1 . You’ve heard that plastic is polluting the oceans — between 4.8 and 12.7 million tonnes enter ocean ecosystems every year. But does one plastic straw or cup really make a difference? Artist Benjamin Von Wong wants you to know that it does. He builds massive sculptures out of plastic garbage, forcing viewers to re-examine their relationship to single-use plastic products.
At the beginning of the year, the artist built a piece called “Strawpocalypse,” a pair of 10-foot-tall plastic waves, frozen mid-crash. Made of 168,000 plastic straws collected from several volunteer beach cleanups, the sculpture made its first appearance at the Estella Place shopping center in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam.
Just 9% of global plastic waste is recycled. Plastic straws are by no means the biggest source (来源) of plastic pollution, but they’ve recently come under fire because most people don’t need them to drink with and, because of their small size and weight, they cannot be recycled. Every straw that’s part of Von Wong’s artwork likely came from a drink that someone used for only a few minutes. Once the drink is gone, the straw will take centuries to disappear.
In a piece from 2018, Von Wong wanted to illustrate (说明) a specific statistic: Every 60 seconds, a truckload’s worth of plastic enters the ocean. For this work, titled “Truckload of Plastic,” Von Wong and a group of volunteers collected more than 10,000 pieces of plastic, which were then tied together to look like they’d been dumped (倾倒) from a truck all at once.
Von Wong hopes that his work will also help pressure big companies to reduce their plastic footprint.
1. What are Von Wong’s artworks intended for?A.Beautifying the city he lives in. | B.Introducing eco-friendly products. |
C.Drawing public attention to plastic waste. | D.Reducing garbage on the beach. |
A.To show the difficulty of their recycling. |
B.To explain why they are useful. |
C.To voice his views on modern art. |
D.To find a substitute for them. |
A.Calming. | B.Disturbing. |
C.Refreshing. | D.Challenging. |
A.Artists’ Opinions on Plastic Safety |
B.Media Interest in Contemporary Art |
C.Responsibility Demanded of Big Companies |
D.Ocean Plastics Transformed into Sculptures |
2 . California has lost half its big trees since the 1930s, according to a study to be published Tuesday and climate change seems to be a major factor(因素).
The number of trees larger than two feet across has declined by 50 percent on more than 46, 000 square miles of California forests, the new study finds. No area was spared or unaffected, from the foggy northern coast to the Sierra Nevada Mountains to the San Gabriels above Los Angeles. In the Sierra high country, the number of big trees has fallen by more than 55 percent; in parts of southern California the decline was nearly 75 percent.
Many factors contributed to the decline, said Patrick McIntyre, an ecologist who was the lead author of the study. Woodcutters targeted big trees. Housing development pushed into the woods. Aggressive wildfire control has left California forests crowded with small trees that compete with big trees for resources(资源).
But in comparing a study of California forests done in the 1920s and 1930s with another one between 2001 and 2010, McIntyre and his colleagues documented a widespread death of big trees that was evident even in wildlands protected from woodcutting or development.
The loss of big trees was greatest in areas where trees had suffered the greatest water shortage. The researchers figured out water stress with a computer model that calculated how much water trees were getting in comparison with how much they needed, taking into account such things as rainfall, air temperature, dampness of soil, and the timing of snowmelt(融雪).
Since the 1930s, McIntyre said, the biggest factors driving up water stress in the state have been rising temperatures, which cause trees to lose more water to the air, and earlier snowmelt, which reduces the water supply available to trees during the dry season.
1. What is the second paragraph mainly about?A.The seriousness of big-tree loss in California. |
B.The increasing variety of California big trees. |
C.The distribution of big trees in California forests. |
D.The influence of farming on big trees in California. |
A.Ecological studies of forests. |
B.Banning woodcutting. |
C.Limiting housing development. |
D.Fire control measures. |
A.Inadequate snowmelt. | B.A longer dry season. |
C.A warmer climate. | D.Dampness of the air. |
A.California’s Forests: Where Have All the Big Trees Gone? |
B.Cutting of Big Trees to Be Prohibited in California Soon |
C.Why Are the Big Trees Important to California Forests? |
D.Patrick McIntyre: Grow More Big Trees in California |
3 . Slowness has been a sweeping trend in sustainability. Slow food celebrates local produce and traditional cooking methods; slow fashion is made with a focus on people and the planet. You may have even heard of the slow city, a campaign to restore local cultures and turn cities back to their natural environments.
Slow design developed from the larger slow movement. Although the term was only recently introduced, the idea of thoughtful design looks back to a time when buildings and furniture were made with great craftsmanship (手艺) and by hand-before the mass-produced throwaway furniture took over. You can think of the term “slow” as a celebration of timelessness: both the timelessness of a piece and the timelessness of the relationship between that piece and its owner.
One example of slow design today is what’s been dubbed the brown furniture revival (复兴). Brown furniture refers to the heavy wooden furnishings that were popular in your grandparents’ day but suddenly fell out of style at the turn of the century. Brown furniture is often associated with dark woods, such as trees like mahogany, walnut, and teak, that take decades to reach maturity and true craftsmanship to transform into functional pieces.
Today’s furniture industry is dominated by the $13.1 billion-and-growing global ready-to-assemble(RTA) furniture market. RTA furniture is usually constructed from low-quality fiberboard, which lasts a small part of traditional furniture’s lifespan (寿命).The weight of furniture landfilled in 2018 was 9. 7 million tons, 4. 5 times what was landfilled in 1960.
In a less direct way, the idea of timelessness also lends itself to a lower environmental impact. Besides their demonstrated physical durability, slow materials and design are meant to outlive trends and never be thrown out simply because they’re out of style.
As second-hand shopping becomes more appealing to today’s young generation-because of its low environmental impact and affordability-the brown furniture of yesteryear is making a comeback.
1. Why is the first paragraph written?A.To explain a new term. |
B.To present the topic of the text. |
C.To provide background information. |
D.To highlight the importance of slowness. |
A.Known as. |
B.Mistaken for. |
C.Compared to. |
D.Connected with. |
A.It is out of date. |
B.It has a long lifespan. |
C.It is heavy and expensive. |
D.It has bad effects on the environment. |
A.Grandparents are buying new furniture. |
B.The brown furniture will soon be mass-produced. |
C.The young generation favors second-hand shopping. |
D.Materials for slow design furniture are more available. |
Your Cat Might Not Be Ignoring You When You Speak
Every cat owner has a story to tell of being blanked by their cat. We call to our cat, it turns away, and some of us might be left
A study by French researchers
“We found that hearing their owners using a high-pitched voice, cats reacted more than when hearing their owner speaking normally to another human adult,” said Charlotte de Mouzon, an author of the study. “But it actually didn’t work when it came from a stranger’s voice.”
So the researchers for the latest study went to the cats’ homes and played recordings of different types of speech and different speakers. At first, there was concern from Dr. de Mouzon and her team for lack of reaction from the cats, but upon analysis of the film recordings, delicate reactions
In the study, there were a few cases
5 . On a dark night, 11-year-old Joe was playing hide-and-seek with his friends in the backyard when he thought he saw Magellan—a huge housecat. However, when the cat suddenly jumped on his head, Joe found it turned out a young cougar. He backed away from the animal, then turned and ran inside the house.
Cougar encounters like this one are becoming increasingly common in the U.S. Most people assume that’s because cougar populations are growing, or because the big cats are coming into closer contact with the expanding web of human suburbs. But Professor Robert Wielgus at Washington State University argues that poorly designed hunting policies might be causing an increase in cougar-human conflicts.
Wielgus’s research teams have been fitting the big cats with radio collars and monitoring their movements. They find that the cougar population is actually declining rapidly and almost no male cougars are over four years of age. And a study shows that the heavily hunted area has five times as many cougar complaints as the lightly hunted area—even though the density of cougars is about the same in both areas.
Wielgus suspects that hunting policies, which allow older males to be killed to keep cougar populations in check, were the culprit and teenage cougars in the heavily hunted area may be responsible for most of the trouble. To test his theory, he adds two more groups of cougars to the tracking program—one in a heavily hunted area and another in a comparable but lightly hunted area. He concludes that heavy hunting indeed almost wipes out older males and the population structure in the heavily hunted area shifts toward younger animals.
With these findings, Wielgus believes without adults to keep them under control, the disorderly teens are more likely to come into conflict with humans, farm animals and pets.
Wielgus’s ideas don’t sit well with everyone. “Hunting definitely does cause lots of teenage males to flow in, but I don’t yet see solid proof that they are more likely to cause trouble than older cats,” says the University of Montana’s Robinson. “In many cases, the new arrivals have been squeezed out of remote wilderness habitat and forced into areas where they are more likely to encounter humans. I think humans are primarily responsible for all the interaction you see. We’re moving into these areas where cougars and deer are,” according to Alldredge, a researcher at the Colorado Division of Wildlife.
We may not understand what makes 18-year-old males more likely than 48-year-old men to do dangerous things, Wielgus says, but we know that the world would be a different place, if teenagers were in charge.
1. The passage begins with a story to ________.A.lead into the topic | B.describe an incident |
C.show the author’s attitude | D.warn of the dangers of cougars |
A.effect | B.evidence | C.cause | D.target |
A.Alldredge agrees hunting results in the arrival of lots of teens. |
B.Robinson doubts whether age is a key factor in human-cougar conflicts. |
C.Alldredge believes killing older males may cause a bigger threat. |
D.Robinson holds humans are to blame for the fall of older males. |
A.Driving teenage cougars back into their natural habitat. |
B.Getting people to move out of the areas where cougars are. |
C.Forbidding children to play in the backyard by themselves. |
D.Changing hunting policies to ensure a healthy cougar population. |
6 . There aren’t enough resources to identify and cure the factors that are causing populations of animals around the world to decline. Artificial intelligence might have the power to change that.
When an endangered seabird hits a power line, it
His team recorded 600 hours of audio and sent the recordings to Preservation Metrics, a company that assists preservation efforts with AI
In science fiction stories such as The Matrix, AI-powered machines take over the world and end life on the planet as we know it. But
By many
Humans,
In large national parks and wildlife reserves,
We still face many challenges to
A.makes a sound | B.catches fire | C.keeps the distance | D.takes chances |
A.affected | B.preserved | C.recorded | D.attracted |
A.unlawfully | B.instantly | C.frequently | D.deliberately |
A.fiction | B.significance | C.factors | D.resources |
A.deceiving | B.doubtful | C.desirable | D.disturbing |
A.Engaged in | B.Qualified for | C.Armed with | D.Exposed to |
A.in addition | B.in reality | C.in return | D.in fact |
A.measures | B.programs | C.services | D.species |
A.biodiversity | B.production | C.population | D.economy |
A.distribute | B.pool | C.lack | D.exploit |
A.meanwhile | B.however | C.otherwise | D.besides |
A.big-game | B.professional | C.local | D.illegal |
A.impossible | B.dangerous | C.urgent | D.thankless |
A.disproved | B.explained | C.predicted | D.ignored |
A.estimate | B.reverse | C.experience | D.sustain |
7 . Million-year-old mammoth genomes push the limits of a revolutionary technique
In the 1966 science-fiction movie “One Million Years B.C. ”, Raquel Welch and John Richardson traverse a primitive landscape inhabited by dinosaurs and early humans. The film was low on science and high on
A more
The team’s work represents a new
The trouble with DNA is that it breaks down after death. The more brokendown it is, the
Samples were sent to Dr Dalen’s laboratory in 2017 and strands of DNA were extracted, sequenced, and dated. Whereas DNA samples from a living animal can run to several hundreds of thousands of letters, the timeworn mammoth samples
To date a specimen, fragments of its DNA are compared to corresponding chunks from
The teeth held other
A.novel | B.fiction | C.drama | D.research |
A.urgent | B.descriptive | C.particular | D.accurate |
A.record | B.term | C.admission | D.pioneer |
A.Revealed | B.Extracted | C.Enrolled | D.Injected |
A.popular | B.punctual | C.invaluable | D.realistic |
A.related | B.concerned | C.critical | D.silent |
A.harder | B.quicker | C.stronger | D.lower |
A.equivalent | B.comparison | C.variation | D.messenger |
A.moreover | B.therefore | C.however | D.meanwhile |
A.mined | B.yielded | C.overestimated | D.recited |
A.destination | B.location | C.limit | D.permit |
A.precious | B.lost | C.rotten | D.known |
A.manual | B.just | C.imperial | D.previous |
A.surprises | B.miracles | C.imaginations | D.alternatives |
A.suddenly | B.permanently | C.slowly | D.accidentally |
8 . When Mexican scientist of the evolution of animal behavior, Laura Cuaya, moved to Hungary for her postdoctoral studies in Budapest, she brought her pet dog, Kun-kun, along for the ride. Cuaya couldn't help noticing how locals warmed to dogs. This prompted her naturally curious scientific mind to start asking questions. “Here people are talking all the time to Kun-kun, but I always wonder if Kun-kun can recognize that people in Budapest speak Hungarian, not Spanish?” So she set out to find an answer through a scientific study.
Cuaya and her colleagues decided to use brain images from MRI scanning to shed light on her hunch. They worked with dogs of various ages that had, until the experiment, only heard their owners speak just one of the two languages, Spanish or Hungarian. Not surprisingly, getting the dogs to happily take part in the experiment took some creative coaxing and animal training! The researchers first needed to teach Kun-kun and her 17 fellow participating dogs including a labradoodle, a golden retriever and Australian shepherds, to lie still in a brain scanner. Their pet parents were always present, and they could leave the scanner at any point.
The research team played children's book classic The Little Prince in both Spanish and Hungarian while scanning the dogs' brains with an MRI machine. They were looking for evidence that their brains reacted differently to a familiar and unfamiliar language. The researchers also played scrambled versions of the story to find out if dogs could distinguish between speech and non-speech.
The images reveal that dogs' brains show different patterns of activity for an unfamiliar language than for a familiar one — the first time anyone has proved, researchers say, that a non-human brain can distinguish between two languages. This means that the sounds and rhythms of a familiar language are accessible to non-humans.
Interestingly, the team also found that the brains of older dogs were more skilled at detecting speech “suggesting a role for the amount of language exposure”. They suggest that dogs have refined their ability to distinguish between human languages over the long process of domestication.
1. What is paragraph 1 mainly about?A.The background of the study. | B.The significance of the study. |
C.The concern of the researcher. | D.The introduction to the researcher. |
A.Age limits. | B.Brain patterns. | C.Language exposure. | D.Owners' commands. |
A.practical | B.contradictory | C.compromising | D.groundbreaking |
A.Dogs Can Tell Foreign Languages | B.Dog Brains Have Different Patterns |
C.Old Dogs Know More About Human Speech | D.Dogs Can Differ Speech From Non-Speech |
请根据下图用英语写一篇短文。你的短文应包括下列要点:
1.简要描写图画内容;
2.这一现象产生的原因;
3.发表你对解决此类问题的看法。
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10 . In the rich countries of the West, the electric vehicle revolution is well underway. Climate-conscious consumers drive Teslas or Polestars for reasons of morality and fashion. Poorer countries are also experiencing a wave of electrified trend. In Bangladesh, electric three-wheeler taxis, known as tuk-tuks, are rapidly replacing gas-powered ones on the streets. Such electric vehicles are climate friendly, cost effective, and help reduce air pollution.
Yet a glance under the hood (引擎盖) of these vehicles reveals a poisonous secret: each tuk-tuk runs on five massive lead-acid batteries, containing almost 300 pounds of lead in total. Every year and a half or so, when those batteries need to be replaced and recycled, about 60 pounds of lead leak into the environment. Battery recycling, often at small-scale unregulated factories, is a highly profitable but deadly business.
Lead is dangerous, and any exposure to it is harmful to human health. Lead that has entered the environment hurts people on an extraordinary scale. The numerous ways lead enters air, water, soil, and homes across the developing world — and the enormous damage it does to human health, wealth, and welfare — causes one of the biggest environmental crises in the world yet receives little attention.
The World Bank estimates that lead kills 5. 5 million people per year, which would make it a bigger global killer than AIDS, malaria, diabetes, and road traffic deaths combined. On top of the shocking deaths, the social burden of lead poisoning is extraordinary, as is its contribution to global inequality — our research on the cognitive effects of lead poisoning suggests that it may explain about one-fifth of the educational achievement gap between rich and poor countries.
But unlike many challenges faced by developing countries, lead poisoning is a problem that is fixable with some attention and a relatively modest financial investment. Better monitoring, research, and rules can help protect children all over the world from the dreadful effects of lead poisoning and reduce the massive global costs it brings.
1. How does the author describe the lead problem in paragraph 2?A.By making a comparison. | B.By analyzing hidden causes. |
C.By listing convincing numbers. | D.By explaining its working principle. |
A.Lead enters rich countries in various ways. |
B.Lead poisoning may make poor societies poorer. |
C.Exposure to lead doesn’t necessarily harm someone. |
D.Lead leaking has caused great panic in both countries. |
A.Fixing these used batteries. | B.Putting certain effort and money. |
C.Prohibiting the illegal use of lead. | D.Reducing the cost of recycling lead. |
A.The Impacts of Lead Poisoning on Human Health |
B.The Outcomes of Using Electric Vehicles |
C.The Ways to Solve Lead Problem |
D.The Global Lead Poisoning Crisis |