1 . Since Peter Singer published Animal Liberation in 1975, animal rights activists thought animals should be granted the same rights as humans. Referring to scientific studies showing animals_______“human characteristics”, they argue animals should be protected with the same rights. So why don’t animals have the same legal status (身份) as humans？

The line of reasoning in favor of granting animals equal rights to humans_______the fact that scientists have found characteristics in animals we normally_______with humans. A group of scientists showed monkeys demonstrate self-consciousness at the same level as humans. This has usually served as a justification for human rights, so why don’t we grant equal rights to monkeys？

The truth is,_______convincing scientific evidence, the argument for granting at least some animals the same rights as humans can’t be justified philosophically. An adequate argument for animal rights would require further philosophical inquiry and not just descriptive_______. We can feel pity for animals being treated badly and strive to protect them from such treatment. This,_______, doesn’t mean animals should enjoy the same legal status as humans.

There is a strong reason for_______that rights only apply to humans. While fundamental rights surely are valuable in their nature, they would be worthless without a system to_______them. That is why we expect other people to respect our rights.

The system that defends our rights is the fact that other people are obliged by_______in their behaviors towards us. In our daily life, we experience numerous situations in which bad guys could________from violating (侵犯) our rights. Nevertheless, we see, of course, with some exceptions, that individuals cooperate and respect other people’s rights. Rights and duties are two sides of the same coin, and one cannot________to have certain rights without having to observe the duties.

If it is my claim to live freely on my property without being bothered, my neighbor’s duty prevents him from violating my right to property and life. Suppose, however, he breaks in and damages my property. He will then be held responsible in a court of law, for he has________his duty to respect my rights. This is completely reasonable, but we will certainly face________if my property was violated by an elephant.

If we assume that animals are granted the same legal status as humans,________requires that we now drag he elephant into court. Remember, if an animal were to have such rights, it would logically also have social duties. Therefore, it is now________to the same legal procedures as humans. This raises practical questions: Who will defend the animal in court？And will the animal be able to comprehend what is going on？

2 . Space exploration has always been the province of ________：The human imagination readily soars where human ingenuity (创造力）struggles to follow. A Voyage to the Moon, often cited as the first science fiction story, was written by Cyrano de Bergerac in 1649. Cyrano was dead and buried for a good three centuries ________the first manned rockets started to fly.

In 1961, when President Kennedy declared that America would send a man to the moon by the ________'s end, those words, too, had a dreamlike quality. They resonated with optimism and ambition in much the same way as the most famous ________ speech of all, delivered by Martin Luther King Jr. two years later. By the end of the decade, both visions had yielded concrete results and________American society. And yet in many ways the two dreams ended up ________each other. The fight for racial and economic equality is intensely pragmatic (讲求实用的）and immediate in its impact. The urge to explore space is just the opposite. It is figuratively and literally otherworldly in its ________.

When the dust settled, the space dreamers lost out. There was no grand follow-up to the Apollo missions. The technologically compromised space shuttle program has just come to an end, with no ________. The perpetual argument is that ________ are tight, that we have more pressing problems here on Earth. Amid the current concerns about the federal deficit, reaching toward the stars seems a dispensable luxury—________ saving one-thousandth of a single year’s budget would solve our problems.

But human ingenuity struggles on. NASA is developing a series of robotic probes that will get the most bang from a buck. They will serve as modern Magellans,________out the solar system for whatever explorers follow, whether man or machine. On the flip side, companies like Virgin Galactic are plotting a bottom-up assault on the space dream by making it a reality to the public. Private spaceflight could lie within ________ of rich civilians in a few years. Another decade or two and it could go mainstream.

The space dreamers end up benefiting all of us—-not just because of the way they expand human knowledge, or because of the spin-off _______ they produce, but because the two types of dreams feed off each other. Both Martin Luther King and John Kennedy appealed to the idea that humans can ________what were once considered inherent limitations. Today we face seeming challenges in energy, the environment, health care. Tomorrow we will transcend these as well, and the dreamers will deserve a lot of the credit. The more evidence we collect that our species is ________greatness, the more we will actually achieve it.

3 . Now elsewhere in the world, Iceland may be spoken of, somewhat breathlessly, as western Europe's last pristine wilderness. But the truth is, once you're off the ______ track of the low-lying coastal areas where everyone lives, the roads are few, and they're all bad, ______ Iceland's natural wonders have been out of reach and unknown even to its own ________For them the land has always just been there, something that had to be dealt with and, if possible, _______—the mind-set being one of land as commodity rather than land as, well, priceless art on the scale of the " Mona Lisa".

When the opportunity arose in 2003 for the national power company to enter into a 40-year ______ with the American aluminum company Alcoa to supply hydroelectric power for a new smelter （冶炼厂）, those who had been dreaming of something like this for decades ______ the opportunity. For a long time, life here had meant little more than a hut, dark all winter, cold, no hope, children dying left and right, plagues, starvation, volcanoes erupting and destroying all vegetation and livestock, all spirit— a world ______ almost entirely around the welfare of one's sheep and, later, on how good the cod catch was. In the outlying regions, it still largely does.

Ostensibly, the Alcoa project was intended to save one of these dying regions— the remote and sparsely populated east— where the way of life had steadily ______ to a point of desperation and gloom. After fishing quotas (定额) were ______ in the early 1980s to protect fish stocks, many individual boat owners sold their allotments or gave them away, fishing rights ended up mostly in the hands of a few companies and small fishermen were virtually ______. Technological advances drained away even more jobs previously done by human hands, and the people were seeing everything they had worked for all their lives turn out to be ______ and their children move away. With the old way of life doomed, aluminum projects like this one had come to be perceived, wisely or not, as a last chance. "Smelter or death."

The contract with Alcoa would infuse the region with foreign ______, an estimated 400 jobs, and spin-off service industries. It also was a way for Iceland to develop expertise that ______ could be sold to the rest of the world and ______ an economy historically dependent on fish. “We have to live,” Halldor Asgrimsson said. Halldor, a former prime minister and longtime member of parliament from the region, was a driving ______ behind the project. “We have a right to live.”

6 . If you like to take a walk in the woods in the United States or you prefer to decorate a tree at Christmas, you should know that climate change is making both of those activities a lot more ___________.

Looking at two ___________ and economically important species - the Douglas fir and the Ponderosa pine -scientists found that fires and drought _____________ by climate change make new growth difficult, especially in low-elevation forests, according to a study published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Some forests in four regions in California, Colorado, the Northern Rockies and the southwestern part of the United States have crossed ''a(n) ___________ climate tipping(转折)point for post-fire tree generation, '' the study says.

Climate conditions over the past 20 years have _____________ changes that would have taken decades or even centuries to ___________ across broad regions of the country. This is leading to the sudden _____________ of trees and making these lands increasingly unsuitable for tree regeneration.

''Climate changes is _____________ our forests now, not just in some distant future. Maybe in areas where there are really _____________ seed sources, there could be some trees, but it is becoming really hard to get these trees back due to climate change, '' said study co-author Kim Davis.

The problem probably won't get any better, as climate change is making intense wildfires much more ______________. Western foresters say there used to be a fire season. But devastating and ____________ fires have become a reality all year long. In 2018, fire cost California more than $9.05 billion, according to the USA insurance commissioner, the deadliest and most destructive wildfires season in the ________________ history.

A higher number of fires and low seed availability means a high probability that these trees in these regions won't come back, Davis said. This study ______________ on the driest and hottest areas of the Western forests, but researchers will next try to focus on how much will be impacted.

____________, there are some things people can do to ease some of this problem. Forest management plans that reduce high-severity burns can help. Increasingly, forest managers are considering allowing some fires to burn under more moderate conditions, Davis said, Forest ______________can also replant trees after fire, at least in the areas where climate conditions will allow.

7 . China and India are Rebuilding the Green World

Over the last two decades, the Earth has seen an increase in foliage (植物) around the planet, measured in average leaf area per year on plants and trees. Data from NASA satellites (卫星) shows that China and India-two___________economies with the world’s biggest populations-are___________the increase in greening on and. The effect comes mostly from_________tree-planting programs in China and intensive agriculture (精耕细作) in both countries.

Researchers from Boston University found that global green leaf area has increased by five percent since the early 2000s, an area_________to the entire Amazon rainforest.(亚马逊热带雨林) The study was also published in the journal Nature Sustainability on February 11. It revealed that at least 25 percent of the global plant_________this century came in China.

“China and India_________one-third of the greening, but contain only nine percent of the planets land area covered in vegetation,” said lead author Chi Chen of Boston University. “That is a surprising finding, considering the general idea of land degradation (退化) in populous (人口多) countries from_________.”

China’s_________contribution to the global greening trend came in large part from programs to protect and expand forests, accounting for about 42 percent of the greening contribution. These programs were developed in an effort to _________the effects of air pollution, soil erosion and climate change.

Another 32 percent of the greening change in China, and 82 percent in India, resulted from intensive__________of food crops. The land area used to grow crops in China and India has not changed much since the early 2000s.

9 . Children’s books are filled with fantastic friendships between humans and beasts. From a young age, we learn that if a tiger comes for tea we should expect it to eat all our sandwiches, and if a Peruvian bear_______for lunch we had better have some marmalade (柑橘酱) in the cupboard.

In this fantasy world, we can coexist peacefully with large mammals. _______, in real life, young people are having fewer wild interactions than ever before. In part this is a result of _______screen time and decreased access to wild spaces. Perhaps it doesn’t help that many countries drove out their most exciting _______ —bears and wolves—centuries ago.

Had they not, more people in the developed world might now be facing similar problems to those in Novaya Zemlya. The playgrounds of this remote Russian archipelago (俄罗斯半岛) were recently_______by a group of hungry polar bears, driven into human settlements in search of food and _______after rising temperatures destroyed the last hospitable slices of the Arctic sea ice. It’s the same story we see across the world: habitat _______ driving elephants to attack crops, human settlements spreading into tiger territory, and people losing their lives to big cats.

The Incident of the Polar Bear in the Playground is not a/an _______consequences to The Humans Who Melted the Ice Caps. We have known for years that Arctic temperatures are rising at_______rates. It should come as no surprise that the polar bears we have forced to leave their natural homes have ________shouting at humans’ front doors in search of their basic requirements for survival. Unfortunately, they are more ________ to be met with the business end of a shotgun than a marmalade sandwich. And who can criticize the people in the main settlement, Belushya Guba, for wanting to protect themselves?

We’ve had years to________these issues. This is not an unusual ________but the latest in a list   of increasingly frequent human/polar bear incidents. And it’s part of an even longer list of rapidly growing areas where there is human/wildlife conflict. We can’t________the local residents of Novaya Zemlya for their quiet town becoming a bear refugee camp. They are not the ones burning fossil fuels, ________farming cows and flying across the world for business meetings. It’s almost always the case that those making the decisions that are most serious for the environment are the furthest from the consequences.

10 . In 200 Years Cows May Be the Biggest Land Mammals (哺乳动物) on the Planet

Around 13,000 years ago North America had a wider variety of mammals than modern Africa. There were multiple horse species, camels and some now-extinct animals. And such _________ creatures were not just found in North America. On every continent mammals on average were a lot larger from around 2.5 million until about 11,700 years ago.

Scientists have long debated what caused all these large creatures to go extinct while many of the smaller ones _________. A team of researchers led by biologist Felisa Smith analyzed evidence from millions of years’ worth of mammalian extinctions and found that on each continent large mammals started to _________ around the same time humans first showed up.

If the extinction trend continues, many more large mammals will soon disappear as well, as the primary threats from humans have _________ from overhunting to indirect processes such as habitat loss. The largest land mammal 200 years from now could well be the domestic cow, Smith’s research suggests. In their new study Smith and her team analyzed a database of all land mammals that lived from 65 million years ago until today. “We found _________ no effect of climate on mammalian extinction over 65 million years,” she says. But starting around 125,000 years ago and continuing until today, large mammals have been more likely to go extinct than smaller ones, the researchers found.

The average _________ of surviving mammals has decreased as a result. And those large-mammal extinctions are tightly coupled with the _________ of humans. For most of mammalian _________ history, an animal’s size was not predictive of its extinction risk. That _________ only appeared once humans began to live alongside large mammals.

This finding does not mean climate-related changes could not have __________ some wildlife populations, enabling humans to more easily bring about their eventual downfall. __________, it suggests the greater likelihood of large mammals going extinct is tied to human activities. The animals that evolved without the risk of hunting from humans were suddenly faced with a new __________. They simply could not __________ fast enough to survive the invasion of humans.

Smith says the lesson to be learned from the new findings is that our ancestors prepared us to be extremely skillful killers. “What’s __________ now,” she says, “is that some of us are comfortable enough, have a high enough standard of living, that we can start thinking about our use of the Earth.” Rather than simply behaving as __________, many of us are now in a position to become environmental protectors.