Vegetarians are people who don’t eat any animals. In the past, vegetarians was     1    , but recently more and more people are choosing a vegetarian diet. In the USA alone there are about 13 million people calling themselves vegetarians and that number is     2     to reach 25 million by the year 2015. There are many reasons why people think it makes sense not to eat animals. They can be     3     to religion, health, ethical or ecological concerns.

People with a     4     background avoid eating meat. Buddhists believe that human beings should not kill animals. Muslims and Jews don’t have pork. Some people are becoming worried about the     5     of eating meat because of the way it is farmed. Certain chemicals are used to make animals grow fast and many animals are fed food that is not part of their natural     6    .

Another reason for choosing to give up meat is that they consider farming animals for food is wrong and that animals have rights to live on as man does.

The last major reason is ecological. Raising animals wastes natural resources faster than growing crops. Much rainforest has been     7     to make farmland to raise animals for food.

Human beings have always eaten meat, but there is a growing     8     towards vegetarianism. Whatever the reason you have for not eating meat, vegetarianism can make much     9    .

Planet Plastic

Here’s a shocking statistic. Scientists have calculated the total amount of plastic ever made: 8.3 billion tonnes. Looked at another way, that’s as heavy as 25,000 Empire State Buildings or one billion elephants. And     1    , almost all of it has been made in the last 65 years.

So what’s the problem? Much plastic is in the form of packaging which is used just once and then thrown away. According to a major new study from the University of California, 9% of this is     2    , 12% is burned and 79% goes to landfill. And because most plastic doesn’t biodegrade (生物降解), once it’s in the ground, it stays there.

It’s a situation that has led the paper’s lead author, ecologist Dr. Roland Geyer, to say that we are “rapidly     3     towards ‘Planet Plastic’”. He believes that there’s already enough waste out there to cover the whole of Argentina.

The team behind this report also estimate that eight million tonnes of plastic waste are     4     into the sea every year. This has     5     concern that plastic is entering the food chain through fish and other sea life which consume the smaller pieces.

Of course, the reason why there’s so much plastic around is that it’s an amazingly useful material. We can’t get enough of it. It’s durable and     6    , and is used for everything from yoghurt pots to spaceships. But it’s    7     this quality that makes it a problem. The only way to destroy plastic is to heat or burn it — although this has the side effect of harmful emissions.

So what’s the     8     other than using less plastic? Oceanographer (海洋学家) Dr. Erik van Sebille from Utrecht University says we’re facing a flood of plastic waste, and that the     9     waste industry needs to “get its act together”.

Professor Richard Thompson, a marine biologist from Plymouth University, says it’s poor design that is at fault. He says that if products are currently designed “with recyclability in mind”, they could be recycled around 20 times over.

Dr. Geyer agrees: “The     10     of recycling is to keep material in use and in the cycle forever if you can. But it turns out in our study that actually 90% of that material that did get recycled — which I think we calculated was 600 million tonnes — only got recycled once.”

Driving an electric car     1     to the protection of environment, or so the marketing departments of their makers would have you believe. Yet a report which analyzes car emissions presents a rather different picture. A battery-powered car recharged with     2     generated by coal-fired power stations, it found, is likely to be more harmful. It could cause more than three times as many deaths from pollution as a     3     petrol-driven vehicle.

The study was carried out by the University of Minnesota. The researchers estimated how levels of fine particulate matter (细颗粒物) and ground-level ozone — two important     4     of air pollution — would change when a car is powered by different ways.

It was no surprise that electric cars whose batteries were recharged with power from wind, solar or hydro-electric sources came out to be virtually free from harmful     5    . They were estimated to cause 231 deaths over the course of a year, compared with 878 for petrol cars. Electric cars recharged with power from natural gas-fired stations were also a lot less harmful than petrol-driven ones, with 439 deaths. But if those same electric cars were recharged     6     by coal, they would be responsible for over 3,000 deaths.

Biofuels also caused more health problems than petrol. But diesel, which often     7     concern about pollution, is slightly cleaner than petrol. This is because the study assumes for all cars that emission-control technologies will be more widely used, especially particulate filters which have a remarkable effect on cleaning diesel     8    . Diesel cars are also more     9     of fuel than petrol-driven ones.

Overall, the study shows that electric cars are cleaner than those traditional vehicles only if the power used to charge then is also clean. That is hardly a surprise, but the     10     of the difference is. How green electric cars really are, then, will depend mainly on where they are driven. In France, which obtains more than half of its power from nuclear station, electric cars look like a good bet. In China and some other developing countries, where a large amount of electricity is produced from coal, they may not be so environment- friendly as they are marketed.

When asked by a TV reporter to talk about air and water quality in his hometown, Qi Mu noted, “The air is great now, and we can take more walks and enjoy being outdoors again.” He felt quite pleased because the villagers were living     1     with nature once more. However, he could not forget about an earlier time when his village had been struggling with a serious air quality problem.

In the 1990s,     2     from a nearby city was usually brought to the village. “How can we make use of this?” the villagers wondered. Soon they found that garbage could be used to feed pigs. “Over the next few years,     3    of pig farms were set up,” Qi recalled. But then nobody in the village wanted to open their windows. “The smell from the garbage and pig waste was making us sick,” Qi said. The numbers of mosquitoes and flies were also horrifying. “Under such circumstances, no single women wanted to marry anyone in our village and move here,” Qi sighed.

The villagers could no longer tolerate the situation. So an    4     was launched and a “clean-up” campaign was added to the government agenda, including     5     large vehicles from passing through the village. Garbage from the city was no longer disposed of in the village, and more trees were planted. “We can all breathe more freely now that the natural beauty of our village has been    6    ,” said Qi.