内容如下：1. 写信目的；
2. 活动原因；
3. 活动建议（节约能源，垃圾分类，植树等 ）；
4. 呼吁加入。
注意：词数 80 词左右。
Dear friends,
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With best wishes,
Li Hua
China has set up its
The laboratory is
After the
1. When did the Kobe earthquake happen?
| A．At dawn on January 17th, 1995 |
| B．At noon on January 17th, 1995 |
| C．At dawn on January 17th, 1996 |
| A．75,000 . | B．Nearly 310,000. | C．More than 6,000. |
| A．Walls should be built to protect towns on the coast from large waves. |
| B．Emergency services should control all. |
| C．Lectures should be encouraged to arouse the public’s attention. |
| A．Engineers do not have the knowledge. |
| B．Protection is too costly (昂贵的) at present. |
| C．No one takes earthquakes seriously. |
4 . Have you ever wondered what happens to your mobile phones and laptops after you throw them out to make way for a newer model? According to its latest Global E-Waste Monitor, India is the third top producer of e-waste in the world. E-waste in Indian landfill goes on to pollute soil and groundwater, affecting food supply systems and water sources.
Thankfully, the country has a new group of artists who are changing these thrown mechanical items-from mobile phones to old televisions- into large murals (壁画) and artworks to creatively show their concern for the waste problem.
Over the past quarter of a century, Mumbai’s Haribaabu Naatesan has transformed hundreds of tonnes of e-waste into art, integrating elements from nature and industry. “I get my waste material from friends, relatives and neighbours who know my interest in e-art and send me bags of thrown electronic appliances,” says Naatesan. Over his career, he has created huge murals for several companies. He has also showed his work at the India Art Fair, as well as several other national displays.
Another artist Vishwanath Davangere has also long worked with e-waste. He likes to take apart old laptops and reassemble (重新组装) them into birds, animals and plants. After retirement, he started pursuing this hobby more seriously and started selling his creations across the world. His most outstanding works include a robotic Egyptian statue with glowing red eyes and a Milky Way made from keyboard keys. He hopes to enable others to reconsider their own consumption habits and make more environmentally conscious choices.
“By giving e-waste a second chance, I aim to raise awareness about the environmental impact of electronic waste.” says Davangare, who today has a collection of more than 600 eco-art objects.
1. Why do the artists create artworks from E-waste?| A．To promote their artistic career. | B．To update electronic appliances. |
| C．To make profits for several companies. | D．To express their environmental concern. |
| A．His creations are displayed globally. | B．He gains support from people around. |
| C．He has been creating e-art for 10 years. | D．His works integrate technology and history. |
| A．Reliable. | B．Confident. | C．Devoted. | D．Generous. |
| A．E-waste Recycling Sweeping the World | B．Environmental Problems Worrying Indians |
| C．An Art Movement Turning Trash into Cash | D．Indian Creatives Transforming E-waste into Art |
5 . Macquarie Island is a tiny island that’s part of Australia. It’s about halfway between New Zealand and Antarctica. The island’s been made a world heritage area because it’s so untouched, but this unique environment is under threat from some unwanted visitors.
It all started when seal hunters came to the island in the early 1800s. They brought rabbits with them as a source of food for the journey, and also on board the ships were rats and mice, which made their way onto the island too. They’re being blamed for destroying the homes of marine birds, causing soil loss and ripping up plant cover, as these before-and-after photos show.
So what’s being done about the problem? It starts with a team of helicopters that fly across the island carrying these giant containers. Inside them are poisoned pellets (有毒饲料) which are dropped and spread across the island. For any rabbits that survived the baiting (诱饵) , there’s a plan B. This special team of dogs is being put through a final training. It’ll be their job to track down any remaining rabbits. They have to also learn to behave around the island’s native wildlife. The dogs could be here for years or until the task is complete. The dogs don’t actually kill the rabbits. They find them, then the hunters decide to either catch the rabbits or shoot them.
But the program has received a bit of criticism. Some people argue 25 million dollars is a lot of money to be spending on wiping out rabbits and rodents (啮齿目动物), and in the process, some native birds will be killed because of the baiting.
The reality is the problem isn’t going to be solved overnight. The people running the program say that even if one pair of rabbits is left alive, the whole task will be seen as a failure, which means these guys could be here for a long time, trying to ensure that this precious island remains protected from pests.
1. Who are these unwanted visitors?| A．Seal hunters. | B．Marine wildlife. | C．Native birds. | D．Foreign species. |
| A．Advancing. | B．Destroying. | C．Dividing | D．Balancing |
| A．Poisoned pellets are being dropped on the island from helicopters. |
| B．A team of hunters is being trained to catch or shoot rabbits. |
| C．Native birds are being protected from the unwanted visitors. |
| D．A special team of dogs is being sent to kill the rabbits. |
| A．To spend as little money as possible. |
| B．To protect native birds from the unwanted visitors. |
| C．To ensure that no pair of rabbits survive on the island. |
| D．To train dogs to track down the rabbits on the island. |
Anji, a small county in East China’s Zhejiang Province,
The outdoor café, the Deep Blue Coffeehouse, has received 350,000 tourists in less than a year, with the highest daily number of visitors
7 . For Cruz, who grew up in Peru’s mountainous region of Cuzco, fog represents a massive opportunity. As a boy, he had to hike for more than an hour every day across hills to collect water from the nearest source. But over time, he realized that during the rainy season, droplets of water would gather in the large leaves of banana trees. So one day he and his father tried to build a canal system with the leaves to collect water and it turned out a success. But afterwards, he moved to Lima at the age of 25.
There, shocked by the water shortages and expensive water supply that some of the city’s poorest residents were faced with, Cruz set up El Movimiento Peruanos sin Agua in 2005. The idea was to deploy the method he learned in his hometown on a larger scale, which would provide free, independently sourced and easily accessible water to those who needed it most. He began installing (安装) a traditional fog catcher model developed in the 1980s.
At the highest point of Los Tres Miradores, there is a curious set of large structures that resemble a fleet of ships in the sky. They are so-called “fog catchers”. Netted devices, made of high density Raschel polyethylene and spanning several meters wide, are lined up at the top of a misty mound and linked by a network of tubes that lead to storage containers. The 40 fog catchers there provide enough water for 180 families, whether to bathe, clean, drink or to irrigate crops on small garden patches.
Supporters believe that fog catchers have the potential to improve water supply for communities around the world among the ever-challenging circumstances. German researcher Lummerich says, “They are cheap, easy to construct.” In a world searching for water supply systems, it is one important puzzle piece that can make an essential difference locally.
However, there are some issues. For one, fog catchers require space, which is not always easy to come by in cities, let alone urban slums. At the same time, fog catchers must be properly cleaned and maintained to stay effective. Most crucially, appropriate climate conditions are required. Fog isn’t everywhere.
1. What does the underlined word “deploy” probably mean in paragraph 2?| A．Employ. | B．Adjust. | C．Design. | D．Study. |
| A．The reason why Cruz installed fog catchers. |
| B．The difficulties of constructing a canal system. |
| C．The installation and benefits of fog catchers. |
| D．The inspiration Cruz gained to build a canal system. |
| A．High costs. | B．Public opposition. |
| C．Space limitation. | D．Climate conditions. |
| A．Urban Areas: A Struggle for Sufficient Water |
| B．Innovative Water Collection Techniques in Peru |
| C．The Global Water Crisis and Possible Solutions |
| D．Fog Catchers: A Local Solution with Global Potential |
8 . In a lab in London, newborn chicks took the first steps of their life and might become part of solving one of the brain’s big puzzles. Elisabetta Versace, the lead author of the new study and head of the Prepared Minds Lab at Queen Mary, and her co-workers published their findings on Tuesday in Biology Letters.
In a simple test, researchers placed the downy animals, hatched after less than a day in complete darkness, one at a time into a special box. Two screens on the opposite sides of the box played videos of moving orange balls, one moving upward and the other downward. Over the course of 20 minutes, most of the chicks hesitantly walked over to the end of the box with the upward-moving ball.
Biologists call the mechanisms (生物机制) that assist animals in their earliest moments “evolutionary predispositions (进化倾向)” or “priors”. “Studying how predisposition s work in humans is difficult,” says Elisa Raffalla Ferre, co-author of the new study, as babies take time to develop complex skills. By the time human babies can easily move, they have already spent significant time learning. Chicks, however, can perform relatively complex actions very soon after hatching, which makes them ideal candidates for exploring how predispositions function.
Why this preference for objects that move against gravity exists at all remains unclear. “Going against gravity in a consistent way is associated with animate objects in the ecological world,” Versace says, “because usually you see that water flows down or a rock falls down.” Lifeless objects, on the other hand, are unlikely to move consistently against gravity.
The newly released article is consistent with previous research, according to Orsola Rosa Salva, a comparative psychologist at the University of Trento. What Salva wants to see next in this field are experiments that begin to identify what areas of the brain are active when predispositions are launched, so scientists can better understand how the mechanisms work. Versace hopes that future research can offer insights into the way the brain is organized to make sense of the world.
1. What did the test find out about newborn chicks?| A．They liked bright colors. | B．They had a poor sense of direction. |
| C．They preferred rising objects. | D．They picked up first steps with difficulty. |
| A．Their mechanisms are more complex. |
| B．They were already studied more in the past. |
| C．Their evolutionary predispositions work more effectively. |
| D．They can exhibit complex behaviors soon after birth. |
| A．It is common among species in nature. | B．It is a natural behavior of living animals. |
| C．It contributes to the survival of animals. | D．It helps newborn animals to learn quickly. |
| A．They’ll be carried out in the wild. | B．They’ll offer detailed workings of the brain. |
| C．They’ll compare the brains of different species. | D．They’ll apply to scientific research in related fields. |
9 . More than 170,000 people in California are unhoused. Even as the state has poured resources into fighting against the problem, the number of people without homes has ticked upward in recent years. On the surface, the state has one key advantage for people without a reliable roof over their heads: relatively consistent and livable weather. So one of my first thoughts when I heard news of a horricane attacking Los Angeles was just “What will happen to the city’s homeless population?”
City agencies quickly took action. As it became clear that the Los Angeles region could experience an extreme downpour and subsequent flooding, outreach teams fanned out across the river bank and dam areas across the city that have become home to a significant unhoused population, offering support to move them into shelters and motels (汽车旅馆).
Despite that, it’s obvious that the effects of climate change will hit the most vulnerable (脆弱的) hardest. We see this globally as extreme weather events hit countries that have contributed the least to the problem.
The most notable connection between climate change and the US housing crisis is the threat extreme weather poses to unhoused people. More unhoused people are affected as climate change drives increasingly unpredictable weather. People without homes know how to respond to expected seasonal events. But events like a near-hurricane in Los Angeles or a wildfire in ‘Maui can catch populations with limited access to information off guard.
Another link worth considering is the way in which climate change creates more homelessness and further stresses on housing systems. Hurricane Katrina, for example, displaced 800, 000 people. Four years later, 12,000 people remained without shelter.
Housing has been — and will continue to be — a key issue in Maui too as it recovers from the wildfire that killed more than 100 people. Maui has already had a housing crisis, the result of a high cost of living driven in large part by the tourism industry. And, now, many more are left looking for places to stay. Ashley Kelly, the chief operating officer at Hawaii’s Family Life Center, said: “Finding housing for any new clients is just not possible right now.”
1. What contributes to the increase of the unhoused population in California?| A．Its mild weather. |
| B．Its inclusive local culture. |
| C．Its limited basic facilities. |
| D．Its relaxed state policies. |
| A．They built dams to prevent flooding. |
| B．They moved homeless people to safe places. |
| C．They sought low-cost housing from city agencies. |
| D．They surrounded the river bank to keep people away. |
| A．Mysterious. | B．Exceptional. | C．Changeable. | D．Difficult. |
| A．Ways of Americans relocating disaster-affected populations. |
| B．The significance of timely weather updates for the homeless. |
| C．The link between climate change and the housing crisis in the US. |
| D．Approaches of homeless Americans to dealing with natural disasters. |
For most people, adopting (收养) a pet is one of the best decisions that they can ever make in their lives. In addition to giving an animal a home and a loving family, the owner will find the company of a pet brings more happiness than expected.
For someone like Maria, having a pet was very suitable. She was all alone after moving to a new apartment in Brazil, which made her feel lonely.
So when she found a cute black puppy named Chips, she knew she had to take him home. Maria thought that Chips would be able to fill the emptiness that she had been experiencing from living all alone.
Maria was right. Once she took the puppy home, they immediately bonded. However, as Maria had to work during the day, she was worried about leaving Chips home alone in her apartment. She was also worried that his crying would upset her neighbors.
One night, when she returned home, outside her door was a package with a folded note attached to it. Maria knew that she was in trouble. She hoped that she would not be evicted (驱逐) from her new apartment because of Chips. She loved Chips so much, and she was afraid that she might have to get rid of him because he made too much noise whenever she was away. Maria was frightened and wondered who could have left it at the door because she had little contact with the people in the building except her neighbor, Angelia. In fact, they only said hello few times.
However, when she noticed the names on the folded note, she found that it wasn’t addressed to her but to her dog, Chips, and that it was “written” by another dog named Corote. Maria opened the package first and found a few toys for pets.
注意：续写词数应为150个左右。Curious, Maria opened the note and started reading it.
___________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________With Chips following her, Maria knocked at Angelia’s door.
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