| A. swept B. previously C. relocated D. surging E. contaminate F. contain G. hit H. dimming I. commercially J. elevated K. extremely |
Wildfires rage as China’s Chongqing suffers unrelenting record heat wave
From: CNN August 23, 2022
Thousands of emergency responders are battling to
The fires, which have been visible at night from parts of the downtown area, have
Municipal authorities have not yet reported any casualties and said the fires are being kept under control, according to an update on Tuesday morning. More than 1,500 residents have been
The fires in Chongqing were the result of “spontaneous combustion” mainly caused by
The wildfires are another knock-on effect of a crippling heat wave China’s worst since 1961 -that has swept through southwestern, central and eastern parts of the country in recent weeks, with temperatures crossing 40 degrees Celsius (104 degrees Fahrenheit) in more than 100 cities.
They are also part of a global trend of wildfires that have ravaged areas from Australia to California, with scientists saying
China’s heat wave has also brought
Earlier this week, Sichuan province, neighboring Chongqing, extended temporary power outages at factories in 19 of the region’s 21 cities. The power cuts will now run until at least Thursday, in a move the local government says will ensure residential power supplies. Last week, the province’s capital city Chengdu began
On Tuesday morning, China issued a red alert heat warning, the highest of four color-coded levels, to at least 165 cities and counties across the country. Chinese authorities have
Blowing a Few Tops
Ever stopped to consider the upside of volcanic eruptions? It’s not all deaths, destruction and hot lava---scientists have a plan to cool the planet by simulating one. It would probably work, but it could have devastating consequence, and there is nothing to stop any country or company from deploying the technology.
Solar geo-engineering(气候工程) involves simulating an erupting volcano by spraying aerosols (气溶胶) into the atmosphere. When they combine with oxygen, droplets of acid form. These droplets reflect sunlight away from Earth, cooling the planet. All good in theory, but the consequences are largely unknown and a few could be disastrous. In a study recently published, researchers led by Anthony Jones, a climate scientist from the University of Exeter, found that using this technology in the Northern hemisphere could reduce the number of tropical cyclones hitting the U.S. and Caribbean. But there’s a worrying problem: more cyclones in the Southern hemisphere and a drought across the Sahel region of Africa. That’s because the entries climate system is linked--- disrupting one region will invariably affect another. How would a nation react if another was causing its weather to get much worse? Would that be an act of war?
There is, however, a case for using solar geo-engineering on a global case. Jones says it could be used to “take the edge of “the temperature increases scientists are predicting. It could be used while the world searches for more effective strategies.
The study also highlights a far bigger problem with solar geo-engineering: its complete lack of regulation. “There is nothing that could stop one country just doing it,” Jones says. “It’s deeply disturbing that we have this technology that could have such a massive influence in the climate, yet there’s just no regulation to stop countries or even organizations from doing it.”
Jones cautions that there is much about the climate system we do not understand, as well as more work that will need to be done before solar geo-engineering is deemed safe—or too dangerous to even discuss.
3 . A therapy-animal trend attracts the United States. The San Francisco airport uses a pig to calm tired travelers. Universities nationwide bring dogs (and a donkey) onto campus to relieve students during finals. And that duck on a plane? It might be an emotional-support animal prescribed by a mental health professional.
The trend, which has been gaining popularity hugely since its initial stirrings a few decades ago, is strengthened by a widespread belief that interaction with animals can reduce distress whether it happens over belief physical contact at the airport or in long-term relationships at home. Certainly the groups offering up pets think so, as do some mental health professionals. But the popular embrace of pets as furry therapists is causing growing discomfort among some researchers in the field, who say it has raced far ahead of scientific evidence.
Earlier this year in the Journal of Applied Development Science, an introduction to articles on “animal -assisted intervention” said research into its effectiveness “remains in its infancy.” A recent literature review by Molly Crossman, a Yale University doctoral candidate who recently wrapped up one study involving an 8-year-old dog named Pardner, cited a “vague body of evidence” that sometimes has shown positive short-term effects, often found no effect and occasionally identified higher rates of distress.
Overall, Crossman wrote, animals seem to be helpful in a “small-to-medium” way, but it’s unclear whether the animals deserve the credit or something else is at play.
“It’s a field that has been sort of carried forward by the beliefs of practitioners” who have seen patients’ mental health improve after working with or adopting animals, said James Serpell, director of the Centre for the Interaction of Animals and Society at the University of Pennsylvania School of Veterinary Medicine. “That kind of thing has almost driven the field, and the research is playing catch-up. In other words, people are recognizing that stories aren’t enough.”
Using animals in mental health setting is nothing new. In the 17th century, a Quaker-run retreat in England encouraged mentally ill patients to interact with animals on its grounds. Sigmund Freud often included one of his dogs in psychoanalysis sessions. Yet the subject did not become a research target until the American psychologist Boris Levinson began writing in the 1960s about the positive effect his dog Jingles had on patients.
But the evidence to date is problematic, according to Crossman’s review and others before it. Most studies had small sample sizes, she wrote, and an “alarming numbers” did not control for other possible reasons for a changed stress level, such as interaction with animal’s human handler. Studies also tend to generalize across animals, she noted. If participants are measurably relieved by one golden retriever, that doesn’t mean another dog---or another species--will arouse the same response.
1. According to the passage, what makes the therapy-animal trend more popular?| A．It has been in existence for no less than twenty years. |
| B．Mental health professionals have managed to cure patients with animals. |
| C．It is widely assumed that staying with animals can make people happier. |
| D．There is much related research to show that animals do good to some patients. |
| A．illustrate more scientific evidence is needed that animals are effective therapists. |
| B．highlight the importance of practitioners’ beliefs in the field of animal therapies. |
| C．question Srepell’s view that animals deserve the credit in helping patients. |
| D．criticize people for their taking human-animal stories too seriously. |
| A．Animal-assisted intervention turns out to be of more use than people think. |
| B．It is hard to see how many reasons there are for people to benefit from animals. |
| C．Research findings relating to one breed of dogs may not apply to another breed. |
| D．Small sample sizes can sometimes produce reliable effects in human-animal studies |
| A．More evidence found for dog-human relationship |
| B．Potential effects dogs have on patients |
| C．Therapeutic animal: nothing new |
| D．Good dog, good therapist? |
4 . If you think about the countless number of animal species on our planet, the giraffe is perhaps one of the most interesting. With its unusual pattern and incredibly long neck, it looks like no other animal on Earth. But how did this mammal come to get its famously huge neck? Well, scientists have been asking themselves this question for centuries.
The most commonly believed answer is that the massive neck — which measures on average 180 centimeters and weighs about 270 kilograms — evolved to allow the animal to reach the leaves of tall trees.
British scientist Charles Darwin was one of the first people to propose this idea in the 1800s.“The giraffe… has its whole frame beautifully adapted for browsing on the higher branches of trees,”he wrote in his famous 1859 book On the Origin of Species. It was Darwin’s belief that the giraffe once had a much shorter neck, but over time, evolution led to longer-necked giraffes being born, which in turn survived as they were able to reach the food that others couldn’t. Yet, there are other theories. According to a paper published in September in the Journal of Arid Environments, the giraffe’s neck evolved to increase its surface-area-to-volume ratio. Because the animal’s neck increases its body’s surface area, it makes it easier for it to keep cool, the paper’s authors wrote. This phenomenon can be seen everywhere in nature, and even in engineering.
For example, this is why elephants have such large ears, and why radiators (暖气片) in homes are flat and thin, as a large surface area allows heat to escape quicker.
Meanwhile, some believe that competition is the answer. A 1996 study by two South African zoologists argued that the male giraffes with the biggest necks are the ones who “win” access to females to reproduce, as they are better at fighting, meaning that their long necks are passed down through the generations. So, it seems like there’s still no definite answer to the question. But until we find the truth, we should at least enjoy this beautiful and interesting creature for what it is today, rather than wonder about where it came from.
1. What idea did Charles Darwin put forward in his book?| A．Giraffe’s necks are 180 cm long and weigh 270 kg on average. |
| B．Giraffes with a long neck are better at fighting. |
| C．Giraffes are a species that is born with a long neck. |
| D．Longer-necked giraffes are able to survive better. |
| A．Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution. |
| B．Different functions of the giraffe’s long neck. |
| C．How the giraffe manages to survive in nature. |
| D．Theories about why the giraffe has a huge neck. |
5 . In the 1990s, when an area of Brazilian rainforest the size of Belgium was cut down every year, Brazil was the world’s environmental villain (反派角色) and the Amazonian jungles the image of everything that was going wrong in green places. Now, the Amazon ought to be the image of what is going right. Government figures show that deforestation fell by 70% in the Brazilian Amazon region during the past decade. If clearances had continued at their rate in 2005, an extra 3.2 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide would have been put into the atmosphere. That is an amount equal to a year’s emissions from the European Union. Arguably, then, Brazil is now the world leader in addressing climate change.
But how did it break the vicious cycle (恶性循环)? The answer, according to a paper is that there was no silver bullet but instead a three-stage process in which bans, better governance in frontier areas and consumer pressure on companies worked.
The first stage ran from the mid-1990s to 2004. This was when the government put its efforts into bans and restrictions. The Brazilian Forest Code said that, on every farm in the Amazon, 80% of the land had to be set aside as a forest reserve. As the study observes, this share was so high that the code could not be followed --- or enforced. This was the period of the worst deforestation. Soybean prices were high and there were a vast expansion of soybean farming on the south-eastern border of the rainforest.
During the second stage, which ran from 2005 to 2009, the government tried to boost its ability to police the Amazon. Brazil’s president made stopping deforestation a priority, which resulted in better co-operation between different bits of the government. The area in which farming was banned was increased from a sixth to nearly half of the forest.
The third stage, which began in 2009, was a test of whether a system of restrictions could survive as soybean expansion continued. The government shifted its focus from farms to counties (each state has scores of these). Farmers in the 36 counties with the worst deforestation rates were banned from getting cheap credit until those rates fell.
By any standards, Brazil’s Amazon policy has been a success, made the more remarkable because it relied on restrictions rather than rewards, which might have been expected to have worked better. Over the period of the study, Brazil also turned itself into a farming superpower, so the country has shown it is possible to get a huge increase in food output without destroying the forest. Moreover, the policies so far have been successful among commercial farms who care about the law and respond to market pressures. Most remaining deforestation is by small holders who care rather less about these things, so the government faces the problem of persuading them to change their ways, too. Deforestation has been slowed, but not yet stopped.
1. Brazil is considered to play a leading role in dealing with climate change because ________.| A．it has rainforest as large as Belgium. |
| B．it has cut down too much rainforest. |
| C．it has taken action to reduce deforestation. |
| D．it sent 3.2 billion tons of carbon dioxide into the air. |
| A．a powerful weapon. | B．an effective solution. |
| C．an intelligent device. | D．a golden opportunity. |
| A．Brazil has successfully eliminated deforestation. |
| B．All the farmers care much about forest protection. |
| C．Small farm holders are a headache for the Brazilian government. |
| D．Both the food output and the forest in Brazil have greatly increased. |
| A．Cutting Down on Cutting Down. | B．Brazil, the World Leader in Farming. |
| C．Restrictions Outperforming Rewards. | D．Former Awareness Working Wonders. |
Sustainable Cities Need More Than Parks, Cafes and a Riverwalk
There are many standards that aim to rank how green cities are. But what does it actually mean for a city to be green or sustainable?
We’ve written about what we call the “parks, cafes and a riverwalk” model of sustainability, which focuses on providing new green spaces, mainly for high-income people. This vision of shiny residential towers and waterfront parks has become a widely-shared conception of what green cities should look like.
Gentrification(住宅高档化) has become a catch-all term used to describe neighborhood change, and is often misunderstood as the only path to neighborhood improvement. In fact, its defining feature is displacement. Typically, people who move into these changing neighborhoods are wealthier and more educated than residents who are displaced.
A recent flood of new research has focused on the displacement effects of environmental cleanup and green space initiatives.
Land for new development and resources to fund extensive cleanup of poisonous sites are scarce in many cities.
| A．This phenomenon is often missing from development projects promoted as green or sustainable. |
| B．This phenomenon has variously been called environmental, eco-or green gentrification. |
| C．Greening and environmental cleanup do not automatically or necessarily lead to gentrification. |
| D．This creates pressure to rezone industrial land for residential towers or profitable commercial space, in exchange for developer-funded cleanup. |
| E．But it can drive up real estate prices and displace low- and middle-income residents. |
| F．Environmental gentrification naturalizes the disappearance of manufacturing and the working class. |
7 . Cowboy or spaceman? A dilemma for a children’s party, perhaps. But also a question for economists, argued Kenneth Boulding, a British economist, in an essay published in 1966. We have run our economies, he warned, like cowboys on the open grassland: taking and using the world’s resources, confident that more lies over the horizon. But the Earth is less a grassland than a spaceship—a closed system, alone in space, carrying limited supplies. We need, said Boulding, an economics that takes seriously the idea of environmental limits. In the half century since his essay, a new movement has responded to his challenge. “Ecological economists”, as they call themselves, want to revolutionise its aims and assumptions. What do they say—and will their ideas achieve lift-off?
To its advocators, ecological economics is neither ecology nor economics, but a mix of both. Their starting point is to recognise that the human economy is part of the natural world. Our environment, they note, is both a source of resources and a sink for wastes. But it is ignored in conventional textbooks, where neat diagrams trace the flows between firms, households and the government as though nature did not exist. That is a mistake, say ecological economists.
There are two ways our economies can grow, ecological economists point out: through technological change, or through more intensive use of resources. Only the former, they say, is worth having. They are suspicious of GDP, a crude measure which does not take account of resource exhaustion, unpaid work, and countless other factors. In its place they advocate moreholistic(全面的) approaches, such as the Genuine Progress Indicator (GPI), a composite index(复合指标) that includes things like the cost of pollution, deforestation and car accidents. While GDP has kept growing, global GPI per person peaked in 1978: by destroying our environment we are making ourselves poorer, not richer. The solution, says Herman Daly, a former World Bank economist and eco-guru, is a “steady-state” economy, where the use of materials and energy is held constant.
Mainstream economists are unimpressed. The GPI, they point out, is a subjective measure. And talk of limits to growth has had a bad press since the days of Thomas Malthus, a gloomy 18th century cleric who predicted, wrongly, that overpopulation would lead to famine. Human beings find solutions to some of the most annoying problems. But ecological economists warn against self-satisfaction. In 2009 a paper in Nature, a scientific journal, argued that human activity is already overstepping safe planetary boundaries on issues such as biodiversity(生物多样性) and climate change. That suggests that ecological economists are at least asking some important questions, even if their answers turn out to be wrong.
1. Kenneth Boulding and the content of his essay at the beginning of this passage are meant to .| A．point out how ignorant of nature the cowboys are |
| B．blame human beings for their exploitation of nature |
| C．ask people to take seriously the environment limits |
| D．introduce ecological economists and ecologist economics |
| A．Ecology and economics are not mixed together |
| B．Human economy isn’t recognized as parts of nature |
| C．The environment has both resources and wastes |
| D．Diagrams connect firms, households and the government |
| A．GDP is crude measure that is not worth using |
| B．car accident should by all means include in GDP |
| C．we are gaining material wealth by destroying nature |
| D．resources and energy will one day be totally used up |
| A．the aims and assumptions of economics need to be revolutionized |
| B．GDP and GPI should be both accepted by mainstream economists |
| C．Human beings can always find solutions to all the annoying problems |
| D．Ecological economists’ concerns about the world are worth noticing. |
Acid rain is now a familiar problem in the industrialized countries in Europe. Harmful gases like Sulphur dioxide and nitrogen oxide are produced by power stations and cars.
Acid rain is also capable of dissolving some rocks and buildings made of soft rock, such as limestone, are particularly badly affected. The acid rain attacks the rock, and so carvings and statues are worn away more quickly.
The acid rain is said to be caused by pollution from oil wells in the Gulf of Mexico. Car exhaust gases are also a problem. Local volcanic eruption make the problem even worse. Nevertheless, with enough money and effort, researchers say that many of the problems could be solved and the rate of dissolving reduced.
Mexico’s current lack of funds is also partly due to oil. The country has rich oil field and a few years ago, when oil was expensive, Mexico was selling large quantities of oil to the USA and earning a lot of money. The government was therefore able to borrow huge sums of money from banks around the world, thinking they would have no problem repaying their debts. However, the price of oil then dropped, and Mexico has been left owing enormous sums of money and with not enough income from oil sales to pay back the loans.
| A．However, the Mexican government does not have enough money to do the work, and needs to spend what money it has on the Mexican people. |
| B．That is enough to have caused some of the ancient carvings to become seriously damaged already. |
| C．So unless the price of rises, it is unlikely that Mexican will be able to afford to clean up the pollution and save its Mayan ruins from destruction. |
| D．These measures would reduce the pollution, but would not stop it completely. |
| E．The problem, however, is not a European one. |
| F．They dissolve in rainwater and this makes acid rain, which damages trees, rivers and streams. |
Anyone planning to go camping or hiking should first learn to recognize poison ivy,
Fortunately this plant is easy to
The poison in poison ivy is in the form of an oil that is in all parts of the plant. It is extremely
A person who makes
| A．since | B．so | C．therefore | D．then |
| A．cold | B．cough | C．case | D．accident |
| A．keep | B．prevent | C．protest | D．cut |
| A．forget | B．grow | C．fertilize | D．recognize |
| A．the same | B．various | C．beautiful | D．ugly |
| A．become | B．change | C．get | D．avoid |
| A．barely | B．always | C．usually | D．almost |
| A．widely | B．narrowly | C．practically | D．strongly |
| A．very poor | B．very good | C．quite well | D．quite worse |
| A．supported | B．discovered | C．watered | D．disturbed |
| A．deep | B．high | C．catching | D．beautiful |
| A．oil | B．part | C．form | D．contact |
| A．combination | B．contact | C．access | D．soap |
| A．smoke | B．fire | C．plant | D．clothing |
| A．poisoning | B．weeding | C．growing | D．seeding |
Where is the Beef
Most people like to eat meat. As they grow richer they eat more of it. For individuals, that is good. Meat is nutritious. In particular, it packs much more protein per kilogram than plants do. However, animals have to eat plants to put on weight - so much so that feeding them accounts for about a third of harvested grain. Farm animals consume 8 per cent of the world’s water supply, and they produce around 15 per cent of unnatural greenhouse-gas emissions. More farm animals then, could mean more environmental trouble.
The simplest way to satisfy this demand is to concentrate on substitutes for familiar products. “Meat” made directly from plants, rather than indirectly, via an animal’s metabolism, is already on sale for the table and barbecue. Impossible Foods, a Californian firm, has deconstructed hamburgers, to work out what gives them their texture (质感) and flavour, and then either found or grown botanical equivalents to these.
For those who really want to eat steak while saving the planet, a second approach maybe more promising. That is “clean” meat made by taking animal cells and growing them in a factory to form strips of muscle. Steak is not yet on the menu, but burgers and meatballs may soon be. The field leader is Mosa Meat, a Dutch firm staffed by scientists.
There is one more novel source of meaty protein that does not involve farm animals -at least, farm animals of the conventional sort. This is insects. Locusts (蝗虫), for example, are about 70 per cent protein. Insects do have to be fed, but being cold-blooded, they convert more food into body mass than warm-blooded mammals do and, being boneless, more of that body-mass is edible.
| A．The first burger it made, in 2013, cost around $300,000. |
| B．It launched its plant-based burger in a number of restaurants in America last year. |
| C．Per edible gram, insects need only a twelfth of the food that cattle require. |
| D．The problem is marketing. |
| E．Plant-based "meat" products have made it onto menus and supermarket shelves. |
| F．Some consumers, particularly in the rich West, get this. |
