2 . There are thirty-four bridges on the Thames River in London, the following are among the most famous ones.

Tower Bridge

Tower Bridge has stood over the River Thames in London since 1894 and is one of the finest, most recognizable bridges in the World. It is the bridge in London you may see in movies and on advertising writing for London. Tower Bridge is the only Thames Bridge that can be raised. It used to be raised about 50 times a day, but nowadays it is only raised 4 to 5 times a week.

London Bridge

The construction of the first stone London Bridge started in 1176 and finished years later. Houses and shops were once built on the bridge, which made the road so narrow that it was often jammed with people, horses and carts. A ‘keep left’ rule was made in 1733 to keep the traffic moving. This became the rule of the road in Britain. In 1757 the old bridge was pulled down and a new one was built in 1831. Interestingly, that one was pulled down again in 1967 but rebuilt in Lake Havasu City, USA, as a tourist attraction. The present London Bridge was opened in 1973.

Millennium Bridge

The Millennium Bridge is a bridge for walkers. It was built to connect the Tate Modern Art Gallery to the City and St Paul’s Cathedral (圣保罗大教堂) in 2000. Thousands of people rushed to see the new bridge. Almost immediately after opening, the bridge had to be shut because of the dangerous waving caused by too many visitors. It has now been reopened. The bridge is about 320 meters, costs 16 million pounds to build and only takes walkers.

Westminster Bridge

Westminster Bridge is a road and foot traffic bridge over the River Thames between Westminster and Lambeth. The present bridge, opened in 1862, is the second on the site and took the place of an earlier bridge opened in 1750. The British romantic poet, William Wordsworth, wrote a famous poem “Composed Upon Westminster Bridge” in the autumn of 1802.

Want to know more about the bridges on the Thames River? Click here www.bridgesinbritain.com.

1. Which of the following is NOT TRUE according to the passage?

A．The 1831 London Bridge is now in the USA.

B．Tower Bridge is much less frequently lifted today than before.

C．Cars and buses are not allowed to cross Millennium Bridge.

D．Westminster Bridge is for walkers only.

2. The Passage is most probably taken from a ________.

A．school report	B．website article
C．teenage magazine	D．science fiction

3. What can we learn from the passage?

A．William Wordsworth wrote many poems of the bridges on the Thames River.

B．Millennium Bridge wasn’t built strong enough so that it had to be pulled down and rebuilt.

C．That all the traffic is kept left in Britain was from a rule of an old London Bridge.

D．Tower Bridge is the symbol of London because it is the first bridge on the Thames River.

3 . Directions: Complete the following passage by using the words in the box. Each word can only be used once. Note that there is one word more than you need.

A. species   B. labelled   C. expanding   D. informed   E. underestimate   F. sustainable G. brief        H. rare          I. involves        J. valuable   K. endangered

Eating Jellyfish Could Come to the Rescue

According to the IUCN Red List 32,000 species are threatened with extinction—everything from birds and mammals. Despite national and international efforts being gathered to protect

    1     species, we actively fish for many of them. For those seafood lovers, the news is sad, but the researchers have come up with an unusual way we can help—and it     2     eating jellyfish.

Between 2006 and 2014,92 vulnerable or threatened     3     were being caught, recorded, and sold. When they are sold, it is     4     that fish and invertebrate (无脊椎的) species are required to be     5     according to species, so consumers have no way of knowing what they’re eating.

It is stressed that only a/an     6     view of the real problem is shown. “A lot of the ‘seafood records’ are listed in groups like ‘marine fish’. Here we didn’t look at those vague records, we only looked at records where the actual species was listed — so we’ve made a huge     7     of the actual catch.

There are some ways to untie the mess we’re creating in the world’s oceans, including     8     our idea of seafood to include jellyfish. That might sound a little off the theme, but it’s not the first time scientists have suggested it as a food source.

There are other ways to help keep the lovely marine lives off the menu. “We need to improve the labelling of seafood so that consumers can have all the information to make a/an     9     choice,” conservation scientist Carissa Klein told Science Alert.

And these choices, at least in some places, are easier than you might imagine. In Australia, where the researchers are based, there’s even official guides providing the     10     future both on your table and at sea.

4 . Directions: Read the following passage and complete the brief outline that follows. Write no more than 5 words for each blank.

The production of coffee beans is huge, profitable business, but unfortunately, full-sun production is taking over the industry and bringing about a lot of damage. The change in how coffee is grown from shade-grown production to full-sun production endangers the very existence of certain animals, and even disturbs the world’s ecological balance.

On a local level, the damage to the forests required by full-sun fields affects the area’s animals. The shade of the forest tree provides a home for birds and other species that depend on the trees’ flowers and fruits. Full-sun coffee growers destroy this forest home. As a result, many species are quickly dying out.

On a more global level, the destruction of the rainforest for full-sun coffee fields also threatens human life. Medical research often makes use of the forests’ plants and animal life, and the destruction of such species could prevent researchers from finding cures for certain diseases. In addition, new coffee-growing techniques are poisoning the water locally, and eventually the world’s groundwater.

Both locally and globally, the continued spread of full-sun coffee plantations could mean the destruction of the rainforest ecology. The loss of shade trees is already causing a slight change in the world’s climate, and studies show that the loss of oxygen-giving trees also leads to air pollution and global warming.

It is obvious that the way much coffee is grown affects many aspects of life, from the local environment to the global ecology. But consumers do have a choice. They can purchase shade-grown coffee whenever possible, although at a higher cost.

Outline:
I. Introduction
Full-sun production of coffee beans is taking over the industry and    1     to some species, even the ecology.
II. Body part
1. On a local level
- It destroys the habitats of local species, and many of them    2     as a result.
2. On a more global level
- It threatens human life, because researchers    3     finding cures for certain diseases.
- It poisons local water, and therefore the world’s groundwater is affected.
3. Both locally and globally
- It destroys the rainforest ecology, for the loss of trees causes a change in climate and
    4     air pollution and global warming.
III. Conclusion
Consumers are advised to buy shade-grown coffee.

5 . Directions: After reading the passage below, fill in the blanks to make the passage coherent and grammatically correct. For the blanks with a given word, fill in each blank with the proper form of the given word; for the other blanks, use one word that best fits each blank.

Over-dried Earth

The south-west of the United States, together with some parts of Mexico across the Rio Grande, is one of the driest parts of the North American continent. But, over the past two decades, even that expected dryness     1     (take) to the limit. According to Park Williams, who works at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, the current lack of rainfall in the area constitutes a megadrought of a severity     2    (see) on only four other occasions in the past 1,200 years.

Dr Williams studies the annual growth rings of 1,586 ancient trees, in order to reconstruct soil-moisture patterns going back to 800 A.D. During warm, wet years trees grow fast, producing wide rings. During cold, dry     3     they grow more slowly, producing narrow rings. During a drought, a tree     4     not grow much at all.

    5    they describe in this week’s Science, the team identified dozens of droughts over the centuries in question. But four stood out. They then took the average soil-moisture value for the current drought and compared it with sequential（连续的） 19-year averages with the previous four, one of them     6    (last) nearly a century. This showed that the region is already drier than it was during the first three of the previous megadroughts, and is equivalent to the event of 1575-1603.

In a world     7     human actions are driving temperatures up, Dr Parker and his colleagues wondered how much people are     8    (blame) for this state of affairs. To estimate that, they turned to climate modelling.

Climate models are able to re-run the past with and     9     the warming effects of human activity, offering a way to compare what actually happened with what might have done. In their simulated world in which anthropogenic（人类起源的） emissions had not increased the greenhouse-gas effect, the team found that a drought did indeed still influence the western reaches of North America during the first two decades of the 21st century. But this imaginary dry spell was considerably     10    (severe) than the real one-ranking 11th rather than 2nd in the period under study (see chart).

7 . Directions: After reading the passage below, fill in the blanks to make the passage coherent and grammatically correct. For the blanks with a given word, fill in each blank with the proper form of the given word; for the other blanks, use one word that best fits each blank.

Deep diving exploration

While most photographers put their cameras away when the night’s dark curtain falls, Zhang Fan gathers his equipment and starts his black water diving adventure.

Blackwater diving involves photographing small, free floating (自动浮动的) ocean creatures that move up to the ocean’s surface (表面) after dark or in any area     1     there is seemingly no bottom.

Still quite new in China, blackwater diving     2    (date) back to 1984 in Hawaii, US. From small eel larva (幼龄鳗鱼) to big, fierce great white sharks, each of Zhang’s underwater photographs has a “wow” factor. But the story behind each photo adds more emotional value to the work     3    .

“It is like meeting an old neighbor,” the 35-year-old photographer recalled, speaking of the touching moment when he returned to a location after a long time only     4    (see) the fish he previously photographed still there.

While the underwater world     5     seem fascinating, it’s not always a fairy tale. Zhang said that he encountered many dangerous moments underwater, including     6    (hit) as a sperm whale (抹香鲸) went by. But     7     fascinated him most is that he can witness big and small changes in the ocean and     8     these changes can tell him about nature.

“Corals are     9     the first indicators of climate change. With the rise in temperature, corals have experienced a process called ‘bleaching’, during which they lose their color and are dying. It is heartbreaking,” he explained.

This risky     10     charming art has helped Zhang attract loads of fans. His Sina Weibo account has more than 430,000 follower. He hopes that his photos and videos can act as a wake-up call to protect our oceans.

8 . Children’s books are filled with fantastic friendships between humans and beasts. From a young age, we learn that if a tiger comes for tea we should expect it to eat all our sandwiches, and if a Peruvian bear_______for lunch we had better have some marmalade (柑橘酱) in the cupboard.

In this fantasy world, we can coexist peacefully with large mammals. _______, in real life, young people are having fewer wild interactions than ever before. In part this is a result of _______screen time and decreased access to wild spaces. Perhaps it doesn’t help that many countries drove out their most exciting _______ —bears and wolves—centuries ago.

Had they not, more people in the developed world might now be facing similar problems to those in Novaya Zemlya. The playgrounds of this remote Russian archipelago (俄罗斯半岛) were recently_______by a group of hungry polar bears, driven into human settlements in search of food and _______after rising temperatures destroyed the last hospitable slices of the Arctic sea ice. It’s the same story we see across the world: habitat _______ driving elephants to attack crops, human settlements spreading into tiger territory, and people losing their lives to big cats.

The Incident of the Polar Bear in the Playground is not a/an _______consequences to The Humans Who Melted the Ice Caps. We have known for years that Arctic temperatures are rising at_______rates. It should come as no surprise that the polar bears we have forced to leave their natural homes have ________shouting at humans’ front doors in search of their basic requirements for survival. Unfortunately, they are more ________ to be met with the business end of a shotgun than a marmalade sandwich. And who can criticize the people in the main settlement, Belushya Guba, for wanting to protect themselves?

We’ve had years to________these issues. This is not an unusual ________but the latest in a list   of increasingly frequent human/polar bear incidents. And it’s part of an even longer list of rapidly growing areas where there is human/wildlife conflict. We can’t________the local residents of Novaya Zemlya for their quiet town becoming a bear refugee camp. They are not the ones burning fossil fuels, ________farming cows and flying across the world for business meetings. It’s almost always the case that those making the decisions that are most serious for the environment are the furthest from the consequences.

1.

A．drops in

B．makes up

C．carries on

D．reaches out

2.

A．Therefore

B．Meanwhile

C．Otherwise

D．Furthermore

3.

A．accumulated

B．wasted

C．increased

D．fixed

4.

A．immigrants

B．citizens

C．locals

D．inhabitants

5.

A．invaded

B．searched

C．deserted

D．surrounded

6.

A．caves

B．territory

C．companions

D．shelter

7.

A．range

B．formation

C．loss

D．selection

8.

A．profound

B．severe

C．unexpected

D．upset

9.

A．moderate

B．horrifying

C．similar

D．varying

10.

A．stuck to

B．gone on

C．ended up

D．protested at

11.

A．reluctant

B．likely

C．desperate

D．confident

12.

A．examine

B．report

C．identify

D．address

13.

A．occurrence

B．escape

C．presence

D．exploration

14.

A．admire

B．reward

C．respect

D．blame

15.

A．intensively

B．realistically

C．specifically

D．practically

10 . In Singapore, most of us love window­shopping while some others enjoy having a picnic at East Coast Park or Changi Beach on sunny days. Singaporeans are never bothered by the occasional (偶尔的) thunderstorms. However, we know that if it rains for long continuous periods, there will be more serious effects. Just recently the main shopping street of Orchard Road was flooded and some parts of Bukit Timah was impossible to traffic. People reacted by writing in to the newspaper to complain about this! We forget that other countries suffer much worse effects.

Elsewhere, heavy tropical (热带的) storms often result in floods that ruin crops especially in Thailand and Malaysia. This in turn usually means that the price of rice and vegetables here in Singapore will rise because we import these products from them. If there is a typhoon or tsunami, thousands of lives are lost too. This happened in Indonesia and Phuket in Thailand in 2004 and it serves to remind us of how Mother Nature can cause great damage.

Weather patterns in general have changed dramatically in recent years. Scientists believe that global warming and the resulting melting of the polar ice­cap has caused the level of the ocean to rise. This in turn causes flooding of low­lying areas in countries where the land is rather flat and some parts of which is below sea level. It is believed that human activities have caused Mother Nature to show her extreme anger, so it is now important that we really work together to cut down on harmful activities, for example, illegal logging (伐木) or irresponsible forest­burning to clear land for farming.

1. From Paragraph 1, we can see that most Singaporeans love ________.

A．making complaints

B．going out for picnics

C．doing window­shopping

D．travelling along the coast

2. What will happen in Singapore if there are floods in its neighboring countries?

A．Heavy tropical storms will follow shortly.

B．The price of rice and vegetables will go up.

C．Many people will write in to the newspaper.

D．More rice and vegetables will be imported.

3. The underlined word “it” in the passage refers to ________.

A．the arrival of heavy tropical storms

B．the import of rice and vegetables

C．the rising price of rice and vegetables

D．the loss of lives in natural disasters

4. What should we do in order not to make Mother Nature angry?

A．Clear more land for farming.

B．Reduce harmful human activities.

C．Bring down the price of food.

D．Improve the quality of weather.