1 . Eco-friendly replacement products for single-use plastic are appearing everywhere. But have you heard of edible (可食性的) straws?Now EQUO, a new eco-friendly company in Vietnam has come up with a natural edible solution to plastic or paper straws. The edible straws are completely plastic free, nontoxic, chemical free, and 100 percent biodegradable (可生物降解的) according to a company press release.
“It’s well-known that plastic straws are harmful to the environment. Most of the 500 million used every day in America end up in oceans where they pollute water and harm marine life. Currently, over eight billion straws create pollute to the world’s beaches,” said Marina Tran-Vu in the press release. “Although there are some plastic and paper straw alternatives on the market, most are environmentally harmful, but we were also unsatisfied with the quality and lasting of paper straws.”
All of the materials are locally from regions that support sustainable farming according to the company’s website and they struggle to have zero-net influence by “using the power of mother nature”. The name of the company was created by combining “ECO” — meaning environmentally friendly — with “STATUS QUO” — meaning the existent state. EQU stands for creating products that have minimal influence on the environment. The company was first shown on Kickstarter on May 18 and hit their funding goal in only 30 days.
Many counties are banning single-use plastics. The EU banned 10 single-use plastic products including straws that will take effect in 2021. Other items that will no longer be made of plastic include cutlery (餐具), and balloon sticks. These 10 items make up a large percentage of ocean waste that harms marine life.
So do your part, use biodegradable cutlery — you can carry your own edible straws, and reusable water or coffee cups. These small items can contribute to buffering plastic waste.
1. What does ECO stand for?A.It means the original aim. | B.It means the existent state. |
C.It means how to create products. | D.It means being nice to the environment. |
A.Plastic straws will be forbidden. |
B.Ocean waste can be removed completely. |
C.Edible straws will be sold cheaply and widely. |
D.Single-use plastic products will disappear completely. |
A.Preventing. | B.Causing. | C.Reducing. | D.Transforming. |
A.Plastic Straws Do Great Harm to the Environment |
B.Single-use Plastic Straws Are to Be Prohibited Since 2021 |
C.Everyone Can Make a Difference to Declining Plastic Waste |
D.Scientists Have Developed Edible Straws to Replace Plastic Straws |
2 . Discover the Wonders Beneath the Waves
Are you ready to start an unforgettable adventure beneath the ocean’s surface? Join us at OceanQuest Expeditions for a journey into the depths of the sea, where you’ll encounter a world filled with life and mystery. Our expert team of marine biologists and experienced divers will guide you through some of the most breathtaking underwater landscapes on the planet. From dynamic coral reefs to mysterious shipwrecks (失事的船), every dive promises an opportunity to witness nature in its purest form.
Why Choose OceanQuest Expeditions?
Expert Guidance: Our team of marine biologists and divers boasts years of experience and in-depth knowledge of marine ecosystems. You’ll learn from the best as you explore the ocean’s wonders.
Safety First: Your safety is our top priority. We stick to the highest safety standards and provide thorough training before each dive, ensuring a secure and enjoyable experience for all participants.
Environmental Conservation: At OceanQuest Expeditions, we are committed to preserving the marine environment for future generations. Join us in our efforts to protect and conserve ocean ecosystems.
Choose Your Adventure
Whether you’re a seasoned diver or a beginner explorer, we have the perfect expedition for you. Select from our range of dive packages, including:
Coral Reef Encounter: Immerse (沉浸) yourself in the vibrant colors and diverse marine life of tropical coral reefs.
Wreck Diving Adventure: Explore sunken ships and artifacts, uncovering the secrets of maritime history.
Night Dive Excursion: Experience the magic of the ocean after dark as nocturnal creatures come to life in the moonlit waters.
Tropical Marine Exploration
Explore the beauty of the tropical ocean and its marine life on guided boat tours that are organized by professional guides.
Book Your Expedition Today
Don’t miss out on the opportunity of a lifetime. Join OceanQuest Expeditions and discover the wonders that lie beneath the waves. Contact us today to book your expedition and start your jourmey into the unknown.
1. What is emphasized as the top priority of OceanQuest Expeditions?A.Marine biology. | B.Conservation. | C.Adventure. | D.Safety |
A.Coral Reef Encounter. | B.Night Dive Excursion. |
C.Wreck Diving Adventure. | D.Tropical Marine Exploration. |
A.Free diving equipment rental for all participants. |
B.Highly trained marine biologists and divers. |
C.Competitive pricing on dive packages. |
D.Exclusive access to underwater caves. |
3 . Despite the difficulties, the California coastal ecosystem is improving, largely thanks to the huge appetite sea otters (海獭) have for crabs. In a creative study, scientists revealed the return of otters to their former habitat in a Central California river mouth has slowed the decrease of the area’s river banks by up to 90%. “It would cost tens of millions of dollars for humans to rebuild these stream banks and restore these rivers. The otters are stabilizing them for free, in exchange for an all-you-can-eat crab feast,” said biology professor Brian Silliman, Ph. D. at Duke University.
Like many California river mouths, Elkhorn once was a habitat for otters, which need to eat around 20 to 25 pounds of food every day, with crabs being one of their favorite meals. But after fur traders hunted the local otter population nearly to extinction, the number of crabs exploded over the next century. Crabs dig into salt river soil, and over time can cause a salt river to wear away and collapse. Today, years after the otters returned, rivers and stream banks became more stable.
Angelini, one of the study’s authors, said that tool is an encouraging sign for her team as they face similar threats to Florida’s coastlines from sea level rise, storms, and extra nutrients overflowing into coastal waters. “All these seem unsurmountable,” Angelini said. “However, this study shows that, if we truly understand the ecosystem and know what tools to use, we can see significant benefits to the health and stability of these systems.”
The research team conducted large-scale surveys across 13 tidal (潮汐的) streams, as well as small-scale field experiments at five locations around the river mouth over a six-year period. Otters were not included in some lest sites but allowed to be used in others, using a caging system designed by Angelini.
“And all these years later, we now see these amazing results. It’s an inspiring story about the benefits of conservation and persistent, long-term research,” Angelini said.
1. What does Brian Silliman think of the function of sea otters?A.It’s complex. | B.It’s expensive. |
C.It’s effective. | D.It’s inefficient. |
A.The collapse of salt rivers. |
B.The hunting for their fur. |
C.The decrease of the sea crabs. |
D.The pollution of their habitat. |
A.Hard to understand. | B.Difficult to deal with. |
C.Impossible to avoid. | D.Dangerous to settle. |
A.The process of the research. |
B.The purpose of the research. |
C.The limitation of the research. |
D.The discovery of the research. |
内容包括:1. 活动目的;
2. 倡议内容;
3. 发起倡议。
注意:1.词数80左右; 2.可适当增加细节,以使行文连贯。
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5 . In our family, the presents we gave one another were almost always homemade. I thought that was the definition of a gift: something you made for someone else. We made all our Christmas gifts: piggy banks from old bottles, and puppets from retired socks. It didn’t seem like a hardship to me; it was something special.
My father loves wild strawberries, so for Father’s Day my mother would almost always make him strawberry cakes. While we kids were responsible for the berries, we each got an old jar and spent the Saturday before the celebration in the fields, filling it as more ended up in our mouths. Finally, we returned home and poured them out on the kitchen table to sort out the bugs. I’m sure we missed some, but Dad never mentioned the extra protein.
In fact, he thought that was the best possible present, or so he had us convinced. It was a gift that could never be bought. As children raised by strawberries, we were probably unaware that the gift of berries was from the fields themselves, not from us. Our gift was time, attention, care and “red” fingers.
Gifts from the earth or from each other establish a particular relationship, a duty of sorts to give, to receive, and to exchange. The field gave to us, we gave to my dad, and we tried to give back to the strawberries. When the berry season was done, the plants would send out its red runners to make new plants. So I would weed out little fields of ground where the runners touched down. Sure enough, tiny little roots would emerge from the runner and by the end of the season there were even more plants, ready to bloom under the next strawberry season. No person taught us this — the strawberries showed us. Because they had given us a gift, an ongoing relationship opened between us.
1. What is the author’s belief about a gift?A.It should be practical and valuable. | B.It should be luxurious and special. |
C.It should be purchased from a store. | D.It should be made with personal effort. |
A.Making strawberry cakes. | B.Finding the sweetest strawberries. |
C.Going strawberry picking. | D.Baking strawberry cookies. |
A.Making homemade gifts for her father. |
B.Devoting time and attention to the plant. |
C.Waiting for the strawberries to get ripe again. |
D.Searching for fields for the plants to take roots. |
A.How to cook with strawberries. |
B.The importance of giving and receiving. |
C.How to cherish homemade gifts. |
D.The procedure of growing strawberries. |
1. What was going on in the town where the speaker lived?
A.A flood. | B.A forest fire. | C.An earthquake. |
A.It was getting darker. |
B.It was raining cats and dogs. |
C.The sky was covered by thick smoke. |
A.He was abroad. | B.He was in town. | C.He was in the garden. |
A.Trees were burning. | B.People were escaping. | C.Animals were running. |
7 . Seals may sound different than expected from their body size. Is this ability related to their vocal talents or is it the result of adaptation? An international team of researchers led by scientists from the Max Planck Institute investigated the vocal tracts (声道) of seals, which matched their body size. This means that seals are capable of learning new sounds.
Most animals produce calls that reflect their body size. A larger animal will sound lower-pitched because its vocal tract, the air-filled tube that produces sounds, is longer. But seals do not always sound like they look. They may sound larger, perhaps to impress an enemy; or smaller, perhaps to get attention from their mothers. Are these animals very good at learning sounds, or have their vocal tracts adapted to allow this vocal flexibility (灵活性)?
To answer this question, Professor De Reus worked together with researchers from the Max Planck Institute. The team measured young seals’ vocal tracts and body size. The measurements were taken from 68 young seals (up to twelve months old) who had died. The team also re-analyzed previously gathered seal vocal data to confirm their impressive vocal flexibility.
De Reus found that the length of seals’ vocal tracts matched their body size. There were no anatomical (身体结构的) explanations for their vocal skills. Meanwhile, the researchers argue that only vocal learning can explain why seals do not sound like they look. “Vocal learners will sound different from their body size, but the size of their vocal tracts will match their body size. The combined findings from acoustic (听觉的) and anatomical data may help us to identify more vocal learners,” says de Reus. “Studying different vocal learners may help us to find the biological bases of vocal learning and shed light on the evolution of complex vocal systems, such as speech. The more we look, the more we see that it would help to study human speech ability.”
1. How did De Reus and the team conduct the research?A.By testing seals’ ability. |
B.By recording seals’ behaviors. |
C.By confirming the flexibility of seals. |
D.By measuring seals’ vocal tracts and analyzing. |
A.Seals are related with human evolution. |
B.Seals contributes to human biological bases. |
C.Studying seals promotes human speech research. |
D.Seals’ vocal learning is the same as human speech. |
A.Seals’ vocal tracts are long. |
B.Seals are capable of singing. |
C.Seals have the ability to learn sounds. |
D.Young seals produce lower-pitched sounds. |
A.Chemistry. | B.Nature. | C.Environment. | D.Lifestyle. |
8 . Be A Responsible Camper
Being a responsible camper is about more than just respecting your neighbors and observing the boundaries set by campsites.
Leave no trace.
Respect the wildlife. If you’re camping in e popular area with plenty of people around, it’s easy to forget that you’re actually sharing space with wild animal habitats. Sometimes, too much interaction with people can disturb the natural balance and make animals more aggressive or lead to more human-wildlife conflicts. Try to keep all of your food out of reach from wildlife.
Practice fire safety. While this is especially relevant on the west coast of the United States, where wildfire season is most threatening, fire safety should always be a top priority while camping.
A.Aim for zero waste. |
B.Keep waterways clean. |
C.Only build fires in fixed sites or rings. |
D.And most importantly, remember never to feed wild animals. |
E.Taking your campsite off the beaten path may sound adventurous. |
F.Always leave your campsite the same as or better than you found it. |
G.It’s about having the lowest impact possible on the surrounding environment. |
9 . When I was young, our family cat broke out in a rash (皮疹). But an examination at the vet’s revealed no answers. When asked, “Has anything
Years later after marriage, I adopted a well behaved cat. Suddenly he decided to
I had forgotten those two incidents. Until recently our dog started
A.happened | B.appeared | C.changed | D.come |
A.bedroom | B.permission | C.mind | D.absence |
A.put up | B.take up | C.hold up | D.dig up |
A.means | B.sign | C.manner | D.mistake |
A.positive | B.negative | C.fine | D.different |
A.controlled | B.witnessed | C.followed | D.conducted |
A.windows | B.tools | C.pictures | D.curtains |
A.blocked | B.developed | C.wasted | D.absorbed |
A.displayed | B.raised | C.covered | D.ignored |
A.working | B.acting | C.eating | D.sleeping |
A.mystery | B.wonder | C.pain | D.reason |
A.likely | B.politely | C.critically | D.eagerly |
A.exchange | B.replacement | C.transition | D.formation |
A.result | B.impact | C.possibility | D.treatment |
A.right | B.quiet | C.away | D.alone |
10 . When scientists talk about recent extinctions, birds and mammals (哺乳动物) get most of the attention. But the first global analysis of its kind finds it is twice as many plants that have disappeared as birds, mammals, and amphibians (两栖动物) combined.
Researchers reviewed published research, international databases, and museum specimens such as grasses from Madagascar, finding that 571 plants species have gone extinct in the past 250 years. One reason why the total is higher than that of the well-studied animals is that there are simply more species of plants. Looking at percentages, the situation is worse for mammals and birds. An estimated 5% of those species have gone extinct, compared with 0.2% of plants.
The loss includes the Chile sandalwood tree in the South Pacific, which was cut down for its fragrant (芳香的) wood. It was last seen on Robinson Crusoe Island in 1908. The extinction rates among plants have been highest for trees and shrubs on islands, which often have species that occur nowhere else, and in regions with rich diversity, especially the tropics and in Mediterranean climates.
Just a few years later, the world lost the banded Trinity (Thismia americana), a leafless plant that grew entirely underground except for its flowers. Most species of this kind of plant grow in rainforests, but this plant was first described in 1912 in a sandy wetland in Chicago, Illinois, and was wiped out by development.
According to the team’s report in Nature Ecology & Evolution, the total of 571 extinct plant species is four times higher than the official listing kept by the International Union for Conservation of Nature. Even so, it is probably still an underestimate (低估), as less is known about the status of plants in Africa and South America than on other continents. Many of these species may disappear, too. A major review of the status of global biodiversity recently estimated that more than a million species, including 14% of plant and animal diversity, are threatened with extinction.
1. What caused the extinction of the Chile sandalwood tree?A.Climate change. | B.The market demand. |
C.Environmental pollution. | D.The decline of the habitat. |
A.It flowered without bearing seeds. |
B.It disappeared during the 19th century. |
C.It was a flowering plant without leaves. |
D.It was a rare plant growing underground. |
A.Their current situation is more worrying. |
B.About one plant species dies out every year. |
C.More plant species will keep alive in the reserve. |
D.They would be replaced by other new species soon. |
A.Sports. | B.Nature. | C.Entertainment. | D.Figures. |