1 . The maleo (塚雉), a bird with black feathers and a pink chest, is native to Indonesia’s Sulawesi island and a few neighboring ones. The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), which identifies wildlife across the world currently facing threats, estimates only 800 to 1,400 adult maleos remain in the wild. Experts do not know how many maleos still live across West Sulawesi island. They were only able to record the presence of nesting grounds in 23 villages based on reports from locals in the area. But of those, only 18 are considered active nesting areas.
Recently, the birds have been faced with new threats, which accelerate their decline. The Indonesian government plans to move the nation’s capital from Jakarta to a new city on Borneo island, which is just a six-hour boat trip apart from Sulawesi island. The island takes on the building of new roads and seaports to be used to transport materials to the new capital. Activities also include tree clearing, digging, and removing stones. The process already has changed the forest environment on West Sulawesi and is harming maleo nesting areas near the beach. These changes have made the trip for maleos to lay their eggs increasingly difficult.
Another problem has been poachers. The Associated Press reports that, regardless of official ban, they steal maleo eggs that the males’ parents have hidden in the sand, and sell the eggs for about $1 to people as food. The eggs are a traditional gift for many people in Mamuju and other parts of Sulawesi.
“As far as I know, maleo birds are in decline,” said Andi Aco Takdir, chief of the West Sulawesi Forestry Agency. He pointed to several reasons for the decline, including destruction of beach areas, and expanding human development activities. He added that government officials there are prepared to take steps to protect the maleos even with the new capital development. Andi said, “Nature conservation must be used as an achievement and must not be built leaving behind problems.”
1. Which word can be used to describe the maleos?| A．Endangered. | B．Adaptable. |
| C．Widespread. | D．Extinct. |
| A．The sudden changes of climate. |
| B．The disappearance of the forests. |
| C．The development of Sulawesi island. |
| D．The supporting work for the new capital. |
| A．People who hunt maleos for their meat. |
| B．People who live by selling maleo eggs. |
| C．People who engage in illegal hunting. |
| D．People who regard maleo eggs as gifts. |
| A．The new capital development might be stopped at once. |
| B．The government will balance conservation and development. |
| C．There seems to be a tough way for the new capital to develop. |
| D．The government will concentrate on solving urban problems. |
2 . Falcons are powerful birds that may be trained to hunt in cooperation with humans. The art of training falcons as “hunting dogs of the skies” is called falconry (训鹰术). It was developed in the ancient Arabian Desert around 4000 B. C. In the past, falconry mainly involved hunting with falcons to supplement one’s diet. But now, it has become the favorite sport and pastime in the Arabian Peninsula.
Falconry includes three major processes: acquiring the falcons, training them, and hunting with them. Every year, falconers begin capturing wild falcons in June and July, the migration season. The best birds to catch are the ones with naturally nurtured hunting skills, aged one or two years. Once the falcons are captured, their heads are immediately covered with a leather hood. This is essential because they imprint as their master whomever they see first after the hood is removed. Right after a bird is caught, the training process starts. It begins by depriving (剥夺) the bird of food to make it easier to tame. The birds are taught to know their own name and respond to their master when called. Arab falconers live with their birds day and night in order to build a strong relationship with them.
By the end of October or mid-November, the trained falcons are ready to hunt in the desert. They have excellent vision, 2. 6 times greater than that of a human. They are also the fastest divers on the planet. One hunting technique that sets them apart from other animals is that they can be trained to deliver their prey, without killing it first. This is vital in Islamic culture because animals used for food must still be alive to ensure that the meat is halal, that is, properly prepared according to Islamic law.
Falcons have played such a crucial role in traditional Islamic cultures that a number of countries in the Middle East have made them their national bird. Falconry has grown so popular that specialist hospitals have been established to take care of these magnificent birds. Falcons are even issued their own passports. They are the only animals in the United Arab Emirates that are legally allowed to travel inside planes, enjoying a level of luxury that some humans can only dream of.
1. What is the main reason for Arabic people to hunt with falcons today?| A．To serve as entertainment and exercise. |
| B．To supplement their diet. |
| C．To replace the practice of hunting with dogs. |
| D．To honor their national bird. |
| A．Falconers don’t give food to falcons in order to capture them. |
| B．Falcons are not allowed to see their masters during the training process. |
| C．Wild falcons with natural hunting skills are ideal for falconers to catch. |
| D．The trainers’ names are written on the hoods covering the birds’ heads. |
| A．Falcons keep their prey alive before delivering it to falconers. |
| B．Falcons can form a strong bond with their owners quickly. |
| C．Falcons’ vision is particularly suitable for hunting in deserts. |
| D．Falcons are relatively easy to train for specific hunting. |
| A．Free air ticket. | B．Passports issued by the King. |
| C．Expensive meals. | D．Access to specialized medical care. |
Kim’s family moved frequently from one place to another due to his father’s profession. Kim had to start a new school every few years. Therefore, Kim’s school life was terrible. He didn’t have any best friends.
One day, Kim went to his classmate Rocky’s home. As soon as they entered the house, Rocky’s pet jumped on Rocky and started licking his face. Rocky said, “My doggy loves me very much. Animals can’t speak, but they have feelings, too.” His words were so touchy that Kim thought about keeping a pet.
Kim talked with his mother. She was afraid of dogs. She said that if Kim kept a dog at home, then it would be entirely his responsibility. The real task for Kim was his father. They were pure vegetarian. His father knew that animal needs meat for growth, which he never bought in the market. Therefore, he said a clear no to Kim’s demand.
One day, Kim saw a puppy in the park, who was in pain because of an injured ear. The puppy was weeping. Kim couldn’t stop himself and took it home. He took good care of it and decided to keep it permanently at home. When his father saw the dog, he scolded Kim, the little pup sitting in the corner and listening to them. Since Kim requested him a lot, finally, he agreed unwillingly.
Kim named that cute puppy Dooner. He trained Dooner and took care of his food, water, and cleanliness. Dooner and Kim became good friends. Everyone loved Dooner except Kim’s father. Every time his father got home, Dooner would hide somewhere in the house.
Then the day came when the results of the examination were declared. Kim failed in one subject, which made Kim’s father disappointed. He scolded Kim and even blamed Dooner for Kim’s failure.
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2. 请按如下格式在答题卡的相应位置作答。
Dooner hid himself in the corner, listening to everything.
______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________Although Dooner had left the house for several days, he decided to pick up Kim’s father’s wallet on the ground of the market and returned it.
______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________4 . On Tuesday, Virgin Atlantic flew a large passenger jet from London to New York using 100% “Sustainable Aviation（航空） Fuel（SAF）”. The flight was meant to show that it’s possible to fly using cleaner fuels.
The fuel used on the flight was mainly made from used cooking oils and animal fats. A small part of the fuel was made from corn waste. Virgin Atlantic says that using SAF cuts the flight’s pollution by 70%. SAF still pollutes when it’s burned, just like regular jet fuel. However, the difference is in how the fuels are made.
SAF is made from plants （and related animal products） that once absorbed carbon dioxide （CO2） from the air. When SAF burns, it just releases this same CO2 again. That’s different from jet fuel, which is made from oil exploited from underground, releasing CO2 that was deeply buried.
SAF may sound great, but it still has many problems. For one thing, SAF costs five times as much as regular jet fuel. That helps explain why only one-tenth of 1% of the fuel airlines currently use is SAF. Virgin Atlantic is hoping that its flight will encourage more companies to produce SAF and that this will bring the price down.
But even if the price of SAF drops, critics say there are still big problems with it. They say it’s easy to make small amounts of SAF out of plant waste. But to make as much SAF as the airlines really need would require farmers to grow plants for fuel instead of for eating. This could also lead to more forests being cut down for farmland.
Airlines like SAF because it can be used now in existing planes with no changes. They hope it will help quickly reduce airplane pollution until non-polluting fuels are developed.
Governments seem to agree that SAF is a step in the right direction. Both the United States and the European Union have set targets that will sharply increase the use of SAF in coming years.
1. What makes SAF superior to regular jet fuels?| A．Its production method. | B．Being pollution-free. |
| C．Its storage technology. | D．Being easy to burn. |
| A．Destroyed. | B．Replaced. | C．Drawn. | D．Checked. |
| A．SAF is heavy. | B．SAF is expensive. |
| C．SAF needs new equipment. | D．SAF may cause safety issues. |
| A．Unclear. | B．Negative. | C．Doubtful. | D．Approving. |
Jenny always admired powerful and attractive marathon runners and dreamed that one day she could also run a marathon.
To make it, one day, she began to seriously prepare. At first, she only set the small goal of running one kilometer each morning. However, she still found it tiring and soon gave up running. As days went on, her weight gradually increased. Upset about her health, she finally decided to lose weight by doing exercise. She began running again.
As usual, in the following days, her big problem with exercising was always how to stay motivated. She tried to find guidance from running experts and books. And everything she read indicated that she’d better pair up with a running partner. She followed the advice, but human exercise companions always let her down. Her last exercise companion quit with excuses like, “It’s my turn to do the dishes” at six o’clock in the morning! She hated to admit it, but she had made similar excuses to others and disappointed them in similar ways.
Then Brucie appeared in Jenny’s life, a birthday gift from her husband, John. John couldn’t work out with Jenny because he had a bad back. So that job was left to Brucie, a yellow dog. Brucie was quite energetic, which made him destined(注定的) to be a running partner.
In the beginning, Brucie and Jenny ran only fifty paces at a time, each set mixed with one hundred paces of walking. “I don’t look foolish starting this way,” thought Jenny, “because Brucie’s bones are too young to make him run much harder.” She was right, and Brucie’s early limitations gave her time to start slowly without feeling awkward.
After about nine months, though, Brucie was old enough to run several miles a day and Jenny was fit enough to keep up. From spring to autumn, they logged the miles together every day. However, as winter approached and the weather got colder, maintaining a daily running routine required lots of dedication and determination. And Jenny started to think the dog would be like her previous human partners and that she couldn’t count on the little dog for help with motivation.
注意：1. 续写词数应为150词左右；
2. 请按如下格式在答题卡的相应位置作答。
What happened later proved that Jenny was wrong.
__________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________One spring morning, Jenny started her first marathon, accompanied by Brucie.
__________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________6 . About 12% of the total global energy demand comes from heating and cooling homes and businesses. A new study suggests that using underground water to maintain comfortable temperatures could reduce consumption of natural gas and electricity in this section by 40% in the US. The approach is called ATES, short for aquifer thermal energy storage (含水层热能储存).
“We need storage to absorb energy from the sun and wind. It’s crucial to creating affordable, reliable, and deeply environmental-friendly electricity systems. Most people are interested in batteries and other kinds of electrical storage. But we were wondering whether there was any opportunity to use geothermal (地热的) energy storage,” said first author A.T.D Perera. “With ATES, energy can be stored for a long period of time, without adding an additional burden to the grid (输电网).”
ATES is a pleasantly simple concept that takes advantage of the heat-absorbing property of water and the natural geological features of the planet. You simply pull existing underground water up and heat it at the surface in the summer with environmental heat or energy. Then you send it back down. It stays fairly hot because the Earth is a good insulator (绝热体).
“Unlike above-ground tank-based water or ice storage systems, ATES will not need space. It’s also more efficient and can support larger communities in cooling or heating than traditional geothermal heat pump systems that rely on heat moving with the underground soil,” added co-author Hong Tianzhen.
A major beneft of ATES is that it will become more efficient as weather becomes more extreme in the coming years due to climate change. The hotter summers and severer winters could increase the amount of free thermal energy that can be stored with ATES. “It’s very much a realistic thing to do and this work is really about showing its value,” said Perera. “This technology is ready to go, so to speak. We just need to do it.”
1. What do we know about ATES?| A．It is technologically demanding. |
| B．It is aimed at replacing natural energy. |
| C．It mainly relies on batteries to function. |
| D．It helps achieve an environmentally friendly society |
| A．By giving examples. | B．By discussing results. |
| C．By making comparisons. | D．By analyzing principles. |
| A．Temperature variations. | B．Insulated materials. |
| C．The duration of storage. | D．The category of energy. |
| A．A Turning Point in Energy Usage |
| B．A Solution to Green Cooling and Heating |
| C．A Transformation in the US Electricity System |
| D．A Discovery About Geothermal Energy Storage |
1. What is Akira Miyawaki?
| A．A scientist. | B．A professor. | C．An officer. |
| A．Producing more oxygen. |
| B．Dealing with climate change. |
| C．Attracting different kinds of animals. |
| A．It helped communities build 100 forests. |
| B．It taught people to grow their own mini forests. |
| C．It educated kids about tiny forests. |
| A．Mini forests are inspired by a French scientist. |
| B．Miyawaki has planted more than 1,000 forests in Japan. |
| C．Planting mini forests has become popular in Europe. |
8 . Most people, if you quizzed them, probably wouldn’t know how much of all global trade is done by sea. It’s one of several reasons that the pollution and carbon emissions from shipping gain much less attention than those from road transport and other industries. It’s over the horizon, out of sight and out of mind.
Today, the international shipping industry is the main mode of transport for around 90 per cent of world trade. It’s powered almost entirely by fossil fuels. Studies show that alternative technologies and zero-emission fuels — including electrofuels such as hydrogen, ammonia and methanol — have the potential to significantly reduce the industry’s carbon footprint and thus require urgent implementation (实施). There’s just one catch: they don’t exist yet.
Even if the technology were available, the infrastructure (基础设施) for that technology or fuel is going to take time to develop. And an even bigger challenge is going to be whether that methanol or ammonia fuel is green, which touches on other industries such as renewable electricity. Do we even have enough renewable electricity in the world to be able to generate these fuels? It’s a complex supply chain that requires cooperation across the industry. It’s not something that one company can solve by itself.
According to Piotr Konopka, senior manager for energy and decarbonisation (碳减排) programs at DP World, there are some simple behavioral changes that can help cut down on fuel used in the meantime, from the regular maintenance and reduced idling of port equipment to the implementation of weather routing that helps ships avoid rougher, more fuel-intensive stretches of water. “Of course, efficiency is unlikely to ever reduce emissions by more than five or ten per cent, but it’s definitely a low-hanging fruit,” he says.
“This is the last moment for the IMO to act decisively to eliminate shipping emissions” says Delaine McCullough, shipping emissions policy manager at environmental NGO Ocean Conservancy. “We need countries to demand that the IMO set strong emission-reduction goals and take action at home if the IMO fails to do the right thing.”
1. What makes people neglect shipping emissions?| A．Prejudice. |
| B．Nearsightedness. |
| C．Low intelligence. |
| D．Lack of knowledge. |
| A．Device. | B．Harvest. | C．Problem. | D．Prey. |
| A．Alternative fuels. | B．Efficient use of fuel. |
| C．Renewable electricity. | D．Advanced technologies. |
| A．①/②③/④⑤ | B．①②/③④/⑤ |
| C．①②③/④/⑤ | D．①/②③④/⑤ |
9 . The French couple, Katia and Maurice Krafft, shared an attraction to volcanoes, one that perhaps approached an addiction. There are many people interested in volcanoes, but very few who are willing to climb an erupting crater(火山口) and approach the flowing lava(岩浆). Katia and Maurice did a lot of work, shooting photographs and films of volcano eruptions, always being the first on the scene of an active volcano, and the ones who fearlessly came to just a few feet from lava flows. They were not only highly respected by volcanologists all around the world, but also envied.
The couple metinthe1960s when they were both students at the University of Strasbourg, and got married in 1970. Both of them were attracted to volcanoes since childhood. Upon graduating, Katia and Maurice pursued their careers as volcano observers with no financial support at all, just their own savings, which they spent on a trip to Stromboli to observe the eruption of the volcano.
They took an incredible and valuable set of photographs of the near-continuous eruption. People were curious about the photographs, while public officials working on threatening volcanoes found them useful. This interest in their work helped the French couple to establish a career in documenting eruptions. Now able to obtain financial support for their work, Katia and Maurice visited hundreds, if not thousands, of volcanoes around the globe. They traveled and recorded eruptions, always getting closer to the danger than anyone else.
In June 1991, along with 40 other people, the Kraffts set out to film the eruption at Mount Unzen in Japan. A sudden and unexpected flow took place and all the people in its path were killed. Later investigation revealed that Katia’s and Maurice’s bodies were closest to the volcano crater. They were 44 and 45 years old respectively.
In their 25-year-long career, the couple documented hundreds of volcanoes, and their work consists of thousands of sill photos, 300 hours off film materials, a number of books, and scientific articles published in Bulletin of Volcanology.
1. When did the couple start their careers as volcano observers?| A．As children. | B．While studying at college. |
| C．When leaving university. | D．After getting married. |
| A．They focused on threatening volcanoes. |
| B．They were taken with their own savings. |
| C．They recorded continuous eruption of volcanoes. |
| D．They were shot at a shorter distance from lava flows. |
| A．The couple didn’t get prepared before setting out. |
| B．The couple had been married for 25 years before the accident. |
| C．The couple made a great fortune with what they shot. |
| D．The couple went ahead of the rest at the last minute. |
| A．Caring and demanding. | B．Promising and optimistic. |
| C．Brave and devoted. | D．Dynamic and calm. |
1. In which country was the fish first found?
| A．The US. | B．Australia. | C．Austria. |
| A．Its age. | B．Its size. | C．Its habitat. |
| A．The museum receives no visitors today. |
| B．Biologists want to replace the fish. |
| C．The species is endangered. |
