1 . Ask someone what they have done to help the environment recently and they will almost certainly mention recycling. Recycling in the home is very important of course. However, being forced to recycle often means we already have more material than we need. We are dealing with the results of that over-consumption in the greenest way possible, but it would be far better if we did not bring so much material home in the first place.

The total amount of packaging increased by 12% between 1999 and 2005. It now makes up a third of a typical household’s waste in the UK. In many supermarkets nowadays food items are packaged twice with plastic and cardboard.

Too much packaging is doing serious damage to the environment. The UK, for example, is running out of it for carrying this unnecessary waste. If such packaging is burnt, it gives off greenhouse gases which go on to cause the greenhouse effect. Recycling helps, but the process itself uses energy. The solution is not to produce such items in the first place. Food waste is a serious problem, too. Too many supermarkets encourage customers to buy more than they need. However, a few of them are coming round to the idea that this cannot continue, encouraging customers to reuse their plastic bags, for example.

But this is not just about supermarkets. It is about all of us. We have learned to associate packaging with quality. We have learned to think that something unpackaged is of poor quality. This is especially true of food. But it also applies to a wide range of consumer products, which often have far more packaging than necessary.

There are signs of hope. As more of us recycle, we are beginning to realize just how much unnecessary material we are collecting. We need to face the wastefulness of our consumer culture, but we have a mountain to climb.

1. What does the underlined word “over-consumption” refer to?

A．Using too much packaging.

B．Recycling too much waste.

C．Making more products than necessary.

D．Having more material than is needed.

2. The author uses figures in Paragraph 2 to show ________.

A．the tendency of cutting household waste

B．the increase of packaging recycling

C．the rapid growth of supermarkets

D．the fact of packaging overuse

3. What can be inferred from Paragraph 4?

A．Unpackaged products are of bad quality.

B．Supermarkets care more about packaging.

C．It is improper to judge quality by packaging.

D．Other products are better packaged than food.

4. What can we learn from the last paragraph?

A．Fighting wastefulness is difficult.

B．Needless material is mostly recycled.

C．People like collecting recyclable waste.

D．The author is proud of his consumer culture.

2 . Where do the turtles go?
Every summer, thousands of endangered green sea turtles climb onto beaches around the world. Each mother sea turtle produces 100 or more eggs in a hole, and covers the hole with sand before she swims away.
Two months later, the eggs hatch(孵化), and the baby turtles climb out of the sand and swim into the ocean. They don’t reappear until they have grown as large as dinner plates. Until now, no one knows where the baby turtles go or what they do.
“if we don’t know where these little turtles are, we can’t protect them,” says Kim Reich, who helps solve part of the mystery.
Her teacher, Karen Bjorndal, has studied green sea turtles for more than 30 years. Every year, Bjorndal goes to the Bahamas Islands. Many young sea turtles come here to live and eat at the end of their childhood.
These turtles are the only sea turtles that live as plant eaters. In fact, their name may be a result of what they eat. The turtles don’t look green but they do have green fat. Scientists learned that the turtles eat green sea plants, which may turn their fat green.
Between 2002 and 2004, Bjorndal caught 44 green sea turtles in the Bahamas. After testing them, she found something to support the 20-year-old idea: baby green sea turtles eat meat before they turn to a diet of plants. In fact, they eat animals that live in the open ocean.
Scientists still need to find where exactly green sea turtles grow. We now know that baby green sea turtles are out in the open ocean, but the open ocean is a big place.
“It is really a problem,” says Bjorndal. The discovery may help us do a better job of protecting this sea animal.
1. What can we learn from the first two paragraphs?

A．baby turtles go to the ocean when they are two months old.

B．Mother turtles leave the eggs alone after they produce them.

C．No one knows when turtles appear on the beach.

D．Mother turtles are as large as dinner plates.

2. Kim Reich does research on where baby turtles go because she wants to _________.

A．help her teacher	B．prove an idea
C．protect turtles	D．become a scientist

3. What does Karen Bjorndal’s research prove about green sea turtles?

A．the young live in the Bahamas Islands.

B．The young eat meat before turning to a diet of plants

C．They live in the open ocean for a lifelong time

D．They are the only sea turtles that live as plant eaters.

4. What does the underlined word “It” in the last paragraph refer to?

A．Finding out where young turtles grow.

B．Protecting this endangered sea animal.

C．Changing young turtles’ eating habits.

D．Living in the open ocean.

3 . Check out our tsunami facts and learn some interesting information related to these great walls of water that can cause so much destruction. Find out what causes tsunamis and read about some recent examples of tsunamis that have occurred around the globe.

The Japanese word for tsunami means harbor wave.

Tsunamis are sometimes referred to as tidal (受潮汐影响的) waves but this term has fallen out of favor because tsunamis are not related to tides.

Tsunamis are huge waves of water that are usually caused by earthquakes or volcanic eruptions.

As a tsunami approaches the shore (海岸), water may move back from the coast. If it is shallow (浅的) enough the water may be pulled back hundreds of meters. If you are in the area, you can know that a tsunami is on the way when you see this phenomenon.

Regions in tsunami danger zones often have warning systems in place to give people as much time as possible to move to a safe place.

When tsunamis hit shallow water (often near the coast) they slow down but increase in height.

An earthquake in the Indian Ocean off Indonesia in December 2004 caused a tsunami that killed over 200,000 people in 14 countries.

In March 2011, the Tohoku earthquake off the eastern coast of Japan caused a tsunami that was a major factor in the death of over 15,000 people.

The tsunami waves created by the Tohoku earthquake reached heights of over 40 meters in some areas, wiping out coastal towns and causing a number of nuclear accidents.

1. How many causes of tsunamis are mentioned in the text?

A．One.

B．Two.

C．Three.

D．Four.

2. In the Tohoku earthquake over 15,000 people died mainly because of ______.

A．the earthquake itself

B．the lack of warning systems

C．the tsunami caused by the earthquake

D．the nuclear accidents caused by the tsunami

3. What do we learn from the text?

A．The Japanese invented the term “tidal waves”.

B．The term “tidal waves” is used more often than tsunami.

C．When tsunamis slow down, their waves can reach 40 meters.

D．When hitting shallow water, tsunamis will rise higher.

4. The text is developed mainly by ______.

A．listing some facts	B．giving some examples
C．providing some numbers	D．making some comparisons

4 . When an ant dies, other ants move the dead insect out. Sometimes, the dead ant get moved away very soon—within an hour of dying. This behavior is interesting to scientists, who wonder how ants know for sure—and so soon—that another ant is dead.
One scientist recently came up with a way to explain this ant behavior. Dong-Hwan Choe is a biologist. Choe found that Argentine ants have a chemical on the outside of their bodies that signals to other ants, “I’m dead—take me away.”
But there’s a twist to Choe’s discovery. Choe says that the living ants—not just the dead ones —have this death chemical. In other words, while an ant crawls around, perhaps in a picnic or home, it’s telling other ants that it’s dead.
What keeps ants from dragging away the living ants? Choe found that Argentine ants have two additional chemicals on their bodies, and these tell nearby ants something like, “Wait—I’m not dead yet.” So Choe’s research turned up two sets of chemical             signals in ants: one says, “I’m dead,” and the other set says, “I’m not dead yet.”
Other scientists have tried to figure out how ants know when another ant is dead. If an ant is knocked unconscious, for example, other ants leave it alone until it wakes up. That means ants know that unmoving ants can still be alive.
Choe suspects that when an Argentine ant dies, the chemical that says “Wait- I’m not dead yet” quickly goes away. Once that chemical is gone, only the one that says “I’m dead” is left. “It’s because the dead ant no longer smells like a living ant             that it gets carried to the graveyard, not because its body releases new unique chemicals after death,” said Choe. When other ants detect the “dead” chemical without the “not dead yet” chemical, they drag away the body.
Understanding this behavior may help scientists figure out how to stop Argentine ants from invading new places and causing problems. Choe would like to find a way to use the newly discovered chemicals to spread ant killer to Argentine ant nests.
The ants’ removal behavior is important to the overall health of the nest. “Being able to quickly remove dead individuals and other possible sources of disease is extremely important to all animals living in societies, including us,” says Choe. “Think             about all the effort and money that we invest daily in waste management.”
1. The underlined word “twist” in Paragraph 3 means _____.

A．an unexpected change	B．a clear mistake
C．an important key	D．a shocking conclusion

2. Ants judge whether another one is dead or not depending on ______.

A．the sense of taste	B．the sense of smell
C．the sense of touch	D．the sense of sight

3. The result of the research can be used to ______.

A．kill troublesome pests

B．solve the problem of endangered species

C．prevent further expansion of the ants’ territory

D．keep the balance of nature

4. Why is it important to remove dead individuals?

A．Because it is easier to manage the living.

B．Because it can save money to deal with the waste.

C．Because it can provide more space for the living.

D．Because it can keep the living from suffering disease.

5. What might be the best title of the text?

A．Dead or living? It is easy to judge

B．Pulling away the dead ants is a difficult task

C．Ant nests have great undertaking capacity

D．Leaving it alone or taking it away? Ants feel puzzled

5 . Without plants, people couldn’t live. We eat plants.     1    . And we need plants for another reason: We need them because they are beautiful.
    2    . Imagine no flowers with their sweet smells, their beautiful colours and their lovely shapes. Imagine, when the wind blows, we are not able to hear the leaves of the trees or watch the branches swing from side to side.
    3    . That is why we have parks full of trees and flowers. That is why people always like houses with room for some grass and a garden.
Do you talk to your plants?     4     Perter Tompkins and Christopher Bird, writers of a book called The Secret of Plants, tell of an experiment in which two seeds were plants in different places. While the plants were growing, one plant was given love and hopeful ideas.     5     Under the earth it had more and longer roots; above the earth, it had a thicker stem and more leaves.

A．Plants get energy from the sun.

B．Do you give them love and take good care of them?

C．After six months, the deserted plant faded away.

D．After six months, the beloved plant was bigger.

E．We take in oxygen that plants make.

F．Everywhere people need beautiful plants.

G．Imagine a world with no plants.