1 . 听下面一段独白，回答以下小题。
1. How much snow can people see this morning?

A．A lot.

B．A little.

C．None.

2. What will the temperature be on Mount Raven at noon?

A．About five degrees.

B．About two degrees.

C．About zero degree.

3. When does the speaker recommend taking the family out?

A．Tomorrow.

B．This weekend.

C．Next Monday.

4. What can listeners hear today at 5: 00 pm?

A．A sports report.

B．Another weather report.

C．A speech by the president.

2 . The rechargeable lithium-ion (锂离子) battery market is worth more than ＄50 billion. Lithium-ion batteries, whose demand continues to go up day by day, are used in a wide range of electronic devices. They are made of four main components, and cathode (阴极) is one of them. The cathode’s active material type is what determines the capacity of a battery.

A recent study, led by Wang Yan, a material scientist of Worcester Polytechnic Institute, finds that lithium-ion batteries made with recycled cathodes work better than those with new cathodes.

“The battery industry is expected to grow sharply in the next decade. This high demand has led companies to go to extremes, like increasing deep-sea mining, to gain access to the minerals used in lithium-ion batteries,” Wang said. “Mining minerals will have environmental impacts. Recycling spent lithium-ion batteries offers a way out.”

But until now, the prospect of using recycled materials in lithium-ion batteries has some manufacturers (制造商) worrying that it could impact performance. Thus, lithium-ion batteries are still not widely recycled. Aware of decreasing resources and environmental impact, Wang and other researchers set out to find a way to make recycling lithium-ion batteries economically practical. Through experiments, they could recover more than 90% of the key metals from spent batteries. These recovered metals became the basis of the new recycled battery’s cathode’s active material.

In tests between Wang’s team’s recycled batteries and brand-new batteries of the same composition, the recycled batteries outperform the new ones in their ability to maintain capacity. It took 11,600 charge cycles for recycled cathode batteries to lose 30 percent of their original capacity. That was about 50 percent better than the 7,600 observed cycles for new cathode batteries, the team reported. Those thousands of extra cycles could translate into years of better battery performance, even after repeated use and recharging.

1. What can we learn about lithium-ion batteries from the first paragraph?

A．They are high in price.

B．They are in great demand.

C．They are limited in use.

D．They are simple in composition.

2. What does Wang mainly talk about in paragraph 3?

A．The target users of recycled batteries.

B．The ways to get minerals for batteries.

C．The major reasons for recycling batteries.

D．The complex process of recycling batteries.

3. What are the manufacturers concerned about?

A．Declining mineral resources.

B．Difficult recycling techniques.

C．Serious environmental problems.

D．Inefficient battery performance.

4. Which of the following details best supports the main idea of the text?

A．The battery industry is going to develop dramatically.

B．Recycling batteries reduces impact on the environment.

C．Scientists can recover key materials from spent batteries.

D．Recycled batteries outperform new ones in charging circles.

3 . The fertile land of the Nile delta is being eroded (侵蚀) along Egypt’s Mediterranean coast at an astonishing rate, in some parts estimated at 100 metres per year. In the past, land washed away from the coastline by the currents of the Mediterranean Sea used to be replaced by sediment (沉淀物) brought down to the delta by the River Nile, but this is no longer happening.

Up to now, people have blamed this loss of delta land on the two large Aswan dams in the south of Egypt, which hold back almost all of the sediment that used to flow down the river. Before the dams were built, the Nile flowed freely carrying huge quantities of sediment. But when the Aswan dams were constructed to provide electricity and irrigation, and to protect the huge population centre of Cairo from annual flooding and drought, most of the sediment with its natural fertilizer accumulated up above the dam in the southern upstream half of Lake Nasser, instead of passing down to the della.

Now, however, there turns out to be more to the story. It appears that the sediment-free water picks up sand as it erodes the river bed and banks on the 800-kilometre trip to Cairo. Daniel Jean Stanley of the Smithsonian Institute noticed that water samples taken in Cairo indicated that the river sometimes carries more than 850 grams of sediment per cubic metre of water — almost half of what it carried before the dams were built.

International environmental organizations are beginning to pay closer attention to the region, partly because of the problems of erosion and pollution of the Nile delta, but mainly because they fear the impact this situation could have on the whole Mediterranean coastal ecosystem.

But there are no easy solutions. In the immediate future, Stanley believes that one solution would be to make artificial floods to flush out the delta waterways, in the same way that natural floods did before the construction of the dams. He says, however, that in the long term an alternative process such as desalination (脱盐) may have to be used to increase the amount of water available.

1. What stopped the sediment coming down to the delta?

A．The Mediterranean Sea.	B．The River Nile.
C．The Aswan dams.	D．Lake Nasser.

2. Why were the Aswan dams built?

A．To flush out the river beds.

B．To offer electricity and protection.

C．To make the water in the River Nile clean.

D．To keep the soil in the region nearby nutrient-rich.

3. What can we infer from the third paragraph?

A．There is no need to worry about the delta.

B．The methods of measurement need improving.

C．Whether the situation is good or not remains to be seen.

D．The dams’ consequences are beyond people’s expectation.

4. What is the last paragraph mainly about?

A．Difficulties to be settled.

B．Rewards for the challenge.

C．Severe influence of the situation.

D．Possible solutions to the problem.