A.The birds are not beautiful enough. |
B.The woman prefers to teach a cat to talk. |
C.The birds actually cannot imitate human voice. |
D.The woman won’t have the birds at such a price. |
2 . More than a score of Australian rare mammals have been killed by wild cats. These predators, which arrived with European settlers, still threaten native wildlife — and are too plentiful on the mainland to eliminate, as has been achieved on some small islands which were previously filled with them. But Alexandra Ross of the University of New South Wales thinks she has come up with a different way to deal with the problem. As she writes in a paper in the Journal of Applied Ecology, she is giving feline (猫科的) — awareness lessons to wild animals involved in re-introduction programs, in order to try to make them cat-conscious.
Many Australian mammals, though not actually extinct, are restricted to fragments of cat-free habitat. This will, however, put the forced migrants back in the sights of the cats that caused the problem in the first place. Training the migrants while they are in captivity, using stuffed models and the sorts of sounds made by cats, has proved expensive and ineffective. Ms Ross therefore wondered whether putting them in large natural enclosures with a scattering of predators might serve as a form of training camp to prepare them for introduction into their new, cat-ridden homes.
She tested this idea on a type of bandicoot (袋狸) that superficially resembles a rabbit. She and her colleagues raised two hundred bandicoots in a huge enclosure that also contained five wild cats. As a control, she raised a nearly identical population in a similar enclosure without the cats. She left the animals to get on with life for two years, which, given that bandicoots breed four times a year and live for around eight years, was a considerable period for them. After some predation (扑食) and probably some learning, she abstracted 21 bandicoots from each enclosure, attached radio transmitters to them and released them into a third enclosure that had ten hungry cats in it. She then monitored what happened next. The outcome was that the training worked. Over the subsequent 40 days, ten of the untrained animals were eaten by cats, but only four of the trained ones. One particular behavioral difference she noticed was that bandicoots brought up in a predator-free environment were much more likely to sleep alone than were those brought up around cats. And when cats are around, sleeping alone is dangerous. How well bandicoots that have undergone this extreme training will survive in the wild remains to be seen. But Ms Ross has at least provided reason for hope.
1. What can be learned from the first paragraph?A.The feline-awareness lessons have proved ineffective. |
B.There are too many wild cats to be killed in Australia. |
C.Different ways have been tried to hunt and kill wildlife. |
D.Native wildlife has been threatened by a growing population of wild cats. |
A.Australian mammals restricted to certain areas |
B.The wild cats tracking down the mammals |
C.Wild animals involved in the program |
D.The predators captured by the animal trainers |
A.They were both closely monitored. | B.They had 200 bandicoots in total. |
C.They had similar natural environment. | D.They both had wild cats in them. |
A.Untrained bandicoots failed to identify cats. |
B.Training bandicoots prepared them to fight cats. |
C.Sleeping alone in the wild was dangerous. |
D.Bandicoots could be trained to avoid predators. |
3 . As wildfires have intensified in recent years, scientists have begun to catalog the ways the massive events influence weather — but so far, all have looked at either enormous or relatively small scales.
But during 2018’s destructive fire season in California — at the time, the worst on record — Jiwen Fan started to wonder: Could the ever more frequent and intense fires raging in the western United States affect weather not just right next door, but as much as 1500 miles downwind?
Major weather patterns in the U.S. tend to travel from west to east along with the prevailing winds. Fan noticed that just a few days after California’s Carr Fire kicked off in mid-July — shockingly early in the expected fire season — a massive days-long storm struck the High Plains states like Wyoming and Colorado with flooding rains, baseball-sized hail, and 90-mile-an-hour gusts. The storm caused over $100 million in damages. Was it possible the two were connected?
Her team had the exact right tools to investigate the question. First, they dug through 10 years of weather and fire data to find examples of other big conflagrations (大火) occurring right before major storm events. The pairing was actually quite rare. That’s because storm season in the Central U.S. is centered around early summer; in the past, that season was winding down by the time wildfire season increased in August and September. But wildfires have been igniting earlier and earlier, pushed forward by climate change-driven drought and heat. Since 2010, the team found several big central storms that coincided with major Western fires.
They focused on a 2018 storm. Using a weather model that added in the effects of heat and smoke emitted from the burns, they simulated days-long storm event in several different ways. As the real situation had been, with massive fires burning in the West; as if those fires didn’t exist; and another set of experiments that included and excluded the effect of some smaller local fires that had been burning at the time.
The differences were dramatic: The combined impact from the faraway western fires and the local ones boosted the occurrence of heavier rainfall — where more than about 0.8 inches of rain fell in an hour — by 38 percent. The outbursts of big hail, with hailstones larger than two inches — nearly the size of a baseball— happened 34 percent more in the fiery conditions. But the far-off fires had a much larger effect.
“The impact is very significant,” says Fan. “That was a little surprising.”
1. What’s the study of Jiwen Fan and her team mainly about?A.The effect of conflagrations on the weather of other areas. |
B.The scale of all the conflagrations. |
C.The number of all the conflagrations that happened in 2018. |
D.The cause of the California’s Carr Fire. |
A.Because they were in lack of labor to dig through all the data. |
B.Because storm season in the Central U.S. isn’t in line with the wildfire season. |
C.Because wildfires usually take place in the early summer. |
D.Because wildfires are pushed forward by big storms. |
A.They invited other experts to do experiments with them. |
B.They interviewed a lot of local people and analyzed the data they collected. |
C.They simulated storm event in different ways by using a weather model. |
D.They observed the real situations and calculated thoroughly. |
A.The number of the big wildfires was beyond the team’s expectation. |
B.The size of the hailstones was definitely incredible. |
C.The occurrence of heavy rainfall shocked Fan’s team. |
D.The conflagrations did have great effect on the occurrence of storm in other areas. |
4 . China becomes a world leader in clean technology by fighting environmental pollution, sharing experience.
Erik Solheim, former executive director of the United Nations Environmental Programme, said he is
This is very
He believes that it’s time for the rest of the world to
For Solheim, who is also the former Norwegian Minister of the Environment and Minister of International Development, China’s achievements on the climate and environmental fronts all started with its fight against
“People wanted to see beautiful skies over their cities,” he told China Daily. “The
The latest
Minister of Ecology and Environment Huang Runqiu told a news conference on Sept 15 that the country’s toughest measures and greatest progress on the ecological and environmental front have occurred in the last decade.
He said that
While poor air quality used to be a source of frequent public complaints, the average
About 87.5 percent of days last year were rated as having good air quality, up 6.3 percentage points from 2015, making China the country with the biggest
In the last decade, the
China has has legislated or revised roughly 30 laws and regulations, some of which focused on water resource protection, including the Water Pollution Prevention and Control Law, which was modified in 2017, and the Yangtze River Protection Law, which
A.confused | B.impressed | C.obsessed | D.connected |
A.available | B.accessible | C.sustainable | D.substantial |
A.evident | B.attractive | C.invisible | D.unique |
A.donating | B.contributing | C.manufacturing | D.distributing |
A.fall behind | B.put forward | C.look up | D.catch up |
A.pollution | B.environment | C.ecology | D.emission |
A.probably | B.inevitably | C.incredibly | D.traditionally |
A.biological | B.advanced | C.far-reaching | D.green |
A.study | B.figures | C.technologies | D.innovation |
A.thanks to | B.despite | C.regardless of | D.other than |
A.height | B.length | C.concentration | D.weight |
A.obstacle | B.improvement | C.contribution | D.cultivation |
A.quality | B.flavor | C.deposit | D.proportion |
A.accounting | B.making | C.looking | D.applying |
A.took effect | B.took place | C.took to | D.took in |
A.Last night. | B.At the age of 20. |
C.At the age of 9. | D.A couple of weeks ago. |
A.Because she liked it at their age. |
B.Because it was a story about animals. |
C.Because it was a fun story. |
D.Because it was a Disney film. |
A.Romeo and Juliet. |
B.A love story between two dogs. |
C.Different lives of two dogs. |
D.Children and dogs. |
A.The summers are even hotter in Hong Kong. |
B.He wishes that he were in Hong Kong last summer. |
C.It is difficult to compare the summers in different places. |
D.Hong Kong is the hottest place in the world. |
A.medical B.relieve C.shelter D. growing E. alternative F. doubled G.fantastic H.marketing I. present J. conducts K.practically |
More and more cats and dogs are getting the human treatment. There are pet spas, pet therapists and pet clothes. And the latest trend is pet hospices(临终关怀医院)。
Around the United States, a growing number of vets are offering hospice care and
It’s part of a vet’s job to
“They’re in their own environment, not only the pets but the owners as well,” said Dr. Gardner, co-founder of Lap of Love, one of the leaders in this small but
Dr. Michele Price, a vet in Northern Virginia whose in-home hospice care business has
A massive fire tore through the main market in the city of Hargeisa in northern Somalia overnight, injuring about two dozen people and
Images
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
The Somaliland president, Muse Bihi Abdi, said during a visit to Waheen
Hargeisa chamber of commerce chairman Jamal Aideed said the loss of the market was immense
“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.
Wolves have a certain undeserved reputation: fierce, dangerous, good for hunting down deer and farmers’ livestock. However, wolves have a softer, more social side, one that has been embraced by a heart-warming new initiative.
In a bid to save some of Europe’s last wolves, scientists have explored the willingness of these supposedly fierce creatures to help others of their kind. Female wolves, the scientists have discovered, make excellent foster parents to wolf cubs that are not their own. The study, published in Zoo Biology, suggests that captive-bred wolf cubs(幼兽) could be placed with wild wolf families, boosting the wild population.
The gray wolf was once the world’s most widely distributed mammal, but it became extinct as a result of widespread habitat destruction and the deliberate killing of wolves suspected of preying on livestock. Fear and hatred of the wolf have since become culturally rooted, fuelled by myths, fables and stories.
In Scandinavia, the gray wolf is endangered, the remaining population found by just five animals. As a result, European wolves are severely inbred and have little genetic variability(变异性), making them vulnerable to threats, such as outbreaks of disease that they can’t adapt to quickly. So Inger Scharis and Mats Amundin of Linkoping University, in Sweden, started Europe’s first gray wolf-fostering program. They worked with wolves kept at seven zoos across Scandinavia. Eight wolf cubs between four and six days old were removed from their natural parents and placed with other wolf packs in other zoos. The foster mothers accepted the new cubs placed in their midst.
The welfare of the foster cubs and the wolves’ natural behavior were monitored using a system of surveillance cameras. The foster cubs had a similar growth rate as their step siblings in the recipient litter, as well as their biological siblings in the source litter. The foster cubs had a better overall survival rate, with 73% surviving until 33 weeks, than their biological siblings left behind, of which 63% survived. That rate of survival is similar to that seen in wild wolf cubs. Scientists believe that wolves can recognize their young, but this study suggests they can only do so once cubs are somewhere between three to seven weeks of age.
If captive-bred cubs can be placed with wild-living families, which already have cubs of a similar age, not only will they have a good chance of survival, but they could help dramatically increase the diversity of the wild population, say the researchers. Just like the wild wolves they would join, these foster cubs would need protection from hunting. Their arrival could help preserve the future of one of nature’s most iconic and polarizing animals.
1. What’s the theme of the passage?A.Giving wolf cubs a new life | B.Foster wolf parents and foster cubs |
C.The fate of wild wolves | D.Changing diversity of wild wolves |
A. | B. |
C. | D. |
A.Female wolves are willing to raise wolf cubs of 3 to 7 weeks old. |
B.Foster cubs are accepted by foster parents and are well bred. |
C.Man’s hostile attitude towards wolves roots in myths, fables and stories. |
D.Foster cubs and their biological siblings have similar growth rate and survival rate. |
A.To help wolves survive various threats |
B.To improve wolves’ habitat and stop deliberate killing |
C.To save endangered wolves by increasing their population |
D.To raise man’s awareness of protecting wolves |
A. capable B. effectiveness C. employing D.exposure E.famously F. joining G. limitation H. minimal I.precisely J.recognizing K.worthwhile |
Clean Air Act
The air in modern homes and offices is pretty clean,but not as clean as it might be.Often it contains small amounts of volatile(挥发性的),poisonous,organic compounds.Long-term
Finding an effective way to do so has proved difficult.But Stuart Strand, Long Zhang and Ryan Routsong, of the University of Washington,in Seattle,think they have succeeded,As they report in Environmental Science and Technology, their method involves
The idea of
Dr Strand, Dr Zhang and Mr Routsong thus sought something suitably transgenic ( 转 基 因 的),but that does not flower indoors. The plant they settled on was Devil's vine,