1 . 听下面一段独白，回答以下小题。1.

A．They have been sent to wildlife parks for protection.

B．Their habitats have been well-protected.

C．They have been taken care of by locals.

D．Their population has almost doubled.

2.

A．She fought against illegal hunting.	B．She helped to cure their disease.
C．She improved their living conditions.	D．She was engaged in preserving forests.

3.

A．To teach people how to treat gorillas.	B．To boost the economy of Uganda.
C．To better the Batwa people’s lives.	D．To raise funds for wildlife protection.

2 . 听下面一段独白，回答以下小题。1.

A．5%.

B．80%.

C．40%.

D．10%.

2.

A．Polluting the environment.

B．Destroying wildlife habitats.

C．Endangering new species.

D．Hunting to a great extent.

3.

A．To appeal to people to protect wildlife.

B．To emphasize the importance of the Earth.

C．To describe different ways to stop pollution.

D．To analyze the reasons for wildlife’s disappearing.

3 . Antarctic Tourism: Should We Just Say No?

More people are visiting Antarctic, the frozen continent than ever before.     1     This has brought a new urgency to the question of how much, if any, tourism should be allowed on the icy continent.

The distance most visitors travel to reach Antarctica makes carbon emissions a serious problem.     2     One study calculated that each tourist between 2016 and 2020 was effectively melting around 83 tonnes of snow, due largely to emissions from vacation ships.

    3     The Antarctic Treaty, established in 1961 to provide governance for the continent, operates on a consultative basis, which means all 56 parties have to agree before a change can be put into action. The last major decision on tourism was a measure passed in 2009 that prohibits vacation ships carrying more than 500 passengers from making landings. That regulation has still not officially been carried out as not every signatory country has accepted it domestically.

There is clear agreement that something needs to change, but no agreement on what those changes should be.     4    

A．The number of visitors hit 100,000 for the first time this tourist season, a 40% jump over the previous record.

B．The Antarctic is at risk not just because of the breakability of its environment, but due to the lack of a single governing body.

C．Should landings be made at a larger number of sites for instance, or should we aim to keep the human footprint as small as possible?

D．If what you really want is to connect with snow and ice and you’re in the northern half, can you catch a train to the nearest snow region instead?

E．The average per-person carbon emissions for an Antarctic tourist are 3.76 tonnes – about the total sum that an individual typically generates in an entire year.

F．There is so little regulation now that almost anything that will protect the areas by an official legal source rather than self-regulated would be really positive.

4 . My son, Ben, died when he was 23. The year after his death, I hiked 48 of the state’s tallest mountains in his memory. Every step, path and peak has been a way to restore.

About a month after his death, my husband and I hiked Carter Dome and Mount Hight, sorrow weighing heavy in our hearts and legs. Standing on the peak, I looked out across the mountains my son loved. For a moment, the heavy blow brought about by Ben’s death faded into the timeless expanse, and I could breathe.

The next weekend found us on Mount Moosilauke. Then Mount Cannon, Mount Flume, Mount Liberty and so on. It was a series of firsts, of struggles and overcoming them — climbing at night, climbing slides and rocks, camping alone, finding paths and planning routes.

Six days before the anniversary of Ben’s death, I hiked my 48^th and final peak: Mount Carrigain. As I stood on the observation platform at the peak, I found the essential truth I had been grasping to express for months: The only place that feels vast enough to hold sorrow this deep and wide is the top of a mountain, looking out into forever.

These days, I hike not to hide, but to seek. I find Ben, but I also find myself: someone broken, now braver and more capable. The forced isolation of sorrow becomes the welcome loneliness of the path; the peace of nature replaces the pain of loss. Hiking is both exhausting and exciting, and it teaches us that sorrow and joy can coexist.

But there’s another, possibly more important truth: A hike is not the only way to find the peace of the natural world; a simple walk along a park path can have a similar effect. The internal journey of sorrow mixes with our steps, and we find comfort along the way.

1. How did the writer feel after climbing Carter Dome and Mount Hight?

A．Doubtful.

B．Relieved.

C．Sad.

D．Terrified.

2. After hiking the 48 peaks, the writer learned that __________.

A．it was possible to live with both sorrow and joy

B．it was the isolation of sorrow that exhausted her

C．only by overcoming struggles could one survive

D．the peaks were proper places to remember someone

3. What does the writer imply in the last paragraph?

A．Walking works best for those in sorrow.	B．We can plan our internal journey as intended.
C．What counts is to make peace with ourselves.	D．People tend to hike in parks to seek comfort.

4. Which of the following is the best title for the passage?

A．The Heavy Steps That Led Me To Peaks	B．The Mountains That Held My Sorrow
C．The Journeys That Frustrated Me	D．The First Struggles That Empowered Me

5 . The emergence of black holes undoubtedly marks the beginning of a revolution. Black holes have many peculiar properties, such as the alteration of space and time, the radiation of gravitational waves and so on. Scientists are still trying to study the properties and evolution of black holes in order to better understand the origin and evolution of the universe.

Recently, a team of astronomers may have found a solo-wandering black hole using a strange trick of gravity called microlensing (微透镜效应), but the results still have to be confirmed.

Sometimes it’s tough being an astronomer. Nature likes to hide the most interesting things from easy observation. Take, for example, black holes. Except for the strange quantum (量子) phenomenon of Hawking radiation, black holes are completely black. They don’t emit a single bit of radiation – they only absorb, hence their name.

To date, the only way astronomers have been able to spot black holes is through their influence on their environments. For example, if an orbiting star gets a little too close, the black hole can absorb the gas from that star, causing it to heat up as it falls. We can watch as stars dance around the giant black hole at the center of the Milky Way.

Even the famed pictures of the black holes in the center of the Milky Way and the M87 galaxy(星系) aren’t photographs of the black holes themselves. Instead, they are radio images of everything around them.

But surely not all black holes have other light-emitting objects around them to help us find them. To find these wanderers, astronomers have tried their luck with microlensing. We know that heavy objects can bend the path of light around them. This is a prediction of Einstein’s general theory of relativity, and the slight bending of starlight around our own sun was one of the first successful tests of the theory.

Microlensing is pretty much what the name suggests. When astronomers get extremely lucky, a wandering black hole and pass between us and a random distant star. The light from that star bends around the black hole because of its gravity, and from our point of view, the star will appear to temporarily flare in brightness.

And when I say “extremely lucky” I mean it. Despite trying this technique for over a decade, it is only now that astronomers have found a candidate black hole through microlensing. Two teams used the same data, a microlensing event recorded from both the OGLE (Optical Gravitational Lensing Experiment) telescope in Chile and the MOA (Microlensing Observations in Astrophysics) telescope in New Zealand. One team found that the mass was somewhere around seven times the mass of the sun – definitely black hole territory. But the other team estimated a much smaller mass, around 2-4 times the mass of the Sun. If the true mass of the object is at the lower end of that spectrum (光谱), then the wanderer is probably not a black hole.

1. Why does the author say it is hard to be an astronomer?

A．Einstein’s theory is hard to understand.

B．Many things in nature are not easy to observe.

C．Understanding the evolution of the universe is not easy.

D．Whether the black hole has been found remains to be seen.

2. What is the example in Para. 4 trying to prove?

A．Stars’ wandering in black holes.

B．Black holes’ absorbing the star’s gas.

C．The relationship between stars’ heating and black holes.

D．Finding black holes by observing environmental changes.

3. What does the author tell us about the discovery of black holes?

A．People can often find black holes with glowing objects.

B．Research groups can work together to find black holes.

C．Glowing objects around black holes help us find them sometimes.

D．Understanding the properties of black holes helps find them.

4. What conclusion can we draw from the last paragraph?

A．To persevere in the end is to win.

B．Facts speak louder than words.

C．Failure is the mother of success.

D．Things are not always what they seem.

6 . Many of the world’s islands were previously unexplored places, but over time, people have come to these places with far-reaching effects, including deforestation, over-hunting and the introduction of invasive species. _______, most of the bird species disappeared.

While the death of many birds since the 1500s has been _______, our knowledge of the fate of species before this relies on fossils (化石), and these records are limited because birds’ lightweight bones are _______ over time. This conceals the true _______ of global extinctions.

Researchers now believe 1,430 bird species — almost 12 per cent — have died out over modern human history since around 130,000 years ago, with the vast majority of them becoming extinct directly or indirectly _______ human activity.

The study, led by the UK Centre for Ecology & Hydrology (UKCEH) and published in Nature Communications, used statistical modelling to _______ the undiscovered bird extinctions.

Lead author Dr Rob Cooke, an ecological modeler at UKCEH, says:“Our study demonstrates there has been a far higher _______ impact on diversity than previously recognized. Humans quickly destroyed bird populations through habitat loss, over-exploitation, and the introduction of rats, pigs, and dogs, which attacked the birds’ nests, and _______ with birds for food. We show that many species became extinct before written records and left no _______, lost from history.”

Dr Søren Faurby of the University of Gothenburg, a co-author of the study, adds: “These historic extinctions have had a major impact on the current biodiversity crisis. The world may not only have lost many fascinating birds but also their varied ________ roles, which are likely to have included key functions such as pollination (授粉). This will have had knock-on effects on ecosystems, so, ________ bird extinctions, we will have lost a lot of plants and animals that ________ these species for survival.”

Observations and fossils show 640 bird species have been driven extinct — 90 per cent of these on islands ________ by people. These ________ from the iconic (标志性的) Dodo of Mauritius to the Great Auk of the North Atlantic to the lesser-known Saint Helena Giant Hoopoe. But the researchers estimate there have been further 790 unknown extinctions, meaning a total of 1,430 lost species — leaving just under 11,000 today. Therefore, from the perspective of protecting species ________, the protection of birds is an urgent issue for mankind.

1.

A．To some extent

B．On average

C．As a result

D．In short

2.

A．confirmed

B．recorded

C．concealed

D．discussed

3.

A．distracted

B．disposed

C．dismissed

D．disintegrated

4.

A．extent

B．context

C．outcome

D．influence

5.

A．due to

B．other than

C．instead of

D．in spite of

6.

A．declare

B．illustrate

C．estimate

D．emphasize

7.

A．climate

B．human

C．environmental

D．natural

8.

A．connected

B．coped

C．lived

D．competed

9.

A．trace

B．route

C．change

D．proposal

10.

A．interactive

B．ecological

C．productive

D．social

11.

A．in terms of

B．because of

C．except for

D．in addition to

12.

A．depend on

B．interact with

C．fight against

D．stay away

13.

A．inhabited

B．removed

C．developed

D．killed

14.

A．result

B．range

C．suffer

D．date

15.

A．origin

B．project

C．growth

D．diversity

7 .

A．The effects of the flood.	B．The fight against the flood.
C．The cause of the flood.	D．The ten floods of the year.

8 . Rain Collection

What do you like to do on a rainy day —sit inside and listen to the pitter-patter on the roof or splash outside and feel the cold drops on your face? Whatever you choose, rain is vitally essential in the nature.

    1     It fills rivers and lakes, slowly sinks into the earth, nourishes our plants, and keeps the land alive and beautiful. In the past, people obtained their water from rain, wells, or nearby rivers. Now, many of us live in places where water is piped in, sometimes from far away. Removing so much water from nature and sending it to great distances harm the living things that also need that water.

As climate change heats up the planet and causes extreme weather, more places face water shortages.     2     . One easy place to look for more water is the sky!

Humans have collected rain since ancient times.     3    . They are tapping into this clean and rich source of water provided by nature. By harvesting the rain we can reduce the amount of water we take from rivers and out of the ground.

Even in dry climates, there is a lot of potential rainwater that can be effectively harvested and utilized. This rich yet often overlooked resource has the potential to significantly contribute to water conservation efforts, especially in regions facing water shortages. Just one inch of rain falling on a medium-sized house produces over 600 gallons of water.    4    .

Nowadays, rainwater is still used as a primary supply in many places in the world, like Vietnam and Hawaii. In places with piped-in water, rainwater is not commonly used, but this is changing. Rainwater harvesting is getting more popular since it’s easy to do and helps create water security.

A．Large roofs can, hence, collect greater amount of water.

B．Rainwater can also be used for fountains and ponds.

C．We all deeply depend on the nourishment of rain.

D．To secure future water supply, we need new sources.

E．Now, many people are returning to this practice.

F．Rainwater is clean but it gets dirty from the roof.

9 .

A．It will cool down a bit over the weekend.

B．He hopes the weather forecast is accurate.

C．Swimming in a pool has a relieving effect.

D．Summer has become hotter in recent years.

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

A. conservation       B. relocate       C. momentarily       D. program       E.   critical      F. initiative       G. ensure              H. permanently        I. additional       J. reserve        K. unexpected

A team of scientists led by Alejandro Arteaga, grantee of The Explorers Club Discovery Expeditions and researcher at Khamai Foundation, discovered three new cryptozoic (living underground) snakes dwelling under graveyards (墓地) and churches in remote towns in the Andes region of Ecuador.

It was an exploration that led to the most     1    of places.

First published in the journal, Zookeys, Arteaga and his team named the small brown color-patterned snakes in honor of institutions or people supporting the exploration and    2     of remote cloud forests in the tropics.

The Discovery Ground Snake (Atractus discovery) was found underground in a small graveyard. Two     3    new species were found near an old church and inside a small school. Destruction of the snake’s native forest habitat may have forced them to     4     to these people-less areas according to Arteaga’s findings.

Atractus discovery was named to honor The Explorers Club Discovery Expedition Grants     5    , a program seeking to foster scientific understanding for the betterment of humanity and all life on Earth and beyond. The grant program supports researchers and explorers from around the world in their quest to ease the climate change crisis, prevent the extinction of species and cultures, and    6    the health of the Earth and its inhabitants.

Atractus zgap was named in honor of the Zoological Society for the Conservation of Species and Populations (ZGAP), a(n)     7     seeking to conserve unknown but highly endangered species and their natural environment.

Atractus michaelsabini was named in honor of Michael Sabin, grandson of American philanthropist and conservationist Andrew Sabin. Through conservation organization Re:wild, the Sabin family has supported field research of threatened reptiles and has protected thousands of acres of     8     habitat throughout the world.

“The discovery of these new snakes is only the first step towards a much larger conservation project,” says Arteaga. “We have already started the process of establishing a nature     9     to protect the ground snakes. This action would not have been possible without first unveiling the existence of these unique and cryptic reptiles, even if it meant     10     disturbing the peace of the dead in the graveyard where they lived.”