Forests give us shade, quiet and one of the harder challenges in the fight against climate change. Even as we humans count on forests to soak up a good share of the carbon dioxide we produce, we
Thankfully, there is a way out of this trap—but it involves striking a subtle balance. Helping forests flourish as valuable “carbon sinks” long into the future
The state's proposed Forest Carbon Plan aims to double efforts
The need
California plans to treat 35,000 acres of forest a year by 2020, and 60,000 by 2030—financed from the proceeds of the state's emissions-permit auctions. That's only
State governments are well accustomed to managing forests,
A. categorise B. creation C. good D. innovative E. maximum F. packed G. pedestrianise H. processing I. shape J. short-lived K. transformation |
All Change in Curitiba!
Like many other major world cities, Curitiba in southern Brazil has had to deal with issues such as pollution, poverty, and limited public funding. However, the architect and three-times mayor of the city, Jaime Lerner, has introduced some
As part of his ‘Master Plan’, Lerner hoped to make the city more environmentally friendly. He initiated a recycling scheme. In return for delivering recyclable rubbish to specified
Lerner did not win over all the city’s residents immediately, however. When his plans to
Lerner’s determination helped
So, is it all just one big success story? In some respects, Curitiba may have been too successful for its own
In Canada you can find dogs, cats, horses etc. in almost every family. These are their pets. People love these pets and have them as their good friends.
People in Canada have many reasons to like animals. One of them might be: Their family ties are not as close as
4 . As humanity has got richer, animal’s roles have changed. People need their services less than before. Fewer wolves and thieves meant less demand for dogs for protection; the internal combustion engine(内燃机)made horses unneeded; modern sanitation(卫生设备)kept rats in check and made cats less useful. No longer necessities, domestic animals became luxuries. Pet-keeping seems to kick in when household incomes rise above roughly $5,000. It is booming.
The trend is not a new one. Archaeologists(考古学家)have found 10,000-year-old graves in which dogs and people are buried together. Some cultures -- such as in Scandinavia, where dogs have long been both working dogs and companions -- have kept pets for thousands of years. But these days the pet-keeping urge has spread even to parts of the world which have no tradition of sinking into a comfortable chair with a furry creature.
The pet business is growing even faster than pet numbers, because people are spending more and more money on them. No longer are they food - waste - recyclers, fed with the remains that fall from their masters’ tables. Pet - food shelves are full of delicacies crafted to satisfy a range of appetites, including ice cream for dogs and foods for pets that are old, diabetic or suffer from sensitive digestion; a number of internet services offer food, tailored to the pet’s individual tastes.
In the business this is called “pet humanisation” -- the tendency of pet owners to treat their pets as part of the family. This is evident in the names given to dogs, which have evolved from Fido, Rex and Spot to -- in America -- Bella, Lucy and Max. It is evident in the growing market for pet clothing, pet grooming and pet hotels.
People still assume that pets must be working for humanity in some way, perhaps making people healthier or less anxious. But the evidence for that is weak. Rather, new research suggests that dogs have evolved those irresistible “puppy - dog eyes” precisely to affect human emotions. It has worked. The species that once enslaved others now works very hard to pay for the care of its pets. Sentimental(多愁善感的)Americans often refer to themselves not as cat-owners but as the cat’s “mommy” or “daddy”. South Koreans go one further, describing themselves as cat “butlers”. Watch an unlucky dog-walker trailing “his” hound(猎犬), plastic bag in hand to pick up its mess, and you have to wonder: who’s in charge now?
1. Which of the following trends is NOT TRUE according to the passage?A.People’s needs for animal services are decreasing. |
B.Both the pet number and the pet business are growing. |
C.Pets are increasingly making their owners less anxious. |
D.Pet foods are more various and customized than before. |
A.The names given to pets in American families nowadays. |
B.Pet’s inbuilt ability to affect emotions of their owners. |
C.Human beings ever rising urge for pet-keeping. |
D.Pet’s roles as both working staff and companions. |
A.Pets should be treated as equals of their human masters. |
B.Human beings are getting much benefit from their pets. |
C.Pet-keeping is still restricted within certain parts of the world. |
D.Some pet owners spend too much money on their pets. |
A.The Changing Roles of Animals | B.The Urge for Pet-keeping |
C.Who Owns Whom | D.Love Me, Love My Dog |
Scientists have discovered that dogs produce more facial movements when a human is paying attention to them than when they are being ignored or presented with a tasty small piece of food.
The research argues
Their expressions are responsive to humans — not just to other dogs. That shows us how domestication
“Facial expression is often seen as something that is very emotionally driven and is very fixed, and so it isn’t something that animals can change
Researchers
The results reveal that the dogs produced far more facial expressions when the human was facing the dog, than when they turned away — in particular, the animals were
But the presence of food had no impact on the animals’ expressions. That suggested canine facial expressions were not just down to excitement, and cast doubt over
“We wanted to see if dogs would produce the most facial expressions when they saw the face and the food, because that might then tell us they are trying to intentionally manipulate the human in order to get the food — and we didn’t see that,” said Waller.
The study suggested doggy expressions were not simply the result of internal emotions, but
Lovely Team Members
I fell in love with rhinos when I worked in a zoo in the 80s, and spent much of the next 20 years as the keeper of the largest captive (圈养的) group of rare black rhinos.
Being aggressive and stupid is
In the past few years, the number of rhinos has dropped dramatically, during
A couple of weeks before their planned release, the sky was filled with smoke and the flames were blowing over it.
That we and the rhinos had escaped unscathed (未受伤的) was a miracle. The relationship we had built with those lovely animals proved crucial.
7 . Every year millions of breeding monarch butterflies in the U.S. and southern Canada search for milkweed plants on which to lay their eggs. Concern over shrinking habitat (居住地)has urged conservationists to create monarch-friendly spaces along roadsides, which are more than enough within the butterflies range and usually publicly owned. But traffic noise stresses monarch caterpillars out, a new study finds. They eventually do become desensitized to it—but that might cause trouble to them later on, too.
Noise pollution is known to affect the lives of birds, whales and other creatures. But until recently, scientists had never tested whether it leads to a stress response in insects. When Andy Davis, a conservation physiologist at the University of Georgia, noticed online videos of roadside monarch caterpillars apparently trembling as cars came by, he wondered how the constant noise might affect them. Davis built a custom caterpillar heart monitor, fitting a small sensor into a microscope to precisely measure monarch caterpillars’ heart rates as they listened to recordings of traffic sounds in the laboratory.
The hearts of caterpillars exposed to highway noise for two hours beat 17 percent faster than those of caterpillars in a silent room. But the heart rates of the noise-exposed group returned to baseline levels after hearing the traffic sounds nonstop for their entire 12-day development period, Davis and his colleagues reported in May in Biology Letters.
This desensitization could be problematic when the caterpillars become adults, Davis says. A rapid stress response is vital for monarch butterflies on their two-month journey to spend winters in Mexico, as they narrowly escape predators(捕食者)and fight wind currents.
Whether a noisy developmental period reduces monarchs’ survival rates remains unknown, notes Ryan Norris, an ecologist at the University of Guelph in Ontario, who was not involved in the study. But in any case, he believes roadside habitat almost certainly drive up the butterflies’ death rates as a result of crashes with cars. ”There is so much potential road habitat for monarchs and other insects一it would be such a nice thing to capitalize on,” Norris says. “But you just can’t get around the traffic.” Davis adds: ”I think roads and monarchs just don’t mix.”
1. By “They eventually do become desensitized to it”, the writer means that.A.monarch caterpillars react less strongly to noise |
B.monarch caterpillars are stressed out by road noise |
C.conservationists are worried about butterflies habitat |
D.conservationists no longer create monarch-friendly spaces |
A.There had been little research on monarch caterpillars. |
B.Videos showed cars crashed into monarch caterpillars. |
C.There was no such record of monarch caterpillars’ heart rates. |
D.He found that monarch caterpillars shook with cars moving by. |
A.They are likely to need more time to develop. |
B.They are likely to lose their way on their journey. |
C.They are more likely to be killed in their migration. |
D.They are more likely to die before they become adults. |
A.Monarchs5 survival rates are decreasing each year. |
B.It is not recommended that roadside habitat be built for insects. |
C.More capital is needed to study monarchs? developmental period. |
D.Butterflies’ rising death rates have nothing to do with moving cars. |
8 . Telescope Searching for Space Treasure Unearths Giant Planet
A giant planet shrouded(遮盖)in clouds, in orbit(轨道)around a star 385 light years from our sun, has been captured by the James Webb Space Telescope in images described as a “
In observations led by a British astronomer, the pioneering telescope focused on a “gas giant” planet called HIP65426b. It captured images in infrared light(红外光), which allows astronomers to more
The planet is up to 12 times bigger than Jupiter and orbits about 100 times farther from its host star compared with the Earth’s distance from the sun, making it
The
James Webb used an instrument called a coronagraph to
Analysis suggests that the planet has a red hue and a temperature of 1,300℃. The images could give a clue as to how Jupiter and Saturn looked in their
NASA said, “Webb’s view, at longer infrared wavelengths, shows new details that ground—based telescopes would not be able to detect
The telescope has already been used to analyze the
A.difficult | B.awful | C.dramatic | D.transformative |
A.carefully | B.precisely | C.positively | D.quickly |
A.term | B.reason | C.explanation | D.material |
A.reporting | B.forecasting | C.changing | D.revealing |
A.clear | B.impossible | C.easier | D.harder |
A.time | B.age | C.history | D.distance |
A.renewable | B.habitable | C.detectable | D.feasible |
A.form | B.component | C.existence | D.orbit |
A.gentle | B.natural | C.warm | D.bright |
A.because | B.although | C.unless | D.as if |
A.look out | B.find out | C.block out | D.make out |
A.digging for | B.hiding from | C.bringing out | D.mixing into |
A.infancy | B.childhood | C.youth | D.peak |
A.in case of | B.in the way of | C.regardless of | D.owing to |
A.chemical | B.physical | C.psychological | D.medical |
The Real Cost of Travel
Mass tourism is a relatively recent phenomenon. The tourism industry
A voyage to the end of the earth?
A large cruise ship (邮轮) can carry as many as 6,000 passengers and there are upwards of 50 such ships currently
Trash on top of the world
From remote ocean habitats to the world’s highest mountain, our trash is everywhere. Though far fewer people go climbing the Himalayas than on a cruise, their impact
When more is not better
Tourism of a different kind is causing problems in Europe. Construction on the Mediterranean coast has been
10 . As Frans de Waal, a primatologist (灵长动物学家), recognizes, a better way to think about other creatures would be to ask ourselves how different species have developed different kinds of minds to solve different adaptive problems. Surely the important question is not whether animals can do the same things humans can, but how those animals solve the cognitive (认知的) problems they face, like how to imitate the sea floor. Children and some animals are so interesting not because they are smart like us, but because they are smart in ways we haven’t even considered.
Sometimes studying children’s ways of knowing can cast light on adult-human cognition. Children’s pretend play may help us understand our adult taste for fiction. De Waal’s research provides another interesting example. We human beings tend to think that our social relationships are rooted in our perceptions, beliefs, and desires, and our understanding of the perceptions, beliefs, and desires of others — what psychologists call our “theory of mind.” In the 80s and 90s, developmental psychologists showed that pre-schoolers and even infants understand minds apart from their own. But it was hard to show that other animals did the same. “Theory of mind” became a candidate for the special, uniquely human trick.
Yet de Waal’s studies show that chimps (黑猩猩) possess a remarkably developed political intelligence — they are much interested in figuring out social relationships. It turns out, as de Waal describes, that chimps do infer something about what other chimps see. But experimental studies also suggest that this happens only in a competitive political context. The evolutionary anthropologist (人类学家) Brain Hare and his colleagues gave a junior chimp a choice between pieces of food that a dominant chimp had seen hidden and other pieces it had not seen hidden. The junior chimp, who watched all the hiding, stayed away from the food the dominant chimp had seen, but took the food it hadn’t seen.
Anyone who has gone to an academic conference will recognize that we may be in the same situation. We may say that we sign up because we’re eager to find out what other human beings think, but we’re just as interested in who’s on top. Many of the political judgments we make there don’t have much to do with our theory of mind. We may show our respect to a famous professor even if we have no respect for his ideas.
Until recently, however, there wasn’t much research into how humans develop and employ this kind of political knowledge. It may be that we understand the social world in terms of dominance, like chimps, but we’re just not usually as politically motivated as they are. Instead of asking whether we have a better everyday theory of mind, we might wonder whether they have a better everyday theory of politics.
1. According to the first paragraph, which of the following shows that an animal is smart?A.It can behave like a human kid. |
B.It can imitate what human beings do. |
C.It can find a solution to its own problem. |
D.It can figure out those adaptive problems. |
A.We talk with infants in a way that they can fully understand. |
B.We make guesses at what others think while interacting with them. |
C.We hide our emotions when we try establishing contact with a stranger. |
D.We try to understand how kids’ pretend play affects our taste for fiction. |
A.Neither human nor animals display their preference for dominance. |
B.Animals living in a competitive political context are smarter. |
C.Both humans and some animals have political intelligence. |
D.Humans are more interested in who’s on top than animals. |
A.we know little about how chimps are politically motivated |
B.our political knowledge doesn’t always determine how we behave |
C.our theory of mind might enable us to understand our theory of politics |
D.more research should be conducted to understand animals’ social world |