| A．Birds’ physical characteristics. | B．The migrating patterns of birds. |
| C．The size of bird population. | D．The behavior of migrating birds. |
| A．They become tired of their partners. | B．They can’t reach home at the same time. |
| C．They are likely to find new mates. | D．They have conflicts during the flight. |
| A．They are able to keep pace with their partners. |
| B．They migrate shorter distances than other birds. |
| C．They do not have to migrate for food. |
| D．They have little chance to meet new mates. |
2 . Canada geese are a common and plentiful North American bird found in many urban parks, golf courses, airports, or areas with large lawns near water. They are a large waterbird with a fairly brown body, pale breast, and long black neck with white cheeks.
Canada geese are particularly attracted to urban areas for the many grassy lawns near small bodies of water. They can often be seen feeding on lawns or playing in shallow water by tipping forward and extending their necks underwater to reach for plants. Canada geese prefer to gathering in large flocks (群) and can be seen flying over in the classic V formation.
In Chicago, Canada geese may remain in the city throughout the year, although some geese get used to moving long distances to more southern sections for the winter or northward in spring to breed. Each breeding season, pairs build large open cup ground nests and lay 2 to 8 eggs which are raised in a single brood (窝). Urban habitats are also attractive to this species as neatly-maintained lawns make it easy when grazing with young to keep watch for approaching enemies. It is, however, their use of these urban areas that often leads to conflicts with humans.
As Canada geese numbers rise, so do their conflicts with humans. Canada geese’s daily activities may damage gardens and landscaping. Geese may also cross roads when searching for food or walking between nesting sites and bodies of water, slowing movement or posing a potential risk on the roadway. Although direct injuries by fierce geese are uncommon, people sometimes fall and pick up injuries when surprised by a charging goose. Additionally, people often feed the birds. Not only are the types of food people typically provide, such as bread, unhealthy for the birds, but this encourages high concentrations of geese leading to more harmful behavior and higher risk of diseases. Lastly, plane-bird conflicts are estimated to be rising, likely due to increasing numbers of planes, but also increases in populations of certain bird species, including Canada geese. Although crashes rarely result in an accident, they often cause costly damage to planes.
1. What do we know about Canada geese from the first and second paragraph?| A．They are a valued and rare species. |
| B．They like to spend time near water. |
| C．They always live quietly and separately. |
| D．Their appearance is in a uniform and single color. |
| A．feeding (paragraph 2) | B．playing (paragraph 2) |
| C．gathering (paragraph 2) | D．moving (paragraph 3) |
| A．adore humans | B．threaten humans |
| C．frustrate humans | D．safeguard humans |
| A．Frequent air crashes. | B．Damage to city view. |
| C．Traffic jam and danger. | D．Indirect human injuries. |
3 . When I step out onto the deck, I definitely feel the Arctic chill. That’s not surprising. I’m a good hundred miles inside the Arctic Circle; in fact, you can’t get much farther north and still be in Sweden. This is Abisko Mountain Station, perhaps the crown jewel of the Swedish mountain lodges (小屋). I’m back for a second time to this remote, scenic spot.
Last Autumn, a heavy snowstorm trapped me in my tent for days and eventually forced me to go to the station, a comfortable place. I discovered a different side to Abisko. People come here for many reasons – some to hike, some to climb, some to cross-country ski. But there’s yet another entirely different attraction here. Looking out from the deck of the train station, above a huge lake, in the upper sky of the North Pole, the Aurora, as we often refer to the northern light, mixed with green and red, was giving off ghostly light, rolling across the dark night sky.
The Aurora may be old hat to those who live this far north, but for the rest of us it is an unforgettable experience. The lights here were so appealing to us we quickly forgot the discomfort of the cold.
One of the attractions in Abisko is the Tornetrask. It’s a huge lake, which extends more than 70 kilometres long just north of the station, creates an unusual weather phenomenon that keeps the skies above the station clear even when fog or clouds blanket most of northern Sweden. The sky in this area is mostly clear all year around.
Abisko has a lot to offer to make it an ideal place to view the Aurora. It is far from any city lights. The station operates a ski lift to the top of Nuolja Peak, more than 3,000 feet high. For the first time this year, a cafe at the top of the mountain has been turned into a viewing platform for the Northern Lights, called the Aurora Sky Station. Also, the station posts forecasts each night of expected Aurora activity, collected from scientific observations arriving via computer, so visitors may choose the best viewing time.
1. What was the reason for the author’s first visit to the lodge?| A．He went there in search of the Aurora. | B．He needed equipment to keep him warm. |
| C．He was forced there by the weather. | D．He had to make his food supply there. |
| A．severe and struggling | B．familiar and unexciting |
| C．strange and shocking | D．mysterious and adventurous |
| A．There is a mountain viewing platform. | B．Weather forecasts are available. |
| C．There are no city lights nearby. | D．There is a café shop there. |
| A．despite the severe weather, it’s an impressive place |
| B．people have overestimated its popularity |
| C．it’s not as popular as it deserves to be |
| D．the cold weather worsens the Aurora viewing experience there |
Is Leather Good or Not?
For thousands of years, humans have used leather to make everything from clothing to furniture to footwear. The skin of animals is a material that is strong, hard-wearing and flexible. These qualities make leather a popular material for many different products, but more people are becoming concerned about the potential harm caused by items they buy. Should we respect ancient traditions or is having real leather not as important as it used to be?
The treatment of animals raised for their skins is a massive issue. According to the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), more than 2.29 billion cows, pigs and goats are killed each year for their hides. This does not include the animal skin of fancier leather products, such as sheep, crocodiles, kangaroos and lizards.
There’s also an environmental problem. Producing leather is a very polluting process, because it requires treating the skins with chemicals. During the procedure, called tanning, chemicals change the fibres (纤维) inside the leather, making it tougher. A tanning facility uses more than 60,000 litres of water for every tonne of leather produced. It uses huge amounts of poisonous chemicals, including substances containing heavy metals such as chromium, which when washed out ends up in nearby soil and drinking water that people use.
However, the making of leather is not entirely negative. Selling animal skin is a key source of income for remote populations such as the Inuit people in Canada. Every day, cows, pigs and goats are killed for their meat to be sold in supermarkets. It’s respectful not to waste anything, and without leather their skins would have to be buried or burned.
Although there are alternatives to leather, some of these fabrics are only 85% to 90% biodegradable (可生物降解的). Vegan leather can be made from plastics which take years to biodegrade, so it’s actually worse for the planet.
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5 . Building good transportation is a good idea. To have environmental value, new transportation has to sufficiently replace or eliminate driving to cut energy consumption overall. That means that a new traffic system has to be supported by reduction in car use. Traffic lanes should be eliminated or converted into bike or bus lanes. Ideally, these should be combined with higher fuel taxes, and parking fees. Needless to say, I have to struggle to make myself extensively understood. But they’re necessary, because you can’t make people drive less, in the long run, by taking steps that make driving more pleasant, economical, and productive.
Lengthy commuting (通勤) time is a forceful factor which can slow the growth of suburbs. The farther people live away from cities, the longer commuting time they need, which means more pollution their cars produce. If, in a misguided effort to do something of environmental value, governments take steps that make long-distance car commuting faster or more convenient—by adding lanes, building bypass, employing traffic-control measures that make it possible for existing roads to accommodate more cars with fewer delays—we are actually encouraging people to live still farther from their jobs, stores, and schools. As a result, governments are forced to further extend road networks, water lines, and other facilities. If you cut commuting time by 10 percent, people who now drive fifty miles each way to work can find reason to move five miles farther out, because their travel time won’t change.
Traffic congestion (拥堵) isn’t an environmental problem; traffic is. Relieving congestion without doing anything to reduce the total volume of cars can only make the real problem worse. Highway engineers have known for a long time that building new car lanes only temporarily reduces congestion, because the new lanes add additional driving. Widening roads makes traffic move faster in the short term, but the improved conditions eventually attract additional drivers, and congestion reappears. With more car on the roads, people think about widening roads again. Moving drivers out of cars and into other forms of transportation can have the same effect, if existing traffic lanes are kept in service: road space stimulates road use.
One of the arguments that cities inevitably make in promoting transportation plans is that the new system, by relieving automobile congestion, will improve the lives of those who continue to drive. No one ever promotes a transportation system by arguing that it would make travelling less convenient—even though, from an environmental perspective, inconvenient travel is a worthy goal.
1. In the first paragraph, the author gives us the hint that his recommendations are ______.| A．not widely supported | B．costly to carry out |
| C．generally recognized | D．temporarily beneficial |
| A．Drivers will become more productive employees. |
| B．Mass transportation will be extended farther into suburban areas. |
| C．Drivers will be more willing to live farther from their working place. |
| D．Mass transportation will carry fewer passengers and receive less government funding. |
| A．They are environmentally beneficial and should be carried out immediately. |
| B．They are well intentioned but ultimately lead to environmental harm. |
| C．They will definitely arouse people’s awareness of environmental protection. |
| D．They will only work if they can make driving more economical and productive. |
| A．support the claim that efforts to reduce traffic actually increase traffic. |
| B．oppose the belief that improving mass transportation systems is good for the environment. |
| C．provide a balance between suburban expansion and traffic congestion. |
| D．indicate that making driving less agreeable is a way to reduce negative effects of traffic. |
6 . Raccoons are arguably the most successful urban carnivore (食肉动物) in North America. They maintain large populations in most U.S. cities and are certainly just as common in Chicago, though actual population estimates are unknown. Almost anyone who has spent time outdoors at night has likely seen one, and they are quite difficult to confuse with anything else — their fat bodies, and mask-like facial markings, make them quite distinctive, and even perhaps charming.
A typical urban raccoon is able to eat virtually anything. Their diet includes earthworms, carrion, plant matter, cat food, and all kind of discarded human food waste. Raccoons are probably the most advanced wildlife which can dive our dustbins. Their paws (爪子) are quite dexterous and enable them to access closed garbage dustbins. Raccoons are also capable climbers and can be found on the top of fences and in trees. While they are typically solitary, they are willing to tolerate crowds of other raccoons if high quality food resources are present. They give birth once and sometimes twice a year in late spring and make use of a wide variety of den (巢穴) sites, including hollow trees, chimneys, etc. Because they make dens in a variety of human structures, raccoons can be a source of human-wildlife conflict, through direct confrontation with humans, property damage caused by their activities, and, perhaps most critically, through the transmission of disease. Leptospirosis, canine distemper, raccoon roundworm, and rabies are the most important zoonotic (人畜共患的) diseases carried by raccoons. Rabies in particular has had a massive effect on raccoon populations and caused a public health attention, to the point where use of vaccine have been attempted in some cities.
In most cases where raccoons are reported by the public, no management action is necessary. Large packs of raccoons, such as those often sighted along the lakeshore path, likely suggest a large artificial food source, such as people deliberately feeding raccoons on unchecked garbage. These large gatherings present a high disease risk and people should be strongly discouraged from feeding raccoons or leaving food outside for them. In cases where there is evidence of disease, individual raccoons will need to be trapped and killed.
1. What do we know about raccoons from the first paragraph?| A．They are unknown in Chicago. | B．They are easily recognized. |
| C．They tend to attack people at night. | D．They are declining in population. |
| A．skillful | B．mysterious | C．invisible | D．abnormal |
| A．share food | B．be in crowd |
| C．live separately | D．hide high quality food |
| A．People are encouraged to feed raccoons. |
| B．Raccoons are killed as food source for people. |
| C．Immediate measures are adopted when raccoons are found. |
| D．Extreme actions may be taken to deal with racoons carrying disease. |
7 . The population of rare Atlantic puffins in Maine, US, took a hit this year, as the number of chicks to survive a tough summer collapsed. The state's coastal bays and the Gulf of Maine are among the fastest warming large water bodies on the planet, making the puffins' fate a test-case for how climate change could disrupt marine ecosystems worldwide.
The little clown-colored birds faced a complex of challenges: nests were flooded by some of the heaviest rains in a hundred years, exposing chicks to cold and predators. It was tough for young puffins, who were being brought up in caves along the island's shores. And their parents had a hard time finding herring (鲱鱼) and other North Atlantic prey they usually dive for, which scientists think may have swum to cooler waters too deep or far-off for the birds. The adult puffins flew farther than usual to find food. Scientists say this limited their time to keep baby puffins warm in their nests. They did find and bring to the nests a lot of butterfish, but the thing is that butterfish are too big for young puffins to swallow.
The director of the National Audubon Society's Seabird Institute, Don Lyons, says puffins provide a unique window on global warming, on how even small shifts in the range or timing of any one species' occurrence can influence the fate of many others. "Working with puffins in Maine, we're seeing the harbingers (预兆) of climate change every day," he said. "I tend to think of puffins as a group of researchers. They're going out and sampling our marine ecosystem all summer, many times a day. And the way we learn from them is watching what fish they bring back and how well they are able to raise baby coffins. ... They're really telling us to be concerned, you know, to pay attention."
Lyons says that with good management of herring and other fisheries that the puffins depend on, the birds should be able to hang on. Puffins can live up to 30 years and this means it won’t be too terrible if they meet only a bad year. He adds, though, that their future in Maine may depend on just how often those bad years keep rolling in.
1. The phrase “took a hit” (in the 1st paragraph) probably mean “________”.| A．suffer heavy losses | B．escape bad fortune |
| C．increase on a large-scale | D．decline moderately |
| A．Puffins’ nests are open to the attack of their predators. |
| B．Baby puffins are not adequately fed. |
| C．Puffins’ prey prefers to stay in warm waters. |
| D．Butterfish are not the appropriate food for baby puffins. |
| A．puffins are helping human to maintain marine ecosystem |
| B．we can tell the marine ecosystem from what puffins do |
| C．puffins are more capable of diving for their prey |
| D．it’s interesting for researchers to work with puffins |
| A．the control of puffins’ population |
| B．prohibition of fishing herring and other fish |
| C．puffins’ abilities to adapt to different marine ecosystem |
| D．the frequency of the continuous occurrence of bad year |
The UK government recently has made a plan to reduce waste that shifts the responsibility for disposal (处置) from the state to the companies that make it.
The legislation (法律条文) requires waste producers to pay into the system
The demand for legislation like the tough attitude the UK
What is absolutely certain is that local governments will save a lot of money as the responsibility shifts to the polluters. That could be
In many countries, kitchen and gardening waste makes up of the biggest part of waste. This type of waste,
