Throughout the world, only 15% of the material that are used to make clothing is properly recycled, according to the Alle SacUrthur Club, an organization in Liverpool, UK, that boosts the circular economy. Most clothing waste—an     1    (estimate) 82 million tonnes from the fashion industry alone-produced every year ends up buried or burnt.

    2    (handle) all that waste, methods to recover and reuse the material are intended as an active response to the future risks by researchers and start-up companies. Much of their focus is on chemical recycling,     3     the material is broken down into its building blocks and applied to create new materials, including fibres that     4     (weave) into new clothes. The challenges lie in     5     (develop) the processes for such treatment. They have to be practical, but they also have to be at least as cost-effective as simply making new fibres.

    6     the natural cellulose fibres from cotton, some other materials include human-made cellulosic fibres. They are derived from wood-pulp cellulose and may be used to produce materials such as viscose (rayon) and a similar material called lyocell.

A change in the manufacturing process is being applied to the textile-waste problem by Essen, a start-up in Seattle, Washington.     7     the company has fundamentally devoted to the process is that it uses discarded textiles, instead of wood, as the source of its cellulose. It has also adjusted the process to produce a fibre that the firm’s co-founder and president Christo Stan says is superior to     8     other cellulosics and cotton, and that can be recycled more times.

Although there are abundant technical challenges, the main barrier     9     widespread textile recycling could be economic, says materials engineer Lijiang Jiang at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Atlanta. “Most of the materials are not that invaluable,” Jiang says. So cheap it is to produce polyester, cotton and other fabrics     10     there’s little profit margin unless the recycling processes themselves are very inexpensive.

2 . 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.

The Mystery is No Mystery

The area of ocean between Florida, Puerto Rico, and Bermuda, known as the Bermuda Triangle, is the source of much mystery. Over the centuries, reports of ships and planes disappearing     1     a trace have seized the public attention, leading the zone     2     (nickname) “The Devil’s Triangle.” Suggested causes for these mysterious disappearances range front supernatural powers to underwater alien bases. However, there is a more basic question to ask: Do more craft really disappear in the Bermuda Triangle than in any similarly trafficked area? The answer,     3     it turns out, is no.

The Bermuda Triangle covers a vast 700,000 square-kilometer swathe of ocean. Close to the equator(赤道)and near the United States, it is a particularly busy patch of sea with heavy traffic. According to Lloyd’s of London and the U. S. Coast Guard,     4     you were to compare the number of disappearances to the large quantity of ships and planes that have passed through the Bermuda Triangle, you would find that there     5     (be) nothing out of the ordinary about the area.

These days, new theories are being put forward, with a bit of scientific truth to them. Some have attributed Bermuda Triangle disappearances to explosive releases of methane (甲烷) gas,     6     (trap) as methane hydrate inside water molecules beneath the cold seabed of the deep ocean. Such blowouts could potentially release a giant amount of gas that could cause the sea to bubble like it was boiling, which could possibly sink ships because the resulting bubbles would be much     7     (thick) than the water on which large ships normally float. The gas could also rise into the sky,     8     (produce) a mixture of five to 15 percent methane which could explode on contact with the engine exhaust of a hot airplane.

The only problem with this theory is that scientists won’t be able to tell with much certainty if this is a factor       9     the ocean floor is mapped in greater detail. It remains to be seen     10     they will succeed in their attempt to clear up the Bermuda Triangle “mystery” this time around.

3 . In an ideal world, people would not perform experiments on animals. For the people, they are expensive. For the animals, they are stressful and often painful. That ideal world, ______, is still some way away. People need new drugs and vaccines. They want ______ from the toxicity（毒性） of chemicals. The search for basic scientific answers goes on. ______, the European Commission is moving ahead with proposals that will ______ the number of animal experiments carried out in the European Union, by requiring toxicity tests on every chemical ______ for use within the union’s borders in the past 25 years.

Already, the commission has ______ 140,000 chemicals that have not yet been tested. It wants 30,000 of these to be examined right away, and plans to spend between $4 billion — $8 billion doing so. The number of animals used for toxicity testing in Europe will thus, experts reckon, quintuple (翻五倍) from just over l million a year to about 5, unless they are saved by some dramatic ______ in non-animal testing technology. Animal experimentation will therefore be around for some time yet. But the search for substitutes continues.

A good place to start finding ______ for toxicity tests is the liver--the organ responsible for breaking toxic chemicals down into safer molecules that can then be eliminated from body. Two firms, one large and one small, told the meeting how they were using human liver cells removed incidentally during surgery to test various substances for long-term toxic effects.

PrimeCyte, the small firm, grows its cells in cultures（士音养基） over a few weeks and doses them regularly with the substance under ______. The characteristics of the cells are carefully ______, to look for changes in their microanatomy（组织学）. Pfizer, the big firm, also doses its cultures regularly, but rather than studying ______ cells in detail, it counts cell numbers. If the number of cells in a culture changes after a sample is added, that suggests the chemical ______ is bad for the liver.

Other tissues, too, can be tested ______ of animals. Epithelix, a small firm in Geneva, has developed an ______ version of the lining of the lungs. According to Huang Song, one of Epithelix’s researchers, the firm’s cultured cells have similar microanatomy to those found in natural lung linings, and ______ in the same way to various chemical messengers. Dr. Huang says that they could be used in long-term toxicity tests of airborne chemicals and could also help identify treatments for lung diseases.

All this suggests that though there is still some way to go before drugs, vaccines and other substances can be tested routinely on cells rather than live animals, useful progress is being made.

For centuries, people have described unusual animal behavior just ahead of seismic (地震的) events: dogs barking endlessly, cows halting their milk, toads leaping from ponds. A few researchers have tried to prove a link, but most such attempts have relied largely on anecdotes and single     1    .

Now researchers at the University of Konstanz, along with a multinational team of colleagues, say they have managed to     2     measure increased activity in a group of farm animals prior to seismic activity. During separate periods     3     about four months in 2016 and 2017, the researchers     4     these highly sensitive biologgers and GPS sensors, which can record accelerated movements in any direction, to six cows, five sheep and two dogs living on a farm in an earthquake-prone area of northern Italy to keep track of the activities and the nervousness of animals. “Only now can we do continuous biologging,” says study co-author Martin Wikelski. “Because the     5     possibilities are finally there.”

The paper’s statistical analysis showed animals’ activity significantly increased before magnitude 3.8 or greater earthquakes when they were housed together in a stable — but not when they were out to pasture (吃草). Wikelski says this difference could be linked to the increased stress some animals feel in     6     spaces. Analyzing the increased movements as a whole, the researchers claim, showed a clear signal of     7     behavior hours ahead of tremors.

Besides, it showed that the farm animals appeared to anticipate quakes anywhere from one to 20 hours ahead, reacting earlier when they were closer to the origin and later when they were farther away. This finding is     8     with a hypothesis that animals somehow sense a signal that spreads outward. It holds that in the days before an earthquake, shifting tectonic plates (地壳板块) squeeze rocks along a fault line, causing the rocks to release minerals that force ions into the air, and then the animals react to this novel     9    .

Not involved with the new study, Wendy Bohon, a geologist from Washington, D.C., is     10     of the air ionization idea. Heiko Woith, a geologist at GFZ German Research Center for Geosciences, says the time frame was still too short and points out that limited data collection in many studies makes it impossible to determine whether a measured signal was related to a quake or was simply noise.

6 . In the 1966 science-fiction movie One Million Years B. C., the movie characters had a time travel and arrived in an ancient landscape inhabited by dinosaurs and early humans. The movie was low on science and high on fiction: by then dinosaurs were long dead and modern humans were millions of years away.

A more accurate picture of Earth’s inhabitants at the time is now being revealed. In research published in Nature, a team of scientists led by Anders Gotherstrom at the University of Stockholm, and Love Dalen at the Centre for Palaeogenetics (古遗传学), also in Sweden, describe sequencing (测序) DNA samples from mammoths (猛犸象) that lived and died in north-eastern Siberia around a million years ago.

The team’s work represents a new record, for their mammoth DNA is, by some half a million years, the oldest ever successfully reconstructed. Extracted (提取) from horses, bears and even Neanderthals and Denisovans, two close cousins of modern humans, such ancient DNA has proved an invaluable tool for investigating the past. Although fossils preserve the basic physical features of extinct animals, they are silent about many crucial details that even an incomplete genome (基因组) can help to fill in.

The trouble with DNA is that it breaks down after death. The more broken down it is, the harder it is to sequence. Scientists think that, after about 6m years, all that would be left would be individual base pairs (碱基对), the equivalent of trying to reconstruct a book from several letters. Under the right conditions, however, such as the extreme cold of Arctic permafrost (冻土层) this decay can be slowed.

Dr. Dalen and his colleagues were interested in three mammoth molars (臼齿) extracted in the 1970s from Siberian geological layers that suggested great age. Samples from each were sent to Dr. Dalen’s laboratory in 2017. Having checked they had not been contaminated by bacteria or the shaking hands of Paleontologists, the DNA were extracted, sequenced, and dated. Whereas DNA samples from a living animal can run to several hundreds of thousands of letters, the ancient mammoth samples yielded merely dozens of letter long. This is close to the limit of what is scientifically usable, says a biologist named Ludovic Orlando.

Sky Kurtz farms in the desert. The co-fbunder and CEO of Pure Harvest Smart Farms—    1    (locate) outside Abu Dhabi, where temperatures regularly top 113°F—and his team use the challenging environs to trial new crops and technologies that have the potential to change farming in climate-challenged areas. Pure Harvest also provides produce to supermarkets and restaurants in Dubai and across the region     2    (use) less water, which is important in one of the most arid regions of the world.

Kurtz founded Pure Harvest Smart Fanns in 2017 with his co-founders Mahmoud Adi and Robert Kupstas. Passionate about food insecurity, they spent the first year studying high-tech food-production systems around the world,     3     searching for the optimal site for their first farm.

Kurtz’s farms in the UAE started out with “    4     but a PowerPoint, a pile of dirt, and the promise of what we would do,” says Kurtz. But Pure Harvest quickly proved it was built on more than a promise. The founders’ research and technological innovation led to the development of a proprietary (专利的)Controlled-Environment Agriculture (CEA) system—a combination of high-tech greenhouses and vertical farms that     5     (provide) a stable year-round climate.   The first crop of tomatoes was planted in August 2018 and harvested in October. The company’s original farm is now its R&D facility, and Pure Harvest has expanded its facilities in the UAE to 16 hectares of growing area. It also operates a 6-hectare farm in Saudi Arabia, and is developing a 6-hectare farm in Kuwait.

It now produces 14 types of leafy greens; two varieties of strawberries, with seven more     6    (develop); and almost 30 varieties of tomatoes, the product that started it all. With limited availability of local, seasonal produce, the UAE has typically imported much of its food, often air-freighted,     7    comes at a high cost, both economically and environmentally. And while they are more expensive compared with locally grown seasonal produce, the company says its fruit and vegetables are typically up to 60% cheaper than air-freighted imports of comparable quality. “I think we’ve fundamentally changed a belief system that said local is     8    (bad).” says Kurtz.

Their vision fits in with a larger objective for Dubai to become more self-sufficient. The focus is not just on growing for premium markets but also developing affordable solutions    9    (help) democratize access to fresh food.

Kurtz hopes the company’s data-driven technology can become a model for other regions that are experiencing climate stress. “We believe that we can develop a local-for-local solution     10     it’s needed most, and we’ve battle-tested that capability in one of the harshest environments in the world." he says.

Satellites Can Help Us Fight Climate Change

At the beginning of 2021, President Joe Biden exclaimed that “science is back” as we continued our efforts to     1     the COVID emergency. That phrase continues to ring true across the federal government. Science and its applications are being used at every agency to deal with public health     2    , build new transportation infrastructure, inform policy decisions and tackle the climate crisis.

Recently the Interior Department’s U.S. Geological Survey assumed     3     of Landsat 9 from NASA, which built and launched it in 2021.This satellite is designed to     4     Earth’s land, water and other natural resources. Landsat missions support environmental sustainability and climate resilience. The Landsat program, which launched in July 1972, has helped us understand our planet and the changes that are occurring on it. That partnership has propelled research and observation forward through the launch of     5     Landsat satellites, each replacing its predecessors and working in tandem with new capabilities and strengths.

I attended the historic launch of Landsat 9 in California. It was nothing     6     of amazing. I toured the mission control center and met a young scientist from the Navajo Nation living far away from home. She uses Landsat     7     to see her home from many miles away, and with such data, she enables her community to manage water resources in the face of a changing climate. This is the power and beauty of science at work.

All around the globe, scientists are using Landsat and other imagery to interpret what is happening on Earth today and to compare it with the 50 years’     8     of data the Landsat program has collected.

This science-based program and those like it across federal agencies are powerful tools in our efforts to responsibly manage our resources. Their prioritization helps to demonstrate the Biden-Harris administration’s commitment to lead with science. So, too, the resources provided through the president’s Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and Inflation Reduction Act will be key to the development of longer-term sustainability measures as we     9     to climate change, including building more resilient communities and protecting our natural environment.

Landsat NEXT is the upcoming mission we will develop with NASA to power better science and decision-making for the next 50 years. Science is indeed     10     us on a path to a brighter future.