Climate change and increases in drought and rainstorms pose serious challenges to our water management. An international group of scientists have brought together a large body of research on water quality in rivers worldwide. The study shows that river water quality tends to worsen during extreme weather events. As these events become more often and severe due to climate change, ecosystem health and human access to safe water may be increasingly under threat.
The research led by Dr. Michelle van Vliet of Utrecht University analyzed 965 cases of river water quality changes during extreme weather such as drought, heatwaves, rainstorms, and flooding. The analysis shows that in most cases water quality tends to become worse during droughts and heatwaves (68%), rainstorms and floods (51%), and under long-term changes in climate (56%). During droughts, less water is available to dilute contaminants (稀释污染物), while rainstorms and floods generally result in more contaminants that run off from land to rivers and streams. Improvements or mixed responses in water quality are also reported for some cases, for example when increased transport of pollutants is offset (抵消) by more dilution during flood events.
Water quality changes are strongly driven by changes in water temperature. Land use and other human factors such as wastewater treatment also shape how this plays out. “Understanding the complex interplay between climate, land use, and human drivers, which together influence the sources and transport of pollutants is crucial,” says van Vliet. The research also calls for more data collection and studies of water quality in non-Western countries. “We need better monitoring of water quality in Africa and Asia. Most water quality studies now focus on rivers and streams in North America and Europe.”
The results of the study underline the urgent need for a better understanding of water quality changes during extreme weather events. It sounds an alarm to us. Only then will we be able to develop effective water management strategies that can safeguard our access to clean water and ensure ecosystem health under climate change and increasing weather extremes.
1. What can we learn from paragraph 1?| A．Human beings should be blamed for climate change. |
| B．Worsened water quality is threatening the climate. |
| C．Water quality in rivers worldwide is under risk. |
| D．Water management has been improved recently. |
| A．The threats caused by extreme weather. | B．The factors influencing water safety. |
| C．The findings of van Vliet’s research. | D．The design of van Vliet’s experiment. |
| A．Water quality in non-Western countries is more terrible. |
| B．Human activities have a big influence on water quality. |
| C．Related data collection and studies of Europe is adequate. |
| D．Water quality changes are dominated by water temperature. |
| A．Unclear. | B．Contradictory. | C．Doubtful. | D．Approving. |
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【推荐1】Welcome to Our Festival
Story Show in Oheron
Adults
8: 00 pm—10: 00 pm
Join us for an evening of true, personal stories about science. Come to the only show where you can hear people—scientists, not-scientists, and half-scientists-tell funny and touching stories about the role of science in their lives.
Cost: $10
Make Your Own iPhone Case through Toysinbox 3D Printing
Families & Teens&. Adults
10: 00 am—12: 30 pm
In this workshop, you will learn to design and make your own iPhone case by 3D printing. First, you will learn how to use a 3D printer. Next, you will design a 3D model for your iPhone case that will have a lovely pattern and your name. Once you create the model, you will print it out on our 3D printers. A 3D-printing worker will guide you through this process step by step. Come and enjoy this fun and unique learning experience!
Cost: $35
DIY Underwater Vehicle Design in MIT Museum Teens
2: 00 pm—5: 00 pm
Dive into the world of ocean engineering by designing and building an underwater vehicle! Test your vehicle in large tanks on the Museum’s floor. Show off your engineering creations and share your design process with Museum visitors.
Cost: $15, Ages 12
Animal Kingdom for Young Ones in Museum of Science, Boston
Families
9: 30 am—2: 00 pm
Join us for a day of hands-on science fun designed especially for pre-schoolers!
Activities include the Museum’s popular “Live Animal Story Time” shows and a talk about baby animals and book-signing by children’s book authors. Take part in special live animal visits and activities in the exhibition halls, as well as design challenges and lab activities—all created with your young scientist in mind!
Cost: $20
1. If you are interested in stories about science, you will probably attend ________.| A．Make Your Own iPhone Case | B．DIY Underwater Vehicle Design |
| C．Story Show | D．Animal Kingdom for Young Ones |
| A．Do role-play games. | B．Test their creations. |
| C．Put on science shows. | D．Meet authors of the books. |
| A．kids not old enough for school | B．children of all ages |
| C．adults | D．college students |
【推荐2】At the end of the 19th century, one in seven people around the world had died of tuberculosis or TB for short (肺结核)，and the disease ranked as the third leading cause of death in the United States. While physicians had begun to accept that TB was caused by bacteria, this understanding was slow to catch on among the general public, and most people gave little attention to the behaviors that contributed to disease transmission. They didn’t understand that things they did could make them sick. It was common for family members, or even strangers, to share a drinking cup.
In the 1890s the New York City Health Department launched a massive campaign to educate the public and reduce transmission. The “War on Tuberculosis” public health campaign discouraged cup-sharing and urged states to ban spitting inside public buildings and on sidewalks and in other outdoor spaces. Changes in public behavior helped successfully reduce the spread of TB.
Disease can permanently change society, and often for the best by creating better practices and habits. Crisis sets off action and response. Many infrastructure improvements and healthy behaviors we consider normal today are the result of past health campaigns that responded to serious outbreaks.
In the 19th century, city streets in the U.S. overflowed with dirt. People threw their unwanted newspapers, food scraps, and other trash out of their windows onto the streets below. The plentiful horses pulling streetcars and delivery carts dropped urine and waste every day. Human waste was a problem, too. Those in tenement (租户)housing did not have their own facilities, but had 25 to 30 people sharing a single outhouse. These toilets frequently overflowed until workers known as “night soil men” arrived to deal with waste, only to dump it into the nearby harbor.
As city and health leaders began to understand that the frequent outbreaks of TB that swept across their cities were connected to the garbage, cities began setting up organized systems for handling human waste. Indoor toilets were slow to catch on, due to the cost and need of a plumbing system. Improvements in technology helped the process along. Following Thomas Clapper’s improved model in 1891, water closets became popular, first among the wealthy, and then among the middle-class. Plumbing systems, paired with tenement house reform, helped remove waste from the public streets.
Disease greatly improved aspects of American culture, too. As physicians came to believe that good ventilation(通风))and fresh air could help fight illness, builders started adding porches and windows to houses. Real estate investors used the trend to market migration to the West, encouraging Eastern physicians to convince TB patients and their families to move thousands of miles from crowded, dirty Eastern cities to the dry air and sunshine in places like Los Angeles and Colorado Springs.
Some of this influence continues today. While we know that sunshine doesn’t kill bacteria, good ventilation and time spent outside does benefit children and adults by promoting physical activity and improving spirits. This fresh-air “cure” also eventually transformed the study of climate into a formal science, as people began to chart temperature, barometric pressure and other weather patterns in hopes of identifying the “ideal” conditions for treating disease.
Public health emergencies have inspired innovations in education. Starting in 1910, Thomas Edison’s lab, which had invented one of the first motion picture devices in the 1890s, cooperated with anti-tuberculosis activists to produce short films on TB prevention and transmission-some of the first educational movies. Screened in public places in rural areas, the TB movies were also the first films that viewers had ever seen.
As we are seeing with the coronavirus today, disease can impact a community--changing routines and shaking nerves as it spreads from person to person. But the effects of epidemics extend beyond the moments in which they occur.
1. According to Paragraph 1, what might have led to the outbreak of TB in the US?| A．Limited access to treatment | B．Incompetence of the physicians. |
| C．Unhealthy living habits. | D．Poor governmental administration. |
| A．The gap between the rich and the poor widened. |
| B．It contributed to changes in public behavior. |
| C．Tuberculosis totally disappeared in New York. |
| D．Citizens finally found a cure for tuberculosis. |
| A．more horses traveling on roads than pedestrians |
| B．lifeless patients infected with TB on every street |
| C．dirty surroundings where bacteria were easy to spread |
| D．unfair discrimination from the rich against the poor |
| A．They were too expensive for the poor to obtain. |
| B．There were many drawbacks of the early models. |
| C．They often overflowed and caused inconvenience. |
| D．People in tenement houses resisted such a device. |
| A．The vast majority of urban citizens moved to the West. |
| B．More people lived in the West than those in the East. |
| C．Many fled to rural areas with good ventilation and fresh air. |
| D．Patients and their family were encouraged to move westwards. |
| A．The benefits of outdoor activities are widely acknowledged. |
| B．People adopt the habit of regular temperature-taking. |
| C．Films have become the primary way to educate people. |
| D．Ideal conditions for treating disease have been defined. |
【推荐3】Where to go?
Here are some of the best places across the UK for your whole family to enjoy the quality time together in nature.
Drove Orchards (果园), Thornham, Norfolk
Drove shines a bit brighter each autumn, when it starts delivering fruit. Many of the fresh apples and pears there are ready-picked as well as PYO (short for pick-your-own). Also juice made from the orchards' special varieties of apples is strongly recommended.
Opening time: 10 am-4 pm daily until the end of October (booking not necessary but checking what's fruiting before visiting at droveorchards.com)
Blooming Green, Linton, Kent
Blooming Green is a "no-dig" flower business, selling flowers directly to customers and opening for PYO activities from summer to the end of October. In November and December there are wreath-making (花环制作) workshops, where participants pick their favorite flowers.
Opening time:10 am-4 pm on Saturdays only (with pre-booking of one-hour slots, bloominggreenflowers.co.uk)
Towerbrook Farm, Banwell, Somerset
Like many other farms, Towerbrook Farm offers pick-your-own and cut-your-own service. But it's the first place that offers dig-your-own Christmas trees, meaning you can take your tree back after the holiday and replant it there, which allows you to avoid sending your tree to the recycling centre.
Opening time: 8am-4pm daily between 20 November and 30 December(pre-booking not necessary)
Shute Fruit, Bishopsteignton, South Devon
As well as selling preserves made from kinds of berries (浆果), Shute Fruit also manages an extensive pick-your-own operation. There you can pick your own sloe berries. If you are a fan of sloe gin, a kind of alcoholic drink, whose alcohol content is between 15 and 30 percent, ask the farm for recipes to make your own sloe gin at home.
Opening time: 11 am-5pm daily except rainy days and Mondays, until the end of October (booking not necessary, shutefruit.co.uk)
1. If you go to Drove Orchards，what can be recommended to you?| A．Delivering fruit. | B．Tasting freshly squeezed apple juice. |
| C．Planting Christmas trees. | D．Picking your own apples at 8 am. |
| A．Thorham. | B．Linton. | C．Banwell. | D．Bishopsteignton. |
| A．Their relevant Information can be got from the same website. |
| B．They have the same opening time. |
| C．They all offer pick-your-own service. |
| D．They needn't be booked in advance. |
【推荐1】Politicians and the public tend to worry about carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions (排放) but neglect the effects of cutting methane (甲烷). Actually, dealing with the gas would have a large effect rapidly and at relatively low cost.
Human activity emits far less methane than carbon dioxide, but methane has a heavier impact. Over the course of 20 years, a ton of the gas will warm the atmosphere about 86 times more than a ton of CO2. As a result, methane is responsible for 23% of the rise in temperatures since preindustrial times. Carbon dioxide gets most of the attention, but unless methane emissions are limited, there is little hope of controlling the climate.
By how much do methane emissions need to fall? Carbon dioxide stays in the atmosphere for centuries, making it hard to reduce its atmospheric concentrations (浓度). By contrast, methane has a half-life of roughly ten years, which means that it degrades quickly. If new emissions can be cut to below the rate at which old emissions reduce, the concentration of methane in the atmosphere will soon fall, slowing global warming. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change estimates that, to keep temperatures between 1.5℃ and 2℃ above preindustrial levels, human methane emissions must drop to 35% below where they stood in 2010 by midcentury.
That is entirely possible. A big step would be to stop millions of tons of methane from leaking out of fossil-fuel infrastructure each year, through pipes with holes, leaky valves and carelessness. The International Energy Agency, a global forecaster, estimates that 40% of methane emissions from fossil fuels, equal to 9% of all human methane emissions, can be got rid of at no net cost for firms. The harder task is to reduce emissions from agriculture, but even here farmers can make use of new ideas, including developing new forms of food for farm animals, and changing how rice is watered.
1. What does the underlined word “neglect” in paragraph 1 probably mean?| A．Ignore. | B．Blame. | C．Value. | D．Delay. |
| A．A less serious threat to global warming. |
| B．The little hope of controlling the climate. |
| C．People’s more attention on carbon dioxide. |
| D．The urgent need to reduce methane emissions. |
| A．They are the only hope of controlling the climate. |
| B．Their atmospheric concentrations are hard to reduce. |
| C．Their impact on the climate is huge but manageable. |
| D．They stay in the atmosphere longer than carbon dioxide. |
| A．Coal mining. | B．Rice farming. | C．Fuel burning. | D．Oil leaking. |
【推荐2】Climate change does not offer comfort, but it can produce winners as well as losers. With parts of England as hot as the Champagne region of France was in the 1980s, the sparkling-wine industry is already bubbling. Longer sunny periods will make it easier for British winemakers to make quality wines.
A recent study from the London School of Economics finds that climate change is also expanding the area in England suitable for making wine. Most vineyards (葡萄园) are in south-east England but more land as far north as the east Midlands could come into use. Alistair Nesbitt, the study’s lead author, says that by 2040 higher temperatures may also allow winemakers to grow more disease-resistant varieties of grapes.
As a result, a mini land rush is under way. According to Strutt & Parker, a consultancy, Britain has over 900 vineyards, up by 80% in the past five years. Essex, Sussex and Kent are of most interest to winemakers. This summer Jackson Family Wines, an American firm, became the first big maker of wines to invest in England; it plans to acquire around 26 hectares (公顷) in Essex. London clay, a mud found in high concentrations in the county, is ideal for producing bold red wine.
Nick Watson of Strutt & Parker says that the prices of established vineyards have increased sharply and that land suitable for viticulture (葡萄栽培) now sells for £40,000-50,000 per hectare. Such prices pale next to those in famed wine regions abroad: in Bordeaux land can fetch over £1.6m a hectare. The difference has little to do with the quality of the soil and much to do with a region’s reputation.
Other aspects of climate change are less welcome for winemakers. A year of heavy rain or severe drought could destroy entire crops. John Atkinson, a winemaker in Essex, says that making good wine all comes down to the soil, the weather and the barrel. “Growing grapes in this country is a bit like playing cricket,” he says, “There are so many ways to be out.”
1. According to the first two paragraphs, climate change has led to __________.| A．a change in the nutrition of grapes |
| B．the expansion of suitable land for vineyards |
| C．longer sunny periods in the Champagne region |
| D．improved skills of British winemakers in wine making |
| A．London clay is ideal for grape growth |
| B．Essex is the best place for wine making |
| C．investments in vineyards in England are increasing |
| D．the global wine market is experiencing significant growth |
| A．Drop sharply. | B．Appear more obvious. |
| C．Look normal. | D．Seem less impressive. |
| A．The Rise of English Viticulture |
| B．Invest in the UK Wine Industry |
| C．Sing the Praises of Climate Change |
| D．Growing Popularity of British Wines |
【推荐3】On Feb 9, Brazilian researchers at Seymour Island reported a temperature of 20. 75 ℃ on the icy continent of Antarctica. It was almost a full degree higher than the previous record of 19. 8 ℃, taken on Signy Island in January 1982.
This record-breaking reading was taken at a monitoring station in the northern part of Antarctica. According to Brazilian soil scientist Carlos Schaefer, the temperature was documented during a 20-year-long research project. The focus of this project is to study the effect that climate change has on the permafrost (永久冻土) within the region. Permafrost is soil that stays frozen for at least two years. Although this is a record high for Antarctica, Schaefer stressed that “We can't use this to anticipate climatic changes in the future. It's simply a signal that something different is happening in that area.”
But in fact, the last high temperature reading was in the 19 ℃ range. These higher temperatures can cause ice and glaciers (冰川) in Antarctic regions to melt. The Antarctic peninsula (半岛) — the long finger of land that stretches toward Argentina — is most dramatically affected. Scientists saw glaciers that have retreated by more than 100 meters in Discovery Bay where the snow melted in little more than a week, leaving dark exposed rock. This melted ice leads to a rise in sea levels that can threaten the safety of coastal areas. It's believed to be behind an alarming decline of more than 50 percent in chinstrap penguin (帽带企鹅) colonies, which are dependent on sea ice.
Like American writer Ermest Hemingway once said, “The Earth is a fine place and worth fighting for.” We should do everything we can to help save our planet. Otherwise, it may become too hot for us to fix.
1. What did Brazilian researchers report on Feb 9?| A．Signy Island is the warmest region in the Antarctic. |
| B．Antarctica hit a record high temperature of 20. 75 ℃. |
| C．The average temperature of Antarctica ranges from 19. 8 ℃ to 20. 75 ℃. |
| D．Antarctica's new record temperature is a full degree higher than the previous decade. |
| A．To explain why the permafrost may cause glaciers to melt. |
| B．To monitor Antarctica's contributions to world climate change. |
| C．To predict possible climatic change in the future. |
| D．To examine how the permafrost is influenced by climate change. |
| A．Moved backward. | B．Covered a certain area. |
| C．Increased in size. | D．Proceeded in an opposite direction. |
| A．the pollution of ocean water | B．disappearances of coastal cities |
| C．threats to penguin habitats | D．the release of various viruses |
