1 . Directions: Fill in each blank with a proper word chosen from the box. Each word used only once. Note that there is one word more than you need.

A. implications       B. piece       C. survival       D. revolution E. varying        F. climatic       G. stretching       H. delicately        I. migrate       J. merely       K. shifts

Climate Change

When global warming finally came, it came aggressively. In some regions, temperatures rose several degrees in less than a century. Sea levels shot up nearly 40 feet, flooding coastal settlements and forcing people to     1    inland. Deserts spread throughout the world as vegetation shifted greatly in North America, Europe and Asia. After driving many of the animals around them to near extinction, people were forced to abandon their old way of life for a new    2    strategy that resulted in widespread starvation and disease.

As environmentalists meet in Rio de Janeiro this week to think carefully about the global climate of the future, earth scientists are in the middle of a(n)     3    in understanding how climate has changed in the past and how those changes have transformed human existence. Researchers have begun to     4    together an inspiring picture of the powerful geological and astronomical forces to change the planet’s environment from hot to cold, wet to dry and back again over a time period     5    back hundreds of millions of years.

Most importantly, scientists are beginning to realize that the     6     changes have had a major impact on the evolution of the human species. New research now suggests that climate     7     played a key role in nearly every significant turning point in human evolution. Indeed, the human history has not been     8     touched by global climate change. Some scientists argue it has in some instances been driven by it.

The new research has far-reaching     9     for the environment summit in Rio. Among other things, the findings demonstrate that dramatic climate change is nothing new for planet Earth. The pleasant global environment that has existed over the past 10,000 years is a mere bright spot in a much larger pattern of widely     10    climate over the ages. In feet, the pattern of climate change in the past reveals that Earth’s climate will almost certainly go through dramatic changes in the future even without the influence of human activity.

2 . Chemists in mid-1500s Nuremburg had discovered that bird droppings were a rich source of saltpetre, a vital ingredient in the making of gunpowder. As a consequence pigeon droppings used to be almost as valuable as silver. Understandably, by the middle of the following century, there were an estimated 26,000 pigeon houses in Britain.

The practice of keeping the pigeon was introduced to Britain by the Romans. The Normans kept pigeons in specially constructed niches in castles and courtyards. When the pigeon houses in Britain were built, they were a vital source of meat and feathers. The latter were particularly prized as a source of warmth. Droppings gathered from the pigeon houses was a rich fertilizer, too.

The pigeon house was not only a source of food and revenue in medieval times, but also a status symbol. The privilege of building or owning pigeon houses was reserved for the rich. Towards the end of her rule, Queen Elizabeth I decided to open pigeon-breeding to the free market. Then, pigeon houses sprang up all over the countryside.

The number of pigeon houses across the British countryside was not universally welcomed. Each day the birds flew off to feed themselves on other people’s crops. By the middle of the 17th century, the problem of pigeons was so great that people feared that the destructive pigeons would turn England into a desert.

Luckily, an agricultural revolutionary, Charles Townsend, had introduced the turnip to Britain around 1700, keeping farm livestock fat enough to eat through the dark winter months. Later, vast quantities of natural saltpetre were discovered in Chile and California. Keeping pigeons went out of fashion.

Now, the homeless pigeons flew off to find somewhere else to live. One species discovered that Britain’s rapidly growing towns and cities were full of the sort of rock-faces they liked to rest on—humans called them “buildings”. Over time they’d become the wild urban pigeon that we know today.

1. Which of the following people in Britain would be least likely to keep pigeons in the late Middle Ages?

A．Fruit growers.

B．The nobles.

C．Gunpowder makers.

D．The miners.

2. What can be inferred from the passage?

A．Farm livestock used to be too thin for lack of food in the dark months in Britain.

B．Townsend revolutionized agricultural development in Britain around 1700.

C．The Normans set an undesirable example of raising pigeons for the British people.

D．England was once faced with the threat of disappearance because of pigeons.

3. According to the passage, why are there so many pigeons in the cities in Britain today?

A．Because people think it a sign of status and keep them to show off.

B．Because pigeons like to stay on hard surfaces which can be abundantly found in cities.

C．Because pigeons find enough food supplies when tourists and citizens feed them in squares.

D．Because the government encourages pigeon raising as a profitable investment.

4. Which is the best title of the passage?

A．A brief history of pigeon houses in Britain.

B．From function to fashion — the pigeon houses in Britain.

C．Profitable pigeon houses in Britain.

D．Pigeon houses in Britain as valuable as silver.

3 . Directions: After reading the passage below, fill in the blanks to make the passage coherent and grammatically correct. For the blanks with a given word, fill in each blank with the proper form of the given word; for the other blanks, use one word that best fits each blank.

A massive fire tore through the main market in the city of Hargeisa in northern Somalia overnight, injuring about two dozen people and     1    (destroy) hundreds of businesses, officials have said.

Images     2    (post) on social media showed flames and huge clouds of smoke in the night sky over the city, the capital of the breakaway region of Somaliland. The cause of the blaze     3     devastated the sprawling Waheen market, the lifeblood of the city and home     4     an estimated 2,000 shops and stalls, is not yet known.

Officials said it started on Friday evening but was largely brought under control by dawn on Saturday, although some small areas were still burning.

“The town has never witnessed such a massive calamity,” Hargeisa’s mayor, Abdikarim Ahmed Mooge, told reporters at the scene. “This place was the economic centre of Hargeisa and     5     the firefighters’ best efforts made to contain the fire, the market is destroyed.” He said the blaze could have been brought under control before causing such extensive damage but that the firefighters’ attempt     6    (deny) due to access problems. The vast market is a crowded warren of shops and makeshift stalls, with no proper streets, only narrow pathways.

The Somaliland president, Muse Bihi Abdi, said during a visit to Waheen     7    about 28 people, nine of them women, were injured, but that so far no loss of life     8    (report). He said the government would be releasing one million dollars to help with the emergency response to the disaster.

Hargeisa chamber of commerce chairman Jamal Aideed said the loss of the market was immense     9     it accounted for 40% to 50% of the city’s economy.

“I have lost everything tonight, this fire was the biggest I have ever seen in my life,” said market trader Bashi Ali. “I had several businesses in the market and all of them burned to ashes.     10    we can learn from this disaster is to plan the market well,” he added.

4 . Directions: Read the following passage. Summarize the main idea and the main point(s) of the passage in no more than 60 words. Use your own words as far as possible.

Meet the Woman Who Gives Rescued Farm Animals a Second Chance at Life

Shortly after doctors diagnosed ten-year-old Jenny Brown with bone cancer, they had to cut off her right leg below the knee to save her life. Facing a year of chemotherapy (化疗) after the surgery, Jenny begged her mother for a kitten. The orange calico Jenny named Boogie rarely left her side, licking tears from her cheeks after hospital visits and curling up in her lap as she adjusted to life with a prosthetic (假肢的) leg.

“My relationship with Boogie showed me that animals think, feel, and suffer as much as we do,” says Jenny, now 44.

In 1994, Jenny graduated from Columbia College Chicago and began a career in television and documentary production. On the side, she volunteered as a videographer for animal rights groups, and in 2002, she shot undercover footage of horrible animal mistreatment at several Texas farm animal stockyards. “After seeing that, I knew I needed to help animals,” says Jenny.

A year later, she gave up her film career and with her fiancé, Doug Abel, a film editor, opened the Woodstock Farm Sanctuary, a nonprofit organization dedicated to rescuing and recovering farm animals, on a 22-acre property they bought in the rolling hills of Woodstock, New York, the next year.

In August 2007, she received a call from Animal Care and Control of NYC about a small goat it had found hopping around Prospect Park. Jenny guessed it had run away from one of the city’s murder-houses. The goat’s legs were severely injured, probably from being bound together with wire, and its mouth was covered in aching.

Jenny and her team brought the goat, which they named Albie, to the preserve, but they soon realized that Albie’s left front leg was injured beyond repair. After a veterinarian(兽医) cut off the leg. Jenny asked Erik Tomkins, the doctor who makes Jenny’s prostheses, to fashion a leg for Albie. To date, seven of the preserve’s animals have received prosthetic limbs or braces. “On most farms, animals with these illnesses would be immediately killed,” says Jenny.

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7 . Directions: Fill in each blank with a missing word according to the text.

The benefits of a degree are not obvious to people who live on this remote island. Families have a    1     lifestyle, hunting walruses, whales and other sea animals in the spring, and gathering berries in the summer. The largest employer is the school system;     2    , there are only a handful of jobs in fishing, oil and the airlines that connect the island to the mainland. There isn’t much demand for anything else and more than a quarter of adults are     3    .

Today two villages remain with a population of just 1,400. People there are used to the     4    landscape and climate—in the summer, fields of grassy frozen ground     5     from snow-capped mountain ranges to the stony shorelines, but in the winter the sun disappears, there is a lot of snow, and polar bears arrive on ice floes. Leaving the island is not an option, as a ticket on a bush plane costs $400, a week’s earnings for many islanders. The sense of     6    is strong. When a whale is killed, the houses and school empty as everyone races to the beach to take a share of the meat.

8 . EARTH WEEK—A diary of the planet

Storms

Several more rounds of fierce storms, tornadoes and floods struck many parts of the American Midwest and Northeast as bad weather continued across the US for a second month.

Monsoon Storms

A south-west monsoon has caused great damage in parts of SriLanka. Government meteorologists said that unexpected monsoonal winds blew directly across the country from the southern part of the earth at about 100km/h, producing several rounds of stormy weather. Nearly 250 houses in the capital Colombo were damaged.

Mt Etna Erupts

Sicily Mount Etna volcano erupted shortly after midnight on July 1, shooting “bombs” of lave (岩浆) on the eastern side of the mountain. The 30-minute eruption could be seen for several miles but did not threaten any nearby villages.

Hurricane

Hurricane Blas lost strength as it moved over cooler waters in the Pacific Ocean to the west of Mexico. Blas formed off southwest Mexico during the last week, but the outer part of the storm swept western Michoacan State, killing four people when their wood and cardboard home fell down.

Monkey Repellent

After years of unsuccessful attempts to keep crop-eating monkeys out of Japanese fields, a Tokyo research team believes that it may have finally found a way to prevent the damage caused by the monkeys. Animal ruin of crops were successfully prevented by shooting chili powder into the air, irritating the eyes and noses of monkeys that passed in front of carefully placed warning. “We’ve tried all kinds of preventive measures, but the monkeys are bright enough to outsmart the tricks,” said Toshiaki Wada, Director of the Tokyo Forestry Experiment Station in western Tokyo.

1. The monsoon in Sri Lanka ________.

A．was of average strength	B．destroyed more property than previous monsoons
C．was rare for that time of the year	D．affected only the outer areas of the nation

2. Toshiaki Wada, director of the Tokyo Forestry Experiment Station, would describe the monkeys as ________.

A．happy

B．clever

C．harmless

D．lovable

3. The information in the “EARTH WEEK” diary ________.

A．tells people future weather patterns	B．gives advice on dealing with monsoons
C．shows that weather can change unexpectedly	D．shows the effects that storms have on animals

10 . 阅读下面短文，在空白处填入1个适当的单词或括号内单词的正确形式。

Hatching a theory

Just as dinosaurs characterized the cretaceous (白垩纪的) period, which ended with their extinction 66 million years ago, and mammals made up the Holocene (全新纪), which extends to the present day, many scientists believe we need to designate a new geologic age, called the Anthropocene,     1     reflects the impact of humankind on the planet. That raises the question: What will constitute     2     (noticeable) feature of the Anthropocene in the fossil record?

It’s likely to be chicken bones, according to a study by Carys Bennett, from the U.K.’s University of Leicester, and colleagues     3     (publish) last month in Royal Society Open Science.

Humans eat a lot of chicken, which means a lot of chicken bones are being buried, and many of them are likely to survive in fossilized form. According to Bennett’s paper, 65.8 billion chickens were killed globally in 2016, and     4     22.7 billion live birds await this fate today. The “biomass” of all poultry is 10 times greater than of all wild birds     5     (put) together.

We’re not just eating a lot of poultry; we’ve also put our mark on the birds themselves.     6     chicken consumption started taking off in the 1950s, the size and shape of the species—their skeleton, bone chemistry and genetics—have changed completely from their wild ancestors. The rapid growth of chicken’s leg and breast muscle means that its organs, including the heart and liver, are proportionally smaller. We     7     (shorten) the life span of broiler chickens, which can no longer survive without “intensive human intervention,” the authors write.

Because we engineered the species, and because it has become such a major feature of food consumption, it will     8     (consider) a marker of the Anthropocene, Bennett predicts. “The significance of the post-mid-20^th-century chicken is that it is the first really good example we have     9     what paleontologists (古生物学家) call a new “morphospecies”—that is, a distinctive kind of skeleton that    10     be identified as a fossil—that appeared in the Anthropocene and became hugely abundant pretty well around the world,” she says. “In the future, humans will find and use chickens as a marker of our age.”