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. |
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. |
4 . 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. |
5 . 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 |
6 . 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. |
A. banned F. regularly | B. imperfect G. reusing | C. delivered H. throw | D. growing I. victim | E. embrace J. relatively | K. keep |
Tips for More Sustainable Living
Making some small changes to your routine can pay off big in various ways:helping the planet while saving your time, money, or both. You will be surprised by how big a difference you can make with
Give up throwing certain items. Your coffee grounds, and used tea leaves can be fertilizer (肥料) instead of being thrown in the trash. If you don’t have access to a fertilizer factory, you can hire a company to
Try to
Forget fast fashion. The average American throws away 82 pounds of fast fashion clothing each year. Thankfully, there’s a(n)
Don’t get cheated. Because of the consumer trend toward more eco-friendly products, many companies make exaggerated (夸张的) claims about their own efforts. For instance, a brand might boast that its products are free of a certain chemical, even though that chemical has been
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
9 . 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 |
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.