1 . Hundreds of scientists, writers and academics sounded a warning to humanity in an open letter published last December: Policymakers and the rest of us must engage openly with the risk of global collapse. Researchers in many areas have projected the widespread collapse as “a credible scenario(情景) this century”.
A survey of scientists found that extreme weather events, food insecurity, and freshwater shortages might create global collapse. Of course, if you are a non-human species, collapse is well underway.
The call for public engagement with the unthinkable is especially germane in this moment of still-uncontrolled pandemic and economic crises in the world's most technologically advanced nations. Not very long ago, it was also unthinkable that a virus would shut down nations and that safety nets would be proven so disastrously lacking in flexibility.
The international scholars’ warning letter doesn't say exactly what collapse will look like or when it might happen. Collapseology, the study of collapse, is more concerned with identifying trends and with them the dangers of everyday civilization. Among the signatories(签署者) of the warning was Bob Johnson, the originator of the “ecological footprint” concept, which measures the total amount of environmental input needed to maintain a given lifestyle. With the current footprint of humanity, “it seems that global collapse is certain to happen in some form, possibly within a decade, certainly within this century,” Johnson said in an email.
“Only if we discuss the consequences of our biophysical limits,” the December warning letter says, “can we have the hope to reduce their speed, severity and harm”. And yet messengers of the coming disturbance are likely to be ignored. We all want to hope things will turn out fine. As a poet wrote,
Man is a victim of dope(麻醉品)
In the incurable form of hope.
The hundreds of scholars who signed the letter are intent(执着) on quieting hope that ignores preparedness. “Let's look directly into the issue of collapse,” they say, “and deal with the terrible possibilities of what we see there to make the best of a troubling future.”
1. What does the underlined word “germane” in Paragraph 3 probably mean?| A．Scientific. | B．Credible. |
| C．Original. | D．Relevant. |
| A．worried | B．puzzled |
| C．surprised | D．scared |
| A．The signatories may change the biophysical limits. |
| B．The author agrees with the message of the poem. |
| C．The issue of collapse is being prioritized. |
| D．The global collapse is well underway. |
There
3 . The environmental practices of big businesses are shaped by a fundamental fact that offends our sense of justice. A business may maximize the amount of money it makes by damaging the environment and hurting people. When government regulation is effective, and the public is environmentally aware, environmentally clean big businesses may out-compete dirty ones, but the reverse is likely to be true if government regulation is ineffective and the public doesn’t care.
It is easy to blame a business for helping itself by hurting other people. But blaming alone is unlikely to produce change. It ignores the fact that businesses are not charities but profit-making companies, and they are under obligation to maximize profits for shareholders by legal means.
Our blaming of businesses also ignores the ultimate responsibility of the public for creating the conditions that let a business profit through destructive environmental policies. In the long run, it is the public, either directly or through its politicians, that has the power to make such destructive policies unprofitable and illegal, and to make sustainable environmental policies profitable.
The public can do that by accusing businesses of harming them. The public may also make their opinion felt by choosing to buy sustainably harvested products; by preferring their governments to award valuable contracts to businesses with a good environmental track record; and by pressing their governments to pass and enforce laws and regulations requiring good environmental practices.
In turn, big businesses can exert powerful pressure on any suppliers that might ignore public or government pressure. For instance, after the US public became concerned about the spread of a disease, transmitted to humans through infected meat, the US government introduced rules demanding that the meat industry abandon practices associated with the risk of the disease spreading. But the meat packers refused to follow these, claiming that they would be too expensive to obey. However, when a fast-food company made the same demands after customer purchases of its hamburgers dropped, the meat industry followed immediately. The public’s task is therefore to identify which links in the supply chain are sensitive to public pressure.
Some readers may be disappointed or outraged that I place the ultimate responsibility for business practices harming the public on the public itself. I also believe that the public must accept the necessity for higher prices for products to cover the added costs of sound environmental practices. My views may seem to ignore the belief that businesses should act in accordance with moral principles even if this leads to a reduction in their profits. But I think we have to recognize that, throughout human history, government regulation has arisen precisely because it was found that not only did moral principles need to be made explicit, they also needed to be enforced.
My conclusion is not a moralistic one about who is right or wrong, admirable or selfish. I believe that changes in public attitudes are essential for changes in businesses’ environmental practices.
1. The main idea of Paragraph 3 is that environmental damage__________.| A．is the result of ignorance of the public |
| B．requires political action if it is to be stopped |
| C．can be prevented by the action of ordinary people |
| D．can only be stopped by educating business leaders |
| A．reduce their own individual impact on the environment |
| B．learn more about the impact of business on the environment |
| C．raise awareness of the effects of specific environmental disasters |
| D．influence the environmental policies of businesses and governments |
| A．Meat packers stopped supplying hamburgers to fast-food chains. |
| B．Meat packers persuaded the government to reduce their expenses. |
| C．A fast-food company forced their meat suppliers to follow the law. |
| D．A fast-food company encouraged the government to introduce regulations. |
| A．Will the world survive the threat caused by big businesses? |
| B．How can big businesses be encouraged to be less driven by profit? |
| C．What environmental dangers are caused by the greed of businesses? |
| D．Are big businesses to blame for the damage they cause to the environment? |
4 . Laughing together is an important way for people to connect and bond. And though the causes of laughter can vary widely across individuals and groups, the sound of a laugh is usually recognizable between people belonging to different cultures.
But what about animals? Do they “laugh”? And are the causes of animal and human laughter alike? In humans, people may laugh when they hear a joke, or when they see something that they think is funny, though it’s unknown if animals’ intelligence includes what humans would call a sense of humor.
However, many animals produce sounds during play that are unique to that pleasant social interaction. Researchers consider such vocalizations to be similar to human laughter. Recently, scientists investigated play vocalization to see how common it was among animals. The team identified 65 species that “laughed” while playing — most were mammals (哺乳动物), but a few bird species demonstrated playful laughter too. Reports of playful laughter were notably absent in studies describing fish, perhaps because there is some question as to whether or not play exists at all in that animal group. This new study could help scientists to analyze the origins of human laughter.
But how can we identify play? Unlike fighting, play is usually repetitive and happens independently of other social behaviors, said lead study author Sasha Winkler, a doctor of biological anthropology at the University of California. When it comes to identifying it, “you know it when you see it,” Winkler told Live Science. One sign is that primates — our closest relatives — have a “play face” that is similar to the expressions of humans who are playing.
When Winkler previously worked with rhesus macaques, she had noticed that the monkeys panted (喘气) quietly while playing. Many other primates are also known to vocalize during play, she said, so a hypothesis (laughter in humans is thought to have originated during play) supported by the play-related panting laughter of many primate species was put forward.
People now still laugh during play, but we also integrate laughter into language and non-play behaviors, using laughter in diverse ways to express a range of emotions that may be positive or negative. Human laughter notably differs from other animals’ laughter in another important way: its volume. People broadcast their laughter loudly, often as a way of establishing inclusion. By comparison, when most animals laugh, the sound is very quiet — just loud enough to be heard by the laugher’s partner.
“It’s really fascinating that so many animals have a similar function of vocalization during play,” Winkler told Live Science. “But we do have these unique parts of human laughter that are also an important area for future study."
1. What is the main purpose of the passage?| A．To explain causes of animal and human laughter. |
| B．To assess complexities regarding animal laughter. |
| C．To present findings on the existence of animal laughter. |
| D．To analyze differences between animal and human laughter. |
| A．Animal laughter is even noticeable in fish. |
| B．Animal laughter is hard to recognize during play. |
| C．People have learned to combine play with laughter. |
| D．People laugh loudly because they want to involve others. |
| A．Distinctive features of human laughter. |
| B．Different functions of animal laughter. |
| C．The origin and development of human laughter. |
| D．The relationship between animal laughter and intelligence. |
5 . Afroz Shah, a lawyer in Mumbai, hasn’t had a weekend off in four years. But he hasn’t spent this time preparing for court. His mission is to save the world’s oceans from plastic pollution.
It’s a calling he found in 2015 after moving to a community in Mumbai called Versova Beach. He had played there as a child and was upset to see how much it had changed. The sand was no longer visible because it was covered by a layer of garbage more than five feet thick — most of it was plastic waste. The unsightly(难看的)mess Shah had stumbled upon is part of a global environmental crisis. It’s predicted that by 2050, there will be more plastic than fish in the ocean.
In October 2015, Shah began picking up trash from the beach every Sunday morning. At first, it was just him and a neighbor, and then he began recruiting others to join in. Word spread and with the help from social media, more volunteers got involved. He’s now spent 209 weekends dedicated to this mission, inspiring more than 200,000 volunteers to join him in what’s been called the world’s biggest beach clean-up. By October 2018, Versova Beach was finally clean and Shah’s clean-up expanded to another beach, as well as a stretch of the Mithi River and other regions of India. So far, the movement has cleared more than 60 million pounds of garbage — mostly plastic waste — from Mumbai’s beaches and waterways.
While he continues to work as a lawyer during the week, Shah now devotes nearly all of his free time to this cause. He also works with coastal communities to tackle plastic pollution at one of the sources. In areas lacking sufficient waste management systems, Shah and his volunteers educate and assist villagers in reducing, managing, and recycling their plastic waste.
1. What has kept Shah busy at weekends over the four years?| A．Handling legal cases. | B．Cleaning up the beach. |
| C．Swimming in the ocean. | D．Fishing on the coast. |
| A．The beach no longer existed. |
| B．The community was in a mess. |
| C．Many fish in the ocean were killed. |
| D．There was severe plastic pollution. |
| A．By raising money to recycle plastic waste. |
| B．By encouraging others to join his clean-up. |
| C．By appealing to people not to throw garbage. |
| D．By devoting all his time to collecting garbage. |
| A．Report. | B．Predict. | C．Deal with. | D．Cover up. |
6 . Episodic memory (情景记忆) allows humans to revisit past personal experiences in their minds, and it was once thought to be a special skill of humans. Although there are still arguments about the extent of this type of memory in non-human animals, scientists have proved that creatures like rats and dogs can pass tests that are developed to assess episodic memory over the past two decades. “Curiously, there is a lack of research investigating dolphins’ episodic memory,” University of Cambridge cognitive (认知的) scientist James Davies says. Therefore, this surprising fact encourages him to fill this gap.
The team used “where” and “who” questions in their research, each on a different test. Each dolphin was first trained to retrieve a ball from the water, and then trained to get a ball by approaching a person holding it in front of them while ignoring an empty-handed person standing at a different spot. During this training, the locations were randomized (使随机化) and the person holding the ball differed each time, so that those details were irrelevant to learning the retrieving behavior. Then, for the tests, the dolphins were asked to retrieve the ball as they had learned to do, but after 10 minutes, something changed-this time, the ball couldn’t be seen, as it was now behind one of the two people’s backs. In the “where” tests, the ball was hidden in the same spot as in the training, but both people had been changed, while in the “who” tests, the locations of the people changed but the ball remained with the person who’d had it previously.
Eight dolphins went through each of the two tests, separated by at least 48 hours. All the dolphins got it right in choosing the correct spot on the “where” experiments, and seven achieved success on the “who” experiments.
Kelly Jaakkola, a psychologist, says that based on their cognitive skills, dolphins are a good candidate for having episodic-like memory, and this study goes really far in showing that. She also says, “The more we look for such capabilities in non-human animals, the more species we’ll likely find them in.” She adds, “An exciting question is therefore ‘Where do we draw that line? Which animals do have it, which animals don’t, and what sort of cognitive or neurological or social characteristics do those animals share? ’ That’s going to be the fun part of the game.”
1. What does the underlined word “retrieve” in Paragraph 2 probably mean?| A．Fetch. | B．Move. | C．Throw. | D．Play. |
| A．The locations of the people involved in the tests. |
| B．The memory tasks that dolphins need to perform. |
| C．The ability of dolphins to communicate with humans. |
| D．The dolphins’ characteristics related to their memory processing. |
| A．Dolphins pass the tests as a result of training. |
| B．It is very likely that dolphins are affected by people during the tests. |
| C．Scientists will probably find episodic memory in all non-human animals. |
| D．The influence of dolphins’ familiarity with a location or a person is avoided. |
| A．Dolphins Are the Most Intelligent Animals |
| B．Dolphins May Remember Personal Experiences |
| C．Episodic Memory Is Important for Humans and Animals |
| D．A Scientific Method Is Used to Study Dolphins’ Memory |
7 . Working Together to Save the Sea Turtles
Florida has some of the best beaches in the world. Thousands of people visit the state to enjoy the sand. But these beaches are also home to five species of sea turtles. A major problem is facing these interesting creatures.
Some volunteers and researchers in Florida take direct action to help the turtles. They look closely at the sand to find the fin (鳍) marks the mother sea turtles left there.
These are not the only Floridians taking action to help protect these creatures. Florida’s government has passed laws to save the turtles. One of these laws is “Florida’s Marine Turtle Protection Act”. This law prohibits anyone from disturbing or destroying marine turtles, nests, or eggs.
Another way Floridians work together to save these creatures is through organizations like the Sea Turtle Conservancy. The Sea Turtle Conservancy helps people take steps that will help reduce the threats that put sea turtles in danger. For instance, bright lights on buildings near the beach can negatively impact sea turtles. Baby sea turtles usually hatch on the sandy beach and head to the ocean. When there are bright lights coming from the other side of the shore far from the ocean, the baby turtles get confused.
| A．Many of them do not make it to the ocean and die. |
| B．Some of these turtle species are in danger of going extinct. |
| C．This helps them to locate where the sea turtles laid their eggs. |
| D．It also helps make sure that sea turtles’ natural habitats are protected. |
| E．Female sea turtles come from the ocean and onto these beaches at night. |
| F．They use their fins to move back across the beach and return to the ocean. |
| G．Every Floridian can do their part to protect sea turtles and their environment. |
8 . Millions of migratory(迁徙的)birds occupy seasonally favorable breeding(繁殖)grounds in the Arctic, but scientists know little about the formation, maintenance and future of the migration routes of Arctic birds and the genetic determinants of migratory distance. In a new study, a multinational team of researchers under the leadership of Dr. ZHAN Xiangjiang from the Institute of Zoology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences integrated two state-of-the-art techniques-satellite tracking and whole genome sequencing(基因排序)-and established a continental-scale migration system of peregrine falcons in Eurasian Arctic.
The researchers tracked 56 peregrine falcons from six Eurasian Arctic breeding populations and sequenced 35 genomes from four of these populations to study the migration of this species. They found that the birds used five migration routes across Eurasia, probably established between the last Ice Age 22, 000 years ago and the middle-Holocene 6, 000 years ago. “Peregrine falcons initiated their autumn migration mainly in September, and arrived at their wintering areas mainly in October, " said Professor Mike Bruford, an ecologist at Cardiff University. “Peregrine falcons that depart from different breeding grounds use different routes, and winter at widely distributed sites across four distinct regions. Individual birds that were tracked for more than one year exhibited strong path repeatability during migration, complete loyalty to wintering locations and limited breeding dispersal(扩散). ”
The researchers quantified the migration strategies and found that migration distance is the most significant differentiation. They used whole genome sequencing and found a gene-ADCY8, which is known to be involved in long-term memory in other animals in previous research- associated with differences in migratory distance. They found ADCY8 had a variant at high frequency in long-distance migrant populations of peregrine falcons, indicating this variant is being favorably selected because it may increase powers of long-term memory thought to be essential for long-distance migration.
“Previous studies have identified several candidate genomic regions that may regulate migration-but our work is the strongest demonstration of a specific gene associated with migratory behavior yet identified, ”Professor Bruford said. The researchers further looked at models of likely future migration behavior to predict the impact of global warming. If the climate warms at the same rate as it has in recent decades, they predict peregrine populations in western Eurasia have the highest probability of population decline and may stop migrating altogether.
“Our work is the first to begin to understand the way ecological factors may interact in migratory birds, ” said Dr. ZHAN Xiangjiang. “We hope it will serve as a cornerstone to help conserve migratory species in the world. ”
1. What can we learn from the first two paragraphs?| A．Five birds’ historical migration routes were rebuilt. |
| B．Peregrine falcons stick to the areas where they winter. |
| C．Two novel research methods of migration were invented. |
| D．Peregrine falcons leave for Arctic regions in September. |
| A．It is a newly-discovered gene in the new study. |
| B．It serves as a fundamental part of long-distance migration. |
| C．It could be strengthened by the power of long-term memory. |
| D．It turned out to be more favored by birds than the other animals. |
| A．It has discovered a new genomic region of birds. |
| B．It has predicted the rate at which the climate warms. |
| C．It analyses the reasons for the decrease of peregrine falcons. |
| D．It encourages attention to environmental effects on migratory birds. |
| A．Researchers Help Conserve Migratory Species |
| B．Biologists Find Evidence of Migration Gene in Birds |
| C．How Long-term Memory Helps Long-distance Migration |
| D．How Ecological Factors Affect Birds’ Migratory Distances |
9 . As a shift in the polar vortex (极地涡旋) swept across much of the US, many people in the country were hit with a sudden snap of cold. Heavy ice and snow coupled with fallen trees caused the outages in major cities, with companies unable to tell their customers when power will be restored.
Polar vortices were noticed long ago. But the first known use of the term “polar vortex” was in a magazine in 1853. Polar vortices are present year-round, but we don’t hear about them until they cause problems. They maintain freezing temperatures at the North and South poles by moving in tight counter-clockwise patterns. Polar vortices grow stronger in winter and weaken in summer. They are kept in place at the poles by another atmospheric current called the jet stream. However, when the jet streams weaken, the cold winds of the polar vortex are pushed southwards and it is during this time that people begin to pay attention!
In Texas, roads froze over, causing six traffic deaths, and many schools were shut-down. People are not the only Earthlings to struggle with the cold. Crops and animals are also freezing. This could have major consequences, especially if herds of cattle die. If snow blocks cattle, the animals can’t reach basic necessities like food and fresh water.
On a brighter note, some Texas cities were more prepared than others. For instance, Amarillo, which is located in North Texas, so they are more accustomed to colder temperatures. Amarillo is notable because the city was redesigned to stand up to severe winter storms. Officials have spread out fire stations to increase coverage of first responders, employed modified dump trucks for clearing ice, and upgraded civic centers to provide shelter during storms. Hopefully, other Texas cities will follow the good example set by Amarillo!
1. What does the underlined word “outages” refer to?| A．Traffic jams. | B．Power struggles. |
| C．Power cuts. | D．Traffic accidents. |
| A．They grow stronger in summer. | B．They are affected by jet streams. |
| C．They were first observed in 1853. | D．They move in a clockwise direction. |
| A．The definition of the polar vortex. | B．The characteristics of the polar vortex. |
| C．The ways to deal with the polar vortex. | D．The serious impact made by the polar vortex. |
| A．Because it is located in the north of Texas. |
| B．Because it has been upgraded and modernized. |
| C．Because it has been regarded as an example to other cities. |
| D．Because it has taken effective measures to resist winter storms. |
Beijing residents woke up to yellow sky on Sunday morning as northern China
Air pollution readings rose to the upper limit of 500 at 8 a.m., according to data from the city's environmental monitory center, as visibility was reduced to
The city's weather bureau advised residents to stay indoors as much as possible, while experts are working to find out
