1 . Every day is Earth Day — probably you’ve heard it before. Nearly all Americans have access to a plastic recycling program. You may be surprised to learn how many types of plastic packaging can be recycled into new, useful products!
Ford Motor Company has been helping to promote the use of environmentally-friendly auto parts — and one way they’re doing that is by using recycled plastic bottles for underbody shields (底盘保护罩) and other auto parts on cars.
“The underbody shield is a large part, and for a part that big, if we use solid plastic, it would likely weigh three times as much,” said Thomas Sweder, a design engineer of Ford Motor Company. “We look for the most durable and highest performing materials to work with to make our parts, and in this case, we are also creating many environmental benefits.”
In the past decade, the global use of plastics in vehicle parts has grown quickly. Ford alone uses about 1.2 billion recycled plastic bottles per year, about 250 bottles per vehicle on average.
When plastic bottles are thrown into a recycling bin, they are collected with thousands of others and cut into small pieces. These pieces are typically sold to suppliers who turn them into fibers, by melting and pressing them. Then they are mixed together with other various types of fiber in a process and used to make a sheet of material which is formed into the auto parts.
Due to its light weight, recycled plastic is ideal for the manufacturing of underbody shields. These shields reportedly also help create a significantly quieter environment on the new 2020 Ford Escape.
This is not the only way that Ford has been committed to environmental protection; the automotive company recently partnered with McDonald’s coffee suppliers to recycle all of their coffee roasting biowaste into headlights.
“Ford is among the leaders when it comes to using recycled materials such as this,” Sweder said. “This material meets all of our requirements for durability and performance.”
1. Why does Ford choose recycled plastic as environmentally-friendly materials?| A．Because it’s new and useful. | B．Because it’s durable and light. |
| C．Because it’s cheap and easy to get. | D．Because it’s portable and well-performed. |
| A．The global use of plastics. | B．The mixing process of fibers. |
| C．The advantages of plastic bottles. | D．The formation of the new auto material. |
| A．Recycling coffee roasting biowaste. | B．Improving vehicle parts. |
| C．Recycling plastic bottles into auto parts. | D．Creating a quieter environment. |
| A．Ford Takes the Lead in Plastic Recycling. |
| B．Every Day is Earth Day. |
| C．Ecological Auto Underbody Shields. |
| D．A Pioneer in Promoting Environmental Protection. |
As many as two-thirds of the city’s 21 million residents live in slums. “Most girls are trapped in a terrible cycle of poverty. Many of them are not thinking of education, a plan for the future,” Abisoye Ajayi-Akinfolarin, a computer programmer in Lagos, recalls. But several times a week, girls like Okpoe get a glimpse of another world when they attend GirlsCoding, a free program run by the Pearls Africa Foundation that seeks to educate and excite girls about computer programming. Since 2012, the group has helped more than 400 disadvantaged girls gain the technical skills and confidence they need to transform their lives.
It’s the vision of Ajayi-Akinfolarin, who left a successful career to devote herself to this work. She'd noticed how few women worked in this growing field-a 2013 government survey found that less than 8% of Nigerian women were employed in technology jobs. She wanted to fix the gender gap. “Technology is a space that’s dominated by men. Why should we leave that to guys?” she said. “I believe girls need opportunities.”
Now, dozens of girls aged 10 to 17 get trained in computer programming technology. “I believe you can still find diamonds in these places,” Ajayi-Akinfolarin said. “They need to be shown another life.” One way her program does this is by taking the students to visit tech companies — not only showing them what technology can do, but also helping them visualize themselves joining the industry.
Okpoe, for one, has taken this to heart. She helped create an app called Makoko Fresh that went live this summer, enabling fishermen like her father to sell seafood directly to customers. She even wants to become a software engineer and hopes to study computer science at Harvard. “One thing I want my girls to hold onto is, regardless of where they are coming from, that they can make it,” Ajayi said. “They are coders. They are thinkers. Their future is bright.”
1. What can we learn about GirlsCoding?| A．It encourages girls to land a job in education. |
| B．It offers Nigerian girls in need part-time jobs. |
| C．It helps girls working in Lagos to fight poverty. |
| D．It teaches girls in Makoko computer programming. |
| A．Men could do far better in technology jobs. |
| B．Girls should get equal work opportunities. |
| C．Men normally got paid more than women. |
| D．Girls tended to devote themselves to work. |
| A．Rebuilding the girls’ confidence. |
| B．Training the girls to find diamonds. |
| C．Presenting a different life to the girls. |
| D．Taking the girls to technology companies. |
| A．She got fishermen to benefit from her app. |
| B．She was admitted to Harvard University. |
| C．She took her father’s suggestion to heart. |
| D．She made some changes to computer science. |
3 . Anyone who commutes (通勤) by car knows that traffic jams are an unavoidable part of life. But humans are not alone in facing potential backups.
Ants also commute—between their nest and sources of food. The survival of their colonies depends on doing this efficiently.
When humans commute, there’s a point at which cars become dense (稠密) enough to slow down the flow of traffic, causing jam. Motsch, a mathematician in Arizona State University, and his colleagues wanted to know if ants on the move could also get stuck. So they regulated traffic density by constructing bridges of various widths between a colony of Argentine ants and a source of food. Then they waited and watched. “The goal was to try to find out at what point they are going to have a traffic jam.” said Sebastien Motsch.
But it appears that that never happened. They always managed to avoid traffic jam. The flow of ants did increase at the beginning as ants started to fill the bridge and then levelled off at high densities. But it never slowed down or stopped, even when the bridge was nearly filled with ants.
The researchers then took a closer look at how the behaviour of individual ants impacted traffic as a whole. And they found that when ants sense overcrowding, they adjust their speeds and avoid entering high-density areas, which prevents jams. These behaviours may be promoted by pheromones, chemicals that tell other ants where a trail is. The ants also manage to avoid colliding (碰撞) with each other at high densities, which could really slow them down. The study is in the journal eLife.
Can ants help us solve our own traffic problems? Not likely, says Motsch. That’s because when it comes to getting from point A to point B as fast as possible, human drivers put their own goals first. Individual ants have to be more cooperative in order to feed the colony. But the research could be useful in improving traffic flow for self-driving cars, which can be designed to be less like selfish humans—and more like ants.
1. What does the underlined word “this” in para.2 refer to?| A．Surviving. | B．Commuting. |
| C．Finding food. | D．Avoiding jams. |
| A．By finding out the dense points. | B．Through closer observation. |
| C．By controlling the widths of their path. | D．By regulating their numbers. |
| A．they follow a special route. |
| B．they level off at high densities. |
| C．they never stop or slow down on the way. |
| D．they depend on their natural chemicals to adjust their speeds. |
| A．Traffic jams. | B．Unavoidable? Not for ants! |
| C．Survival of an ant colony. | D．Difference between human and ants. |
4 . From the cold Arctic to the African plains, every society seems to have some form of music as part of their culture. Music is so common and widespread that most people don’t even question it anymore. But until recently, there were researchers who doubted it: How could we know that music was really a part of all known societies?
Now, Harvard researchers, Samuer Mehr and Manvir Singh, have found further evidence to support the argument. They gathered music from different countries, media and time periods, and collected descriptions of many different pieces of music. Rather than focusing on music first and then looking at where it could be found, they started by studying a record of detailed descriptions of more than three hundred known global societies, and found that all of them have music as part of their culture.
To see if people could recognize the functions of songs from around the world, the researchers also created a listening experiment in which people tried to guess the behavioral context of a song. This went surprisingly well. Particularly music that was intended for dancing or to calm a baby were easy to recognize as either dance music or lullabies. Love songs were a bit more difficult to qualify, because they tend to be very diverse even within cultures.
This systematic study of connections sounds like the way that researchers in other fields would study biological patterns. “There’s a field known as cultural phylogenetics,” says Singh. Whereas biological characteristics are only received from parent to child, cultural characteristics (like music) are also shared between people of the same generation. That makes it much more difficult to figure out where the characteristic has come from.
“Finally,” Singh says, “We still don’t know why music developed gradually. Our study shows that humans everywhere share cognitive mechanisms (认知机制) that make certain sounds seem appropriate in particular contexts.”
1. What does the underlined word “it” in paragraph 1 refer to?| A．The fact that music is part of every culture. |
| B．The question whether music is widely spread. |
| C．The doubt whether further research has been done. |
| D．The idea that Africa and the Arctic have cool music. |
| A．They found out further evidence. | B．They studied various societies. |
| C．They sought the origins of music. | D．They focused mainly on music. |
| A．To comfort a baby. | B．To pick out love songs. |
| C．To create a context. | D．To tell functions of songs. |
| A．Music shapes societies in different cultures. |
| B．Global music shares common characteristics. |
| C．Musical systems display cultural differences. |
| D．Multi-culture is based on biological patterns. |
5 . Amanda Seyfried didn’t grow up with dogs. With her busy work schedule, she didn’t think she could take care of a dog. In fact, she wasn’t looking for a furry friend at all.
But then she met Finn. Today, the 34-year-old actress, who’s known for films Mamma Mia, is a dog owner and a spokeswoman at the welfare organization Best Friends Animal Society.
“I can’t imagine my life without him,” Seyfried says of 6.5-year-old Australian shepherd Finn, who is allowed on her U.S. set. If for some reason he can’t join Seyfried on location --- like on a recent trip when she traveled from France to China, Seyfried requests from her dog sitter twice — daily videos of him.
Now with a new video for Best Friends Animal Society, she calls herself Finn’s “stage mother.”
Seyfried and Finn shot an 80s-themed video for the 9000StepsChallenge, which asks animal owners to walk 9,000 steps with their pets on the ninth day of the month to raise awareness to the fact that more than 9,000 dogs and cats are euthanized (安乐死) in shelters each day because there’s not enough room.
As for the video shoot, in which Seyfried and Finn walked the 9,000 steps --- it was more exhausting than a long walk. Seyfried was Finn’s trainer on the shoot. She believes that instead of being Finn’s cp-star, she’ll go back to being BFFs.
1. Why did Seyfried originally refuse a pet dog?| A．She wasn’t not yet a spokeswoman. |
| B．She wasn’t used to being with a dog. |
| C．She was too busy to care for a dog. |
| D．She had not enough room for a dog. |
| A．Finn. | B．Seyfried. |
| C．The dog sitter. | D．Finn’s best friend. |
| A．To show how deep she loves Finn. |
| B．To train Finn to have a long walk. |
| C．To take part in an animal cp-star show. |
| D．To call on public attention to pets’ life. |
| A．News | B．Life |
| C．Education | D．Sports |
6 . A rainy day can be a chance to recharge. While you relaxed on the sofa with a movie, the raindrops falling on your windows might one day provide the power for your TV. This is the idea behind an invention that harvests energy from water.
The technology is based on the triboelectric (摩擦电的)effect. An engineer at the University of Hawaii, David Ma knew that it’s possible to generate electricity by rubbing two things together. So, he thought, “Why don’t we use water?”
A drop of water sliding across a surface coated with two different materials would generate enough friction to create an electrical charge. By placing metal wires that the drop of water touched as it moved, it should be possible to harvest electricity, he reasoned.
It worked. In fact, the researchers lit up 15 LED bulbs with a single moving water drop.
This is not the first time that scientists have got electricity from water-generated friction( 摩 擦 ). Earlier experiments, though, harvested the charge produced in a surface by a sliding drop of water. There, the surface had acted as an electrode(电极). This is different. The energy of friction is being harvested from the water itself.
“It turns out,” Ma says, “the charge in the water drop is way more than the charge produced in the other electrode.” In fact, his team’s model generated almost 100 times more power than previous experiments from a single drop of water.
“The technology could someday power phones, sensors or other small electronics,” says Christopher Oshman, an engineer at the Colorado School of Mines. “This work is a step toward harvesting the energy of moving objects all around us, including ourselves, to power the electronic appliances we use every day,” he says.
Ma has shown that the technology can work in a lab, Oshman says. Next, the Colorado researcher would like to see it tried on a larger scale, such as on an umbrella.
1. How did the author introduce the topic of the text?| A．By telling a story. |
| B．By raising a question. |
| C．By giving an example. |
| D．By imagining a situation. |
| A．The wire. | B．The drop of water. |
| C．The surface. | D．The electricity. |
| A．The water itself acts as an electrode. |
| B．It is based on the triboelectric effect. |
| C．It produces electricity from water-made friction. |
| D．It uses a surface coated with two different materials. |
| A．It has a promising future. |
| B．It will do well on an umbrella. |
| C．It works well in the real world. |
| D．It will replace batteries someday. |
