borders between African countries, and the animals could travel freely according to the season or the weather. However, in the 19th and 20th centuries, the continent was divided up into colonies and then into nations. Fences were put up along the borders, so the animals could no longer move about freely.
Some countries decided to protect their animals by creating national parks. Kruger National Park, created in South Africa in 1926, was one of the first. By the end of the twentieth century, it had become an important tourist attraction and a home for many kinds of animals. Among these, there were about 9,000 elephants, too many for the space in the park. It was not possible to let any elephants leave the park, however. They would be killed by hunters, or they might damage property or hurt people. South African park officials began to look for other solutions to the elephant problem.
As early as 1990, the governments of South Africa and Mozambique had begun talking about forming a new park together. In 1997, Zimbabwe agreed to add some of its land to the park. A new park would combine the Kruger National Park with parks in Mozambique and Zimbabwe. There would be no national border fences within the park, so that elephants and other animals from the crowded Kruger Park could move to areas of Mozambique and Zimbabwe. This new “transfrontier” park would cover 13,150 square miles (35,000 square kilometers). The idea of a transfrontier park interested several international agencies, which gave money and technical assistance to Mozambique to help build its part of the park.
In April 2001, the new park was opened, with new borders and a new name: The Great Limpopo Transfrontier Park. A border gate was opened between Kruger National Park and Mozambique, and seven elephants were allowed through. They were the first of 1,000 elephants that would be transferred to the world’s greatest animal park.
1. The passage begins with________.| A．a common sense | B．a fact |
| C．a mysteries event | D．a theory |
| A．It was not big enough to hold all its elephants. |
| B．A lot of hunters slipped in to hunt animals. |
| C．As the first national park in Africa, it was not well designed. |
| D．Too much tourism did great damage to it. |
| A．It is divided into three parts by fences along borders. |
| B．It is built mainly for elephants rather than other animals. |
| C．It is located across the border of South Africa and Mozambique. |
| D．It is the result of a talk between Mozambique and some international agencies. |
| A．how international aid has functioned in Africa |
| B．how the Kruger National Park will save its elephants |
| C．how three African countries cooperated to make a new park |
| D．how many African animals have suffered because of natural disasters |
相似题推荐
【推荐1】The ocean covers more than 70% of our plane. It is so immense(巨大的) that explorers once thought there was no way to cross it. When our ships were advanced enough to do so, naturalists then thought it impossible for humans to ever exhaust fisheries or drive marine species to extinction. They were wrong.
Commercial fishing now covers an area of four times that of agriculture, and much of that expanse has been rendered completely unsustainable. We have reduced 90% of formerly important coastal species. Fish have been harvested so heavily that they are nearly wiped out in many places.
Some may hope that there are immense areas still untouched, given that humans do not live on the ocean, and we need specialized ships to go far beyond the coast. But that is incorrect. Just13% of the ocean remains as wilderness, and in coastal regions where human activities are most intense, there is almost no wilderness left at all. Of the roughly 21 million square miles of marine wilderness remaining almost all is found in the Arctic and Antarctic or around remote Pacific island nations with no populations.
What concerns us now is that most wilderness remains unprotected. This means it could be lost at any time as advances in technology allow us to fish deeper and ship further than ever before. Thanks to a warming climate, even places that were once safeguarded because of year-round ice cover are now open to fishing and shipping.
This lack of protection seems in large part from international environmental policies failing to recognize the unique values of wilderness, instead, focusing on saving at-risk ecosystems and avoiding extinctions. This is similar to a government using its entire health budget on emergency cardiac(心脏的) surgery without preventive politics, encouraging exercise to decrease the risk of heart attacks occurring in the first place.
If Earth's marine biodiversity is to be preserved forever, it is time for conservation to focus not only on the ER but also on preventive health measures.
1. What can be inferred from the first three paragraphs?| A．The ocean covers no more than seventy percent of the earth. |
| B．Naturalists still think there will be no way to cross the ocean. |
| C．There is almost no wilderness left at all in remote Pacific island. |
| D．It is incorrect that there were immense areas remaining as wilderness. |
| A．Unprotected. | B．Isolated. | C．Protected. | D．Lost. |
| A．Skeptical. | B．Negative. | C．Conservative. | D．Objective. |
| A．Ignore the unique values of wilderness. |
| B．Encourage exercise to decrease the risk. |
| C．Focus on avoiding partial extinction. |
| D．Focus also on preventive measures. |
The Frost looked forth one still, clear night,
And whispered, “Now I shall be out of sight,
So through the valley and over the height,
In silence I’ll take my way,
I will not go on, like that blustering train,
The wind and the snow, the hail and the rain,
Who make so much bustle and noise in vain,
But I’ll be as busy as they.”
He flew up, and powdered the to the mountain’s crest,
He lit on the trees, and their boughs he dressed,
With diamonds and pearls; and over the breast,
Of the quivering lake, he spread,
A bright coat of mail, that it need not fear,
The glittering point of many a spear,
That he hung on its margin, far and near,
Where a rock could rear its head.
He went to the windows of those who slept,
And over each pane, like a fairy, crept,
Wherever he breathed, wherever he stepped,
Most beautiful things were seen,
By morning’s first light! There were flowers and trees,
With bevies of birds and swarms of bright bees,
There were cities with temples and towers; and these,
All pictured in silver sheen!
But he did one thing that was hardly fair,
He peeped in the cupboard, and, finding there,
That all had forgotten for him to prepare,
“Now just to set them a-thinking,
I’ll bite this basket of fruit," said he,
“This costly pitcher—I’ll burst in three,
And the glass with water they’ve left for me,
Shall ‘tchick’! to tell them I’m drinking!”
1. Read the stanza: “ He flew up, and powdered the mountain’s crest...” What did the frost do to the tree boughs? (No more than 8 words)
2. What do the first three lines of the poem communicate about the setting?
| A．The frost quietly moves through a clear night. |
| B．The frost went blustering through the valley like a train at night. |
| C．The frost is awakened by the clear morning sun. |
| D．The frost ventured out during a windy and rainy evening. |
4. What is the poet trying to tell the readers about frost?(No more than10 words)
5. Read the 1st stanza in the poem. For what purpose does the poet include a description of trains, wind, snow, hail and rain?
【推荐3】Whether hunting or competing for limited space and resources, humans are the planet’s super predator (捕食者). As the human population expands, it’s getting harder for other creatures to find somewhere to hide during the day. Now new findings indicate animals around the world have come up with another strategy: They are becoming nocturnal (夜间活动的).
In a paper published in Science, researchers analyzed 76 previous scientific studies about human impact on animal activity. They compared animals’ activity during the day and night in areas of high human disturbance (from hunting or farming to hiking and other outdoor recreation) and low human disturbance (relatively natural conditions). The analysis showed animals are becoming an average of 1.36 times more nocturnal due to high human disturbance.
For example, in Poland wild boars go from 48% nocturnal in natural forests to 90% nocturnal in urban areas. Even activities people consider relatively innocuous, such as hiking and wildlife viewing, strongly affected animals’ daily rhythms. “We think that we’re leaving no trace often when we’re outdoors, but we can be having lasting consequences on animal behavior,” says Kaitlyn Gaynor, lead researcher for the study.
This is not the first time animals have had to live at night; during the time of dinosaurs, they were also nocturnal. “Dinosaurs were this ubiquitous (无处不在的), scary force, and only after their extinction did mammals (哺乳动物) emerge into the daylight,” Gaynor says. “And now humans have taken over and are pushing other animals back into the night.”
Scientists suspect becoming nocturnal may hurt those species highly adapted to the sun. They might not be able to live well at night, which would ultimately hurt their chances of survival and reproduction. Perhaps even more alarming effects could be in the wider ecosystem. In California’s Santa Cruz Mountains, coyotes have been more nocturnal in response to hikers and have started to alter their diets from daytime prey, such as squirrels and birds, to nocturnal prey, such as rats and rabbits.
Exactly how ecological communities will change, and whether it will be for better or worse, requires further study. Some nighttime shifts may benefit both animals and humans, Gaynor notes. For instance, tigers in Nepal are avoiding potentially deadly conflicts with people as they become more nocturnal.
Studies like this one will eventually help conservation managers make better decisions about how to protect ecosystems. “We’ll need to understand local dynamics to really understand how we should be changing management of wildlife populations or human activities,” Gaynor notes, “One potential approach might be to manage the timing of human activities so that we leave some of the daylight for other animals.”
1. How do animals respond to increasing human disturbance?| A．By limiting food intake. | B．By leaving their habitat. |
| C．By controlling population. | D．By adjusting daily routine. |
| A．Harmless. | B．Recreational. | C．Organized. | D．Irregular. |
| A．To highlight the importance of daylight. | B．To indicate the domination of humans. |
| C．To illustrate mammals’ adaptability. | D．To demonstrate dinosaurs’ power. |
| A．It has led to a new ecological balance. | B．It demands more conservation areas. |
| C．It may encourage bio-diversity. | D．It might be double-edged. |
【推荐1】After more than a year of pandemic, after months of an aggressive vaccination campaign, the United States should finally be better prepared to protect itself against the coronavirus. Nearly all of our long-term-care residents are vaccinated. Tens of millions of other people have been vaccinated, and tens of millions more have some level of immunity from previous infection. With more people protected, a new surge could behave differently, but early signals from the states with rising case numbers suggest that this will not universally be the case.
Just look at Michigan, the leading edge of this new surge. Cases are going up quickly, and hospital admissions are moving in lockstep (步伐一致) —just as they have in past surges. This is a bit of a surprise. The United States is entering a new phase of the pandemic. Although we’ve previously described the most devastating (毁灭性的) periods as “waves” and “surges,” the more proper metaphor now is a tornado: Some communities won’t see the storm, others will be well fortified against disaster, and the most at-risk places will be crushed. The virus has never hit all places equally, but the remarkable protection of the vaccines, combined with the new attributes of the variants. has created a situation where the pandemic will disappear, but only in some places. The pandemic is or will soon be over for a lot of people in well-resourced (实力雄厚的), heavily vaccinated communities. In places where vaccination rates are low and risk remains high, more people will join the 550,000 who have already died.
CDC Director Rochelle Walensky spent her weekly press conference on Monday pleading with the American people, noting “the recurring feeling I have of coming doom (厄运).” She asked the country to “work together to prevent a fourth surge.” Three distinct factors are now shaping this country’s pandemic experience.
First, the United States did a terrible job preventing transmission (传染) of the disease. The country’s level of excess death has been high, signaling that the pandemic’s true toll has been even steeper than the officially released COVID-19 deaths. Most other countries did not experience the same levels of consistent transmission. Most estimates place the number closer to 100 million, and possibly tens of millions more.
Second, the U.S. is vaccinating people quite efficiently. It has given out the largest absolute number of doses (药的一剂) in the world. Almost three-quarters of the U.S. population over 65 has received at least one dose of the vaccine, with nearly half now fully vaccinated. On a percentage basis, the U.S. has immunized nearly three times the number of people that Germany, Italy, and France have, and in two months, the U.S. will almost certainly have a very large percentage of vaccinated adults.
Third, the virus has had staggeringly unequal effects on the American population. For a person of a given age, the risk for certain racial and ethnic groups is several times that of a white person. Native American, Latino, Pacific Islander, and Black communities have suffered large and deadly outbreaks across the country. Racialized economic hierarchy (等级制度) as well as, perhaps, distrust of the medical establishment-are holding down vaccination rates in poorer places with less access to care. So some communities have both higher risk and fewer fully protected people.
This all makes for an extremely messy and volatile (不稳定的) current situation. The first two factors mean that some places, such as California, will see the pandemic’s worst pressures fade. But where the virus is already spreading quickly, the danger is still high, and the days are running out to slow transmission via vaccination. So far, the fatality (死亡) numbers have not turned upward. Now we can only wait to see if deaths will follow hospital admissions at the pace of past surges—or if something has changed.
1. It can be inferred from the case of Michigan that _________.| A．Michigan has an edge in bringing the pandemic under control |
| B．more patients are receiving proper medical treatment in hospitals |
| C．a new surge in cases and hospital admissions is unexpected and scary |
| D．a growing number of residents have been immune to the infection |
| A．the tornado that strikes during the pandemic makes people suffer more |
| B．the measures to fight the coronavirus produce uneven results in different areas |
| C．some poor communities are protected while some areas most at-risk are crushed |
| D．the crushing effects of the pandemic will last as long as the tornado effects do |
①less access to medical care
②inaccurate estimates of death tolls
③distrust of governmental policies
④disadvantaged socio-economic status of ethnic groups
⑤a larger percentage of vaccinated adults
⑥efficient prevention of the transmission
| A．①②③④⑤ | B．①②③④ | C．①②④⑤ | D．①②③④⑥ |
| A．Frustrated. | B．Optimistic. | C．Indifferent. | D．Desperate. |
【推荐2】Life isn’t fair. That universal truth is something that children seem to understand at a young age，but the path through which they develop a sense of what’s fair and what isn’t—and how they act on injustices—is something that has been a puzzle for social scientists.
To find out which aspects of fairness might be universal and which might be culturally driven，a team of scientists traveled to seven countries to study how different groups of children play fair. The researchers designed an “inequity(不公平) game” that they used to test 866 pairs of children aged 4 to 15 in Canada，India，Mexico，Peru，Senegal，Uganda and the United States.
Two children of the same gender(性别) and similar age were seated across from each other and were offered some candy. Sometimes the allocations were equal and sometimes they were not. One of the two children got to decide whether both of them accepted the allocation or rejected it. The experiment was set up to work through a machine that required the child to pull one handle to accept the deal—resulting in the candy being poured into a bowl for two children each—and a different handle to reject it—pouring the sweets into a third bowl where neither one would get to eat them.
In all seven countries，the results indicated a rejection of disadvantageous inequity. That is，when the children were allocated less candy than others，they tended to route all the treats into the bowl that no one could access. The reactions to advantageous inequity were more mixed. Children in only three countries—the United States，Canada and Uganda—had a tendency to reject unequal distributions of candy when they got more than others. “Given that these countries tend to stress principles of equality，it is possible that children in these countries face social pressures to learn these principles earlier，” the researchers wrote.
1. What does paragraph 3 talk about?| A．The players of the game. |
| B．The tools of the game. |
| C．The rules of the game. |
| D．The results of the game. |
| A．School education. |
| B．Social environment. |
| C．Parents’ influence. |
| D．National development. |
| A．To discuss the importance of fairness. |
| B．To draw readers’ attention to inequity. |
| C．To offer kids some tips for rejecting inequity. |
| D．To introduce a study on how kids play fair. |
【推荐3】For generations, the standard way to learn how to ride a bicycle was with training wheels. But in recent years, many parents prefer to train their kids with balance bikes, two-wheelers that enable children to develop the competence needed for bicycling.
Given the benefits of balance bikes, why did it take so long for them to replace training wheels? There are plenty of other examples in which ignored solutions that involve subtraction(减法) turn out to be better alternatives. In some European cities, for example, urban planners have gotten rid of traffic lights and road signs to make streets safer.
Leidy Klotz, an engineer at the University of Virginia, noticed that reformative designs, in which elements are removed from an existing model, were uncommon. So he reached out to Adams, a social psychologist, to try to figure out why this was the case. The two researchers hypothesized(假设) that there might be an explanation: when faced with a problem, people tend to select solutions that involve adding new elements rather than taking existing components away.
Adams, Klotz and their colleagues set out to test if their hypothesis was correct. The researchers first carried out a set of studies. In one, they asked 91 participants to make a pattern symmetrical(对称的) by either adding or removing colored boxes. Only 18 people used subtraction. In another, the team scanned through ideas for improvement submitted to an incoming university president and found that only 11 percent of 651 project plans involved getting rid of an existing regulation, practice or program.
These findings suggest that “additive solutions have sort of a priority”, says Benjamin Converse, a co-author of the study. “Subtractive solutions are not necessarily harder to consider, but they take more effort to find.”
For now the team hopes that these findings will encourage people across various fields to think about subtractive options that might be typically ignored. “The hope is that, just by getting people to think about this more, maybe it will help inspire some other ignored subtractions,” Converse says.
1. What is the purpose of paragraph 1?| A．To present a problem. | B．To introduce the topic. |
| C．To give some examples. | D．To put forward a concept. |
| A．Balance bikes are not good for training kids. |
| B．People used to learn riding bikes effortlessly. |
| C．Parents now train kids to ride bikes pointedly. |
| D．Some European cities ignore their governance. |
| A．They are superior to additive solutions. |
| B．They are often harmful for creativity. |
| C．They are always overlooked by our brain. |
| D．They are often preferred by conservatives. |
| A．A New Way of Management |
| B．A Trend of Avoiding Regulations |
| C．A New Concept of Problem-solving |
| D．A Study on Problem–solving Methods |
