A. deliberately B. justifiable C. accumulating D. consume E. spills F. spent G. potential H. charging I. boost J. subscription K. collected |
Is rental fashion the future?
With a cost-of-living crisis and climate awareness sitting heavily at the forefront of our minds, many of us are having to make choices about what we
Even the fastest of fashion retailers are taking note; this summer, BooHoo announced that they will be
However, there will still be times where a new item feels like a
So here comes rental fashion. The set-up is simple. Rent three, five or ten items and swap (替换) every month, with prices starting from £39 a month for a three-item. In the case of any accidents, do not fear
At the end of each cycle, you’ll receive an email reminding you to choose your next box. With a three-item return, items can be returned at a local drop-off point, whilst bigger parcels will be
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
3 . Happiness of dolphins
For those of us who’ve ever been to a marine(海洋的) park, the best part was probably seeing the beautiful and friendly dolphins.
And the luckier people among us may have even had the chance to swim with these amazing creatures.
At the same time, however, we can’t help but think that these animals would be happier in the wild, rather than be forced to perform for humans in captivity(囚禁).
According to a recent study though, we needn’t think like that.
The study, which was published in the journal Applied Animal Behavior Science, was led by scientist Isabella Clegg, who carried out her research at a dolphinarium(海豚馆) in France.
As the first of its kind, the study’s aim was to look at captivity from the animals’ point of view, according to BBC News.
Over the course of three years, Clegg and her team put together a series of experiments to figure out how captive dolphins felt about their lives.
“We wanted to find out what activities in captivity they like most,” she told BBC news.
There were three kinds of experiment: one in which the dolphins were left alone, one in which toys were added to their pool, and one in which a human played with the dolphins.
It was found that of the three types of experiment, the dolphins seemed to enjoy playing with humans the most.
“Their leaping(跳跃) from the water during training, and their curious approaches to the edge(边沿) of the pool appeared to be enthusiastic(热情的).” wrote BBC News science correspondents Victoria Gill.
However, this doesn’t necessarily mean dolphins are happier in captivity than they are in the wild.
According to wildlife and nature platform One Green Planet, being raised in captivity could actually be harmful for dolphins.
“By being born into captivity, they will never learn the skills necessary to survive in the wild. This means that any animal that is born in captivity can never be sent back into the wild,” it wrote on its website.
But while this may be true, at least it seems that captive dolphins still enjoy happy moments with humans.
1. What can we learn about the study on captive dolphins?A.It was carried out in a dolphinarium in the UK. |
B.It was the first study on captivity’s influence on animals. |
C.It compared the behavior of captive dolphins and wild dolphins. |
D.It studied the feelings of captive dolphins. |
A.with toys. | B.with humans. |
C.by themselves. | D.with other sea animals. |
A.They may not be able to survive in the wild. |
B.They may be less healthy than wild dolphins. |
C.They may live an unhappy and lonely life among humans. |
D.They might be unwilling to return to the wild. |
4 . Eradajere Oleita thinks she may have a partial solution for two of American’s persistent problems: garbage and poverty. It’s called the Chip Bag Project. The 26-year-old student and environmentalist from Detroit is asking a favor of local snack lovers: Rather than toss your empty chip bags into the trash, donate them so she can turn them into sleeping bags for the homeless.
Chip eaters drop off their empty bags from Doritos, Lay’s, and other favorites at two locations in Detroit: a print shop and a clothing store, where Oleita and her volunteer helpers collect them. After they sanitize the chip bags in soapy hot water, they slice them open, lay them flat, and iron them together. They use padding and liners from old coats to line the insides.
It takes about four hours to sew a sleeping bag, and each takes around 150 to 300 chip bags, depending on whether they’re single-serve or family size. The result is a sleeping bag that is “waterproof, lightweight, and easy to carry around,” Oleita told the Detroit News.
Since its start in 2020, the Chip Bag Project has collected more than 800,000 chip bags and, as of last December, created 110 sleeping bags. Sure, it would be simpler to raise the money to buy new sleeping bags. But that’s only half the goal for Oleita — whose family moved to the United States from Nigeria a decade ago with the hope of attaining a better life — and her fellow volunteers. “They are dedicated to making an impact not only socially, but environmentally,” she says.
And, of course, there’s the symbolism of salvaging bags that would otherwise land in the trash and using them to help the homeless. It’s a powerful reminder that environmental injustice and poverty often go hand in hand. As Oleita told the media: “I think it’s time to show connections between all of these issues.”
1. What does the Chip Bag Project call on people to do?A.To throw empty chip bags into dustbins |
B.To bring empty chip bags to appointed locations |
C.To donate them to those homeless |
D.To sanitize empty chip bags for recycle |
A.charge | B.protect | C.load | D.fill |
A.To lead a better life with her immigrated family in U.S.A |
B.To launch a charity project with other volunteers in school time. |
C.To make a difference both socially and environmentally. |
D.To help those homeless by giving them handmade sleeping bags. |
A.adaptable and extroverted |
B.creative and warm-hearted |
C.aggressive and capable |
D.modest and generous |
5 . When Carolyn Kurle first visited Alaska’s Hawadax Island, then known as Rat Island, she immediately noticed the silence. “When you’re on an island that’s never had rats, it’s just like birds everywhere — it’s really loud,” she says. “So when you get to an island that does have rats, you really notice because it’s cacophony versus quiet.”
Nowadays Hawadax is once again a noisy place. Roughly a decade after a successful effort to rid the island of its predatory rodents (捕食性啮齿动物), a mass of seabirds has returned. And the benefits have extended across the island’s entire seashore ecosystem, which is again full of diverse life. These findings, published in Scientific Reports, show that certain ecosystems can recover with surprising speed if given the chance.
“This study is an example of something positive that can happen when we humans take action to clean up after ourselves,” says Kurle, who is lead author of the study and a conservation ecologist at the University of California, San Diego. “It also highlights how everything is interlinked, especially in coastal systems.”
The greedy rodents colonized Hawadax after a Japanese shipwreck in the 1780s, and they quickly wiped out seabird communities. Kurle’s first findings, published in 2008, showed that the rats affected not just birds but the entire food chain — all the way down to algae (藻类). Without birds to eat seashore invertebrates (无脊椎动物), populations of snails and other species feeding on plants exploded and consumed much of the marine kelp (巨藻), which provides crucial habitat for other organisms. “Certain invasive species can have impacts beyond those that are most obvious,” Kurle says.
Those early findings inspired the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, in partnership with The Nature Conservancy and Island Conservation, to wipe out the rats by dropping poison on Hawadax. Kurle and her colleagues secured funding to survey the island 5 and 11 years after taking the action. They found that its ecosystem had steadily recovered and now resembles that of other Aleutian Islands that were never invaded by rats, with significantly fewer marine invertebrates and much more kelp cover.
“Very few rat-eradication projects have focused on the impact on marine ecosystems, so the Hawadax Island case is really noteworthy,” says University of Tennessee, Knoxville, ecologist Daniel Simberloff, who was not involved in the study. “This is a very cool, elegant result from an academic ecology standpoint and, of course, is important in terms of conservation.”
1. What does “cacophony” in paragraph 1 most probably mean?A.Silent night. | B.Messy beach. |
C.Limited space. | D.Disagreeable sounds. |
A.Greedy rodents. | B.Marine kelp. |
C.Seashore invertebrates. | D.Invasive species. |
A.setting traps and catching rats |
B.raising money for follow-up study |
C.joining hands with conservation groups |
D.comparing Hawadax with other rat-free islands |
A.Birds and rats cannot co-exist. |
B.Rats are invasive species that must be rooted out. |
C.Ecosystem is too delicate to restore itself once disturbed. |
D.Removing invaders on land can benefit marine populations. |
A. species | B. informed | C. awareness | D. indicate |
E. additional | F. figures | G. advanced | H. sticking |
I. state | J. reliance | K. based |
Sensors for Houseplants
Over the past two years Jasmin Moeller, a 38-year-old in Germany, has been buying more houseplants, making her feel more comfortable.
Actually, the fact that people have spent much more time
Yet it is one thing to buy a houseplant and quite another to successfully look after it. Luckily, some
A sensor made by German firm Greensens has approximately 5000 plant
Another app released by German business Fyta tells users how their plants are by analyzing the uploaded pictures of the plants. It also includes
However, Botanist Silver Spence is worried that
Back in Germany, Ms Moeller says she is sure that the sensors are helping her improve gardening skills.
7 . Otters, are cute, this no one can deny. They have big eyes, short and flat noses and claws (爪子) like tiny hands. They look even cuter when they wear hats and throw food balls into their mouths as if they were bar snacks, like Takechiyo, a pet otter in Japan. Documenting Takechiyo’s funny behavior has earned his owner nearly 230,000 followers on Instagram, a photo-sharing app.
Takechiyo’s fame reflects a craze across east and South-East Asia for keeping the cute creatures as pets. Enthusiasts in Japan visit cafés where they pay to hug them; Indonesian owners parade their pets around on leads or go swimming with them, then share their pictures online. But these enjoyable photos mask a trade that is doing a lot of damage. Even before they became fashionable companions for humans, Asia’s wild otters faced plenty of threats. Their habitats are disappearing. They have long been hunted for their coats, or killed by farmers who wish to prevent them consuming fishes. The pet trade, which began picking up in the early 2000s but appeared to speed up a few years ago, has made things worse. The numbers of wild Asian small-clawed otters and smooth-coated otters, two species that are in highest demand, have declined by at least 30% in the three decades to 2019.
The international agreement that governs trade in wildlife, known as CITES, now prohibits cross-border trade in these species. But laws banning ownership are often poorly implemented, as in Thailand, or full of holes, as in Indonesia. And the otter-keeping craze has been dramatically improved by the internet, says Vincent Nijman of Oxford Brookes University. In 2017 TRAFFIC, a British charity that monitors the wildlife trade, spent nearly five months looking at Facebook and other social-media sites in five South-East Asian countries. During that time, it found around 1,000 otters advertised for sale online.
In any case, otters do not even make particularly good pets. Every year the Jakarta Animal Aid Network, a charity in Indonesia’s capital, receives some ten otters from people who have struggled to look after them. Faizul Duha, the founder of an Indonesian otter-owners’ group, admits that his two animals emit a “very specific” (read: fishy) smell. They bite humans and chew on furniture. Their scream can be heard blocks away. And their cages need cleaning every two-to-three hours. That is how often they empty their bowels (肠道).
1. The function of the first paragraph is to ________.A.present the main idea | B.introduce the main topic |
C.set readers thinking | D.illustrate the writer’s point |
A.The demand for pet otters. | B.The disappearance of otters’ habitats. |
C.The popularity of otter coats. | D.The decrease of fishes. |
A.the laws that prohibit cross-border trade are strict in Asia |
B.social media plays a significant role in the online otter trade |
C.people usually give up otters because they are endangered |
D.otters are suitable pets because they are friendly to humans |
A.advertise for a photo-sharing app |
B.introduce the popularity of pet otters |
C.discourage the illegal otter pet trade |
D.describe the characteristics of otters |
8 . When Mexican scientist of the evolution of animal behavior, Laura Cuaya, moved to Hungary for her postdoctoral studies in Budapest, she brought her pet dog, Kun-kun, along for the ride. Cuaya couldn't help noticing how locals warmed to dogs. This prompted her naturally curious scientific mind to start asking questions. “Here people are talking all the time to Kun-kun, but I always wonder if Kun-kun can recognize that people in Budapest speak Hungarian, not Spanish?” So she set out to find an answer through a scientific study.
Cuaya and her colleagues decided to use brain images from MRI scanning to shed light on her hunch. They worked with dogs of various ages that had, until the experiment, only heard their owners speak just one of the two languages, Spanish or Hungarian. Not surprisingly, getting the dogs to happily take part in the experiment took some creative coaxing and animal training! The researchers first needed to teach Kun-kun and her 17 fellow participating dogs including a labradoodle, a golden retriever and Australian shepherds, to lie still in a brain scanner. Their pet parents were always present, and they could leave the scanner at any point.
The research team played children's book classic The Little Prince in both Spanish and Hungarian while scanning the dogs' brains with an MRI machine. They were looking for evidence that their brains reacted differently to a familiar and unfamiliar language. The researchers also played scrambled versions of the story to find out if dogs could distinguish between speech and non-speech.
The images reveal that dogs' brains show different patterns of activity for an unfamiliar language than for a familiar one — the first time anyone has proved, researchers say, that a non-human brain can distinguish between two languages. This means that the sounds and rhythms of a familiar language are accessible to non-humans.
Interestingly, the team also found that the brains of older dogs were more skilled at detecting speech “suggesting a role for the amount of language exposure”. They suggest that dogs have refined their ability to distinguish between human languages over the long process of domestication.
1. What is paragraph 1 mainly about?A.The background of the study. | B.The significance of the study. |
C.The concern of the researcher. | D.The introduction to the researcher. |
A.Age limits. | B.Brain patterns. | C.Language exposure. | D.Owners' commands. |
A.practical | B.contradictory | C.compromising | D.groundbreaking |
A.Dogs Can Tell Foreign Languages | B.Dog Brains Have Different Patterns |
C.Old Dogs Know More About Human Speech | D.Dogs Can Differ Speech From Non-Speech |
Norway is Teaching Travelers to Travel
After 15 people died during Easter in 1967, the Norwegian Trekking Association and the Red Cross announced their campaign ‘Welcome to the mountains, but be responsible’. Fjellvettreglene, the ‘mountain code’
Nationally, Norway
![](https://img.xkw.com/dksih/QBM/2021/10/20/2833405422059520/2833918876442624/STEM/f198cb7b53ee4cf18a8f3890289ad889.png?resizew=163)
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 |