1 . 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.
As climate change heats up the planet and causes extreme weather, more places face water shortages.
Humans have collected rain since ancient times.
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.
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. |
文中应包含以下内容：
1.你是否支持动物表演；
2.你支持或反对的理由。
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The First Space Cat
In a few weeks, space scientists will celebrate a remarkable event — the 60th anniversary of the launch of the first cat into space, an astronautical success that has never been repeated.
In the early 60s, dogs and monkeys were the animals usually used by scientists to find out exactly
A total of 14 street cats
Then,
“In the 60s,
| 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. |
5 . Flamingos (火烈鸟) make long friendships
When it comes to making friends, humans often seek people with similar interests and personalities.
Scientist Dr Paul Rose had already spotted that flamingos seemed to form narrow exclusive circles.
Each bird wore a ring around one leg with a unique code to tell them apart. McCully spent months studying their behaviour and built a personality profile for each flamingo. She found that confident, aggressive flamingos walked proudly around in their friendship groups, while the quieter birds carefully avoid those individuals.
McCully and Rose found that for the Caribbean birds, personality seemed to matter more in friendships than it did for Chilean flamingos. Caribbean birds were more likely to defend their friends and the confident ones had much larger social groups than the quieter birds. The researchers found this surprising because in many ways, including body shape and how they search for food in the wild, the two species are very similar.
| A．Their long-lasting relationships are important for survival in the wild. |
| B．He teamed up with Fiona McCully, a scientist in animal behaviour. |
| C．The scientists conclude that it’s important to keep flamingos in a large flock. |
| D．According to a recent study, so do flamingos. |
| E．This avoidance may serve to prevent the fights. |
| F．New research shows that flamingos with brighter colors tend to be more aggressive. |
6 . One summer midnight several years ago, standing outside a wooden cabin in Michigan River, I looked up. The sky was filled with thousands of stars, the sight of which was almost enough to make me, a non-believer, offer a word of
As a bat scientist, Eklof’s work on bats requires a specific kind of darkness—the
Excess light is incredibly
It is worth mentioning that middle-aged writer like Eklof can
The bottom line: We can change if we want to. Some of the solutions to light pollution— motion-detecting lights, shielded lights that do not
Right now it is hard to know what that middle way might look like. In 50 years, every city could be equipped with an array of programmed and
| A．honour | B．gratitude | C．optimism | D．determination |
| A．artificial | B．brilliant | C．faint | D．absolute |
| A．achieved | B．distracted | C．enhanced | D．threatened |
| A．resulting from | B．bringing about | C．judging by | D．contributing to |
| A．decorated | B．restored | C．lit | D．faded |
| A．effective | B．sensitive | C．positive | D．destructive |
| A．scares | B．blows | C．pulls | D．turns |
| A．accustomed | B．subject | C．available | D．restricted |
| A．on duty | B．in turn | C．on time | D．in public |
| A．stimulate | B．advocate | C．negotiate | D．account |
| A．challenging | B．appealing | C．demanding | D．outstanding |
| A．absorb | B．stretch | C．transform | D．reflect |
| A．reach for | B．apply to | C．long for | D．adapt to |
| A．Therefore | B．Furthermore | C．However | D．Instead |
| A．fundamentally | B．scientifically | C．environmentally | D．economically |
7 . 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. |
8 . 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. |
9 . 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. |
