1 . Directions: Complete the following passage by using the words in the box. Each word can be used only once. Note that there is one word more than you need.

A. exported              B. creating              C. environmental D. enjoying              E. implications F. respectively G. conservation H. protecting              I. recovering              J. borders K. eliminated

Is growth good for biodiversity? To answer the question, it is critical to define what we mean by growth. Is growth gross domestic product (GDP), the “monetary value of all the finished goods within a country’s     1    ”? Or does it mean improving the human standard of living? Today, when people say growth, they mean GDP, a measure that is over 70 years old. Actually GDP demonstrates negative     2    for biodiversity, as this “growth” measures only money inflows while far more important is the balance sheet, which shows properties and debts. As biodiversity delivers no cash, it has no place in GDP system, but biodiversity provides the asset side of the balance sheet, such as forests, rivers, wetlands and animals—the list goes on.

It is argued that growth is good for biodiversity in the long run as there is an environmental Kuznets curve where     3    conditions get worse in the early stages of modern economic growth, but improve once a growth level has been reached. According to some people, once GDP has been high, more resources are to invest in     4    , and new technologies are used to protect nature. They said people would have more interest in protecting the environment, and some of the forests started to return and many pollutants were almost     5    . Standing in America today it might appear that the environmental Kuznets curve works.

At first sight there appears to be a logic. Today the U. S. GDP is increasing while many precious species populations are also     6    . Such conditions, according to some people, can be explained by greater efficiency in cars or more efficient agricultural production. But in fact, the majority of the negative impacts have simply been     7    . The high-polluting industries have been outsourced to developing nations. Therefore the bitterest punishments are largely felt beyond the borders while we Americans are     8    high GDP and selfish biodiversity at the same time. This can be seen in the WWF annual Report, where species population trends are increasing by 7% in high-income countries and declining in middle- and low income countries by 31% and 60%     9    .

It is self-evident that growth, as currently defined, has a major negative impact upon biodiversity. What needs to change is the definition of growth from a GDP-essential concept to a balance-sheet approach. Organizations and world community should work on     10    new vision or reform that will help ensure a real balance between an improving standard of human life and a thriving biodiverse landscape.

3 . As consumers, especially young ones, become more eco﹣conscious, services are popping up to reduce wastefulness in the flower industry, extending the life of old bouquets（花束） that were previously thrown away the day after a big event.

Considering that the floral（花的）gifting market is expected to reach ﹩16 billion in revenue by 2023, buying from eco﹣friendly businesses can have a huge impact. According to one estimate, the roughly 100 million roses grown for a typical Valentine's Day in the U. S. produce about 9,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions.

“When you realize what the supply chain looks like and the number of hands that touch these flowers. and then they're only appreciated for a couple of hours, it's kind of disgusting when you think about the amount of resources that go into it,” says Jennifer Grove, founder of New York City﹣based flower service Repeat Roses.

While working as a wedding designer and corporate planner, Grove often oversaw the design of floral arrangements, only to see those creations thrown away within a few hours. In 2014 she founded Repeat Roses to make it easier for luxury clients to donate used bouquets. Like a traditional floral service, the company sells high﹣end floral decorations for weddings or social events, but it then recycles or composts（堆肥） them.

If a customer chooses the unique repurposing（改变用途） service, a Repeat Roses team can remove the arrangements from the event and then restyle the flowers into smaller bouquets to donate to hospitals, nursing homes and family shelters. If there's a charity that holds a special place in a customer's heart, the team will ensure the blooms are sent there. “It's a logistics business, and we're trying to make sure we are strategic in where we play matchmaker,” Grove says. When the charities are finished with the flowers, Repeat Roses also picks them back up and composts them. The altruism isn't free﹣prices start at ﹩1,750 for the removal and repurposing service to account for the transportation and labor costs. If you're not willing to spend that much, the company will still compost the flowers from your event instead of sending them to a landfill.

Through these two methods, Repeat Roses estimates it has diverted more than 98 tons of waste from landfills and delivered almost 53,000 floral arrangements to people in need. Although Repeat Roses is a for﹣profit business, the flower repurposing itself is a tax write﹣off for the client. As the fair market value of a client's donated flowers is what's used for the charitable tax credit and is eligible for deduction, Repeat Roses ensures that the beneficiary sends you an acknowledgement letter including details of your donation.

1. Jennifer Grove founded Repeat Roses in order to do the following except .

A．avoid the waste of flowers

B．reduce the pollution to the environment

C．earn money by selling used flowers

D．help some customers do charity work

2. The underlined word “altruism” in Paragraph 5 refers to .

A．the company’s composting the flowers

B．the customers’ donating flowers to people in need

C．the reception of the donation by the people in need

D．the transportation of the flowers to a landfill

3. What benefit does a customer who has donated flowers get？

A．To get a discount when buying flowers.

B．To feel fulfilled because of donation.

C．To get a tax reduction.

D．To receive a letter of compliment.

4. The passage is mainly intended to introduce .

A．a creative way of making money

B．a green trend of waste utilization

C．a way to cut the emission of carbon dioxide

D．a company devoted to charity

4 . 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.

Over-dried Earth

The south-west of the United States, together with some parts of Mexico across the Rio Grande, is one of the driest parts of the North American continent. But, over the past two decades, even that expected dryness     1     (take) to the limit. According to Park Williams, who works at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, the current lack of rainfall in the area constitutes a megadrought of a severity     2    (see) on only four other occasions in the past 1,200 years.

Dr Williams studies the annual growth rings of 1,586 ancient trees, in order to reconstruct soil-moisture patterns going back to 800 A.D. During warm, wet years trees grow fast, producing wide rings. During cold, dry     3     they grow more slowly, producing narrow rings. During a drought, a tree     4     not grow much at all.

    5    they describe in this week’s Science, the team identified dozens of droughts over the centuries in question. But four stood out. They then took the average soil-moisture value for the current drought and compared it with sequential（连续的） 19-year averages with the previous four, one of them     6    (last) nearly a century. This showed that the region is already drier than it was during the first three of the previous megadroughts, and is equivalent to the event of 1575-1603.

In a world     7     human actions are driving temperatures up, Dr Parker and his colleagues wondered how much people are     8    (blame) for this state of affairs. To estimate that, they turned to climate modelling.

Climate models are able to re-run the past with and     9     the warming effects of human activity, offering a way to compare what actually happened with what might have done. In their simulated world in which anthropogenic（人类起源的） emissions had not increased the greenhouse-gas effect, the team found that a drought did indeed still influence the western reaches of North America during the first two decades of the 21st century. But this imaginary dry spell was considerably     10    (severe) than the real one-ranking 11th rather than 2nd in the period under study (see chart).

5 . 语法填空

Can We Eat Meat Without Damaging the Environment?

“I’ve eaten meat my whole life, but the more I learn about our planet, the more I question how we treat it,” says Liz Bonnin at the start of the BBC documentary Meat: A Threat To Our Planet?.

“Unless we do things very differently,” says Liz, “the impact the meat industry has    1    our environment is only going to get worse.    2    demand increases, so do greenhouse gas emissions and pollution. This leads to a very obvious question: should we just stop eating meat?” This question is often asked, and we can’t just use “yes” or “no” to answer it. I’d like to share with you my ideas on    3    to eat meat with the least environmental damage.

Eat grass-fed meat

We actually need to eat more grass-fed meat, mainly beef and lamb. University of Oxford Professor Myles Allen has recalculated the amount of CH₄ emissions from ruminants(反刍动物). The inference from this new research is that we don’t have to stop    4    （eat）grass-fed cattle or sheep. Instead of demonizing(妖魔化)them, we need to differentiate between the animals that are part of the problem --- namely intensively produced(集中生产的)poultry, pork and dairy products, and    5    that are part of the solution --- namely grass-fed ruminants. At the root of the climate change problem is our fossil fuel(化石燃料)consumption, this is where we need to take    6    （urgent紧急的,急迫的）action.

Consider    7    your meat comes from

There are responsible ways of eating meat. You can begin with knowing the farm your animal came from and what kind of life the animal    8    （lead）.The EU’s organic standard for livestock(牲畜), for instance, requires that a farm hold no more than two cows per hectare of land. In the UK, there is labeling available too,    9    will tell you if a meat’s been pasture-raised(牧场放养).

It’s important to ensure pastures are well-managed and not over-grazed(过度放牧). It’s almost possible to eat meat and be environmentally and socially conscious,    10    what we can do at least is to try not to buy meat that is mass-produced.

6 . Children’s books are filled with fantastic friendships between humans and beasts. From a young age, we learn that if a tiger comes for tea we should expect it to eat all our sandwiches, and if a Peruvian bear_______for lunch we had better have some marmalade (柑橘酱) in the cupboard.

In this fantasy world, we can coexist peacefully with large mammals. _______, in real life, young people are having fewer wild interactions than ever before. In part this is a result of _______screen time and decreased access to wild spaces. Perhaps it doesn’t help that many countries drove out their most exciting _______ —bears and wolves—centuries ago.

Had they not, more people in the developed world might now be facing similar problems to those in Novaya Zemlya. The playgrounds of this remote Russian archipelago (俄罗斯半岛) were recently_______by a group of hungry polar bears, driven into human settlements in search of food and _______after rising temperatures destroyed the last hospitable slices of the Arctic sea ice. It’s the same story we see across the world: habitat _______ driving elephants to attack crops, human settlements spreading into tiger territory, and people losing their lives to big cats.

The Incident of the Polar Bear in the Playground is not a/an _______consequences to The Humans Who Melted the Ice Caps. We have known for years that Arctic temperatures are rising at_______rates. It should come as no surprise that the polar bears we have forced to leave their natural homes have ________shouting at humans’ front doors in search of their basic requirements for survival. Unfortunately, they are more ________ to be met with the business end of a shotgun than a marmalade sandwich. And who can criticize the people in the main settlement, Belushya Guba, for wanting to protect themselves?

We’ve had years to________these issues. This is not an unusual ________but the latest in a list   of increasingly frequent human/polar bear incidents. And it’s part of an even longer list of rapidly growing areas where there is human/wildlife conflict. We can’t________the local residents of Novaya Zemlya for their quiet town becoming a bear refugee camp. They are not the ones burning fossil fuels, ________farming cows and flying across the world for business meetings. It’s almost always the case that those making the decisions that are most serious for the environment are the furthest from the consequences.

1.

A．drops in

B．makes up

C．carries on

D．reaches out

2.

A．Therefore

B．Meanwhile

C．Otherwise

D．Furthermore

3.

A．accumulated

B．wasted

C．increased

D．fixed

4.

A．immigrants

B．citizens

C．locals

D．inhabitants

5.

A．invaded

B．searched

C．deserted

D．surrounded

6.

A．caves

B．territory

C．companions

D．shelter

7.

A．range

B．formation

C．loss

D．selection

8.

A．profound

B．severe

C．unexpected

D．upset

9.

A．moderate

B．horrifying

C．similar

D．varying

10.

A．stuck to

B．gone on

C．ended up

D．protested at

11.

A．reluctant

B．likely

C．desperate

D．confident

12.

A．examine

B．report

C．identify

D．address

13.

A．occurrence

B．escape

C．presence

D．exploration

14.

A．admire

B．reward

C．respect

D．blame

15.

A．intensively

B．realistically

C．specifically

D．practically

7 . In 200 Years Cows May Be the Biggest Land Mammals (哺乳动物) on the Planet

Around 13,000 years ago North America had a wider variety of mammals than modern Africa. There were multiple horse species, camels and some now-extinct animals. And such _________ creatures were not just found in North America. On every continent mammals on average were a lot larger from around 2.5 million until about 11,700 years ago.

Scientists have long debated what caused all these large creatures to go extinct while many of the smaller ones _________. A team of researchers led by biologist Felisa Smith analyzed evidence from millions of years’ worth of mammalian extinctions and found that on each continent large mammals started to _________ around the same time humans first showed up.

If the extinction trend continues, many more large mammals will soon disappear as well, as the primary threats from humans have _________ from overhunting to indirect processes such as habitat loss. The largest land mammal 200 years from now could well be the domestic cow, Smith’s research suggests. In their new study Smith and her team analyzed a database of all land mammals that lived from 65 million years ago until today. “We found _________ no effect of climate on mammalian extinction over 65 million years,” she says. But starting around 125,000 years ago and continuing until today, large mammals have been more likely to go extinct than smaller ones, the researchers found.

The average _________ of surviving mammals has decreased as a result. And those large-mammal extinctions are tightly coupled with the _________ of humans. For most of mammalian _________ history, an animal’s size was not predictive of its extinction risk. That _________ only appeared once humans began to live alongside large mammals.

This finding does not mean climate-related changes could not have __________ some wildlife populations, enabling humans to more easily bring about their eventual downfall. __________, it suggests the greater likelihood of large mammals going extinct is tied to human activities. The animals that evolved without the risk of hunting from humans were suddenly faced with a new __________. They simply could not __________ fast enough to survive the invasion of humans.

Smith says the lesson to be learned from the new findings is that our ancestors prepared us to be extremely skillful killers. “What’s __________ now,” she says, “is that some of us are comfortable enough, have a high enough standard of living, that we can start thinking about our use of the Earth.” Rather than simply behaving as __________, many of us are now in a position to become environmental protectors.

1.

A．smart

B．massive

C．marine

D．ancient

2.

A．survived

B．shrank

C．escaped

D．returned

3.

A．hide away

B．bring up

C．break up

D．die out

4.

A．faded

B．restored

C．improved

D．expanded

5.

A．absolutely

B．predictably

C．exclusively

D．potentially

6.

A．weight

B．speed

C．size

D．appetite

7.

A．production

B．appearance

C．exploration

D．cruelty

8.

A．recorded

B．contemporary

C．evolutionary

D．conclusive

9.

A．link

B．contact

C．adaptation

D．distinction

10.

A．enlarged

B．stressed

C．impressed

D．dominated

11.

A．Moreover

B．Otherwise

C．Meanwhile

D．Rather

12.

A．species

B．hope

C．rule

D．threat

13.

A．grow

B．digest

C．withdraw

D．adapt

14.

A．instructive

B．tremendous

C．different

D．marvelous

15.

A．sponsors

B．creators

C．consumers

D．producers

8 . When I was a puppy, I entertained you and made you laugh. You called me your child, and despite a number of chewed shoes and a couple of murdered pillows, I became your best friend. Whenever I was “bad”, you’d shake your finger at me and ask “How could you?”—but then you rolled me over for a belly (腹部) rub.

I remember those nights of rubbing you in bed and listening to your secret dreams, and I believed that life could not be any more perfect.

Gradually, you began spending more time at work and on your career, and more time searching for a human mate. She, now your wife, is not a “dog person”—still I welcomed her into our home, tried to show her affection, and obeyed her. I was happy because you were happy.

Then the human babies came along and I shared your excitement. I was fascinated by the pinkness, how they smelled, and I wanted to mother them, too. Only she and you worried that I might hurt them, and I spent most of my time in another room.

There had been a time, when others asked you if you had a dog, that you produced a photo of me from your wallet and told them stories about me. These past few years, you just answered “yes” and changed the subject. I had gone from being “your dog” to “just a dog”.

Now, you have a new career opportunity in another city, and you and they will be moving to another apartment that does not allow pets. You’ve made the right decision for your “family”, but there was a time when I was your only family.

People in the animal shelter are attentive to me, but I lost my appetite. At first whenever anyone passed, I rushed to the front, hoping it was you—that this was all a bad dream or I hoped it would at least be someone who cared, anyone who might save me.

1. How did the dog’s owner treat the puppy when it was at a younger age?

A．He entertained the puppy with jokes and gestures.

B．He treated the puppy as if it were a family member.

C．He disciplined the puppy when it made a mess.

D．He kept the puppy at a distance for the chewed shoes.

2. Why was the puppy excluded from the room after the babies were born?

A．The puppy was tempted by the babies’ pinkness and sweet smell.

B．The puppy poses a serious danger to the health and well-being of babies.

C．The couple were concerned that the babies would be in danger.

D．The master envied the natural affection between the babies and the puppy.

3. What can we infer from the last 3 paragraphs?

A．It was hard for the puppy to accept the fact that it was ignored.

B．The master had a mixed feeling for the advancement in career.

C．The puppy felt relieved for the master’s establishment of a new family.

D．It was urgent for the master to give up the puppy and move to another city.

4. Which of the following could be the best title for the passage?

A．A Good Heart to Lean on	B．New Member of the Family
C．The Words of an Abandoned Dog	D．Animal Shelter: the Last Home for Puppies

9 . 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。

Since astronomers confirmed the presence of planets beyond our solar system, called exoplanets, humans     1     (wonder) how many could harbor life.

Now, we're one step closer to       2    (find) an answer. According to the Kepler space telescope, about half the stars similar in temperature       3    our Sun could have a rocky planet capable of supporting liquid water on its surface.

Our galaxy holds at least an     4    (estimate) 300 million of these potentially habitable worlds, based on even the most conservative interpretation of the results in a new study to be published in The Astronomical Journal.

This research helps us understand the potential for these planets     5    (support) life. This is an essential part of astrobiology, the study of life's origins and future in our universe.

The study is authored by NASA scientists     6    worked on the Kepler mission alongside collaborators from around the world. NASA retired the space telescope in 2018 after it ran out of fuel. Nine years of the telescope's observations revealed that there are billions of planets in our galaxy - more planets than stars.

    7     this result is far from a final value, it’s extremely exciting that we calculated that these worlds are this common with such high confidence.

That's a wide range of different stars, each with       8    own particular properties impacting whether the rocky planets in its orbit are capable of supporting liquid water. These complexities are partly why it is so difficult to calculate how many potentially habitable planets are out there, especially when even our     9    (powerful) telescopes can just barely detect these small planets. That's     10     the research team took a new approach.