1 .

A．The summers are even hotter in Hong Kong.

B．He wishes that he were in Hong Kong last summer.

C．It is difficult to compare the summers in different places.

D．Hong Kong is the hottest place in the world.

3 . This Halloween, scare off evil spirits while protecting the earth!

1. Create home-made costumes

Apart from the fact that they’re expensive, flammable and mostly unoriginal, shop bought Halloween outfits are a terrific burden on the environment. From the much-too-high amount of water that is used to create them to the seven million costumes that will be thrown straight into the bin, and the microfibres released into the water from the ones that do get washed there are PLENTY of reasons against shop buying.

And let’s be frank, home-made costumes are far more unique and fun to create. For the scariest costume we could possibly imagine, why not dress up as the earth on fire?

2. Be considerate with your pumpkins

Pumpkins are a wonderful Halloween tradition but can be more damaging to the environment than you’d originally think. Harmful pesticides and fertilizers are used during farming and the nature of their large-scale production means they can be transported over vast distances Similarly, how you dispose of them once you’re done determines how big an impact they have.

Don’t let their delicious innards go to waste and instead make a yummy pumpkin treat, even go so far as to save the pumpkin seeds either for you or the birds. Then, once your carved pumpkin is past it’s best, make sure to compost (制成堆肥) it rather than throwing it in the bin-this will prevent the release of methane as it breaks down.

3. Scare yourself silly at home

Rather than travelling to far-flung places, keep the frights closer to home.

Halloween party to get everyone together and encourage car-pooling or the use of public transport.

Read scary stories and create a Halloween hunt in your garden for children to run around and find treats.

4. Make your own trick-or-treating goodies

If you’ve taken on the American tradition of trick-or- treating, why not whip up a few Halloween treats of your own? Apart from being tastier and more fun to look at, they’ll also reduce your consumption of packaging and likely will have a lower carbon footprint. Suggest to any neighbours that they might do the same, and if you go trick-or-treating yourself, be sure to use a reusable carrier.

1. What can we do to help the environment during the Halloween according to the passage?

A．Making use of the pumpkin innards to make fertilizers for your garden.

B．Going to the local shop to buy some costumes and recycling them after using.

C．Throwing a Halloween party with your friends out of town.

D．Inviting your neighbors to taste your home-made treats.

2. What impacts of the tradition of pumpkins are not mentioned in the passage?

A．Harmful pesticides.	B．High carbon footprint.
C．Damage to birds.	D．Harmful gas emission.

3. Which one of the following titles suits the passage best?

A．What to do to celebrate the Halloween traditionally

B．Why is it important to have an eco-friendly Halloween

C．How to have a Halloween beneficial to the environment

D．How to celebrate the Halloween to cheer yourself up

4 . Directions: Complete the following passage by using the words in the box. Each word can be used only once. Note that there is one word more than you need.

A. deliberately B. justifiable C. accumulating D. consume E. spills F. spent   G. potential H. charging I. boost J. subscription K. collected

Is rental fashion the future?

With a cost-of-living crisis and climate awareness sitting heavily at the forefront of our minds, many of us are having to make choices about what we    1    . Fashion is one of them. As of 2021, UK households    2    approximately 57.3 billion British pounds on clothing, significantly contributing to the very real effects of climate change that can be felt around the world.

Even the fastest of fashion retailers are taking note; this summer, BooHoo announced that they will be    3     a returns fee to try and help customers reflect on overshopping habits. Meanwhile, Love Island teamed up with eBay as their official partner for 2022’s series,     4     avoiding their usual tie-ins.

However, there will still be times where a new item feels like a    5    treat: to attend a wedding, to suit the requirements of a job interview, for that much-needed; confidence    6    on a date. For those who love to shop, getting oneself completely out of retail seems a little like a punishment, taking away yet another source of joy during already-undesirable times.

So here comes rental fashion. The set-up is simple. Rent three, five or ten items and swap (替换) every month, with prices starting from £39 a month for a three-item. In the case of any accidents, do not fear     7    and light damages (think broken zips and small stains) are accounted for in the pricing, as is laundry. If you fall in love, there are options to keep certain items longer, or if you’re not in the market for anything new, your     8    can be easily paused or cancelled.

At the end of each cycle, you’ll receive an email reminding you to choose your next box. With a three-item return, items can be returned at a local drop-off point, whilst bigger parcels will be     9    when the team make their next delivery. Think of it a kind of clothing library, where items are rotated in and out of your life instead of     10     dust.

5 . 选用适当的单词或短语补全短文。

A.medical       B.relieve       C.shelter       D. growing       E. alternative       F. doubled       G.fantastic       H.marketing       I. present       J. conducts       K.practically

More and more cats and dogs are getting the human treatment. There are pet spas, pet therapists and pet clothes. And the latest trend is pet hospices(临终关怀医院)。

Around the United States, a growing number of vets are offering hospice care and       1    it as a way to give pets ---and their owners---a less anxious, or comfortable passing. The approach, in the spirit of the human variety, involves stopping aggressive     2     treatment and give painkillers and anti-anxiety drugs. Unlike in hospice care for human, euthanasia(安乐死) is a(n)     3    ---and in fact, is a big part of this end-of-life care. When it’s time, the vet    4    it in the living room, bedroom, or wherever the family feels comfortable.

It’s part of a vet’s job to     5     pet owners’ guilt, give them an emotional bridge to their pets’ death and let them grieve at home---rather than in a clinic or animal     6     . The closeness    7    costs 25 percent or more than euthanasia in a clinic, but vets and their clients say it can be worth it.

“They’re in their own environment, not only the pets but the owners as well,” said Dr. Gardner, co-founder of Lap of Love, one of the leaders in this small but     8     market, “Other people and pets are welcome to be     9     . I’ve been to some houses where the owners had barbecues for the dog and invited me and the neighbours. The dog was the man of the hour.”

Dr. Michele Price, a vet in Northern Virginia whose in-home hospice care business has     10     since 2009, got a call about a Labrado named Champ. The dog had received per hospice care for months until recently, when he took a sharp downward turn. Before Dr. Price set up for the euthanasia, pet owners hugged Champ on a quilt next to the fireplace and told him what a good dog he was. As for Champ, “He fall asleep. That was the last thing he remembered.”

8 . Directions: Fill in each blank with a proper word chosen from the box. Each word can be used only once. Note that there is one word more than you need.

A. urgent     B. transformative     C. presents       D. grabbed     E. declaration F. collective G. capacity H. worsening I. determined J. foundation K. responsibility

Save the World

The United Nations issued a report last week warning that humans are destroying nature at such a rate that life on Earth is at risk. When the report came out, it naturally     1     headlines. But obviously it did not hijack the news agenda in the manner of a major terrorist attack or     2     of war.

The report from the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) is clear on what’s at stake and what needs to change. IPBES chair Robert Watson says the “overwhelming evidence”     3     an “ ominous (凶兆的)picture”.   “The health of ecosystems on which we and all other species depend is     4     more rapidly than ever,” Robert Watson said. “We are biting the very     5     of our economies, livelihoods, food security, health and quality of life worldwide.” The report says it’s not too late if we make “    6     changes” ----fundamental, system-wide reorganization ----- at every level from local to global, we need to focus on how to make that happen.

First, don’t immerse yourself in despair, because despair leads to inertia (惰性) and doing nothing means certain disaster. Every action to save nature will improve our     7     and personal futures and the only action to respond to a threat of this scale is with     8     action rooted in optimism. Second, we need focus, just like when rescue teams arrive on a scene and use the concept of “triage(伤员鉴别分类)” to ensure the most     9     cases get treated first. Saving the natural world needs that kind of thinking. We don’t have the     10     to do everything at once. We need to make hard choices.

9 . When Carolyn Kurle first visited Alaska’s Hawadax Island, then known as Rat Island, she immediately noticed the silence. “When you’re on an island that’s never had rats, it’s just like birds everywhere — it’s really loud,” she says. “So when you get to an island that does have rats, you really notice because it’s cacophony versus quiet.”

Nowadays Hawadax is once again a noisy place. Roughly a decade after a successful effort to rid the island of its predatory rodents (捕食性啮齿动物), a mass of seabirds has returned. And the benefits have extended across the island’s entire seashore ecosystem, which is again full of diverse life. These findings, published in Scientific Reports, show that certain ecosystems can recover with surprising speed if given the chance.

“This study is an example of something positive that can happen when we humans take action to clean up after ourselves,” says Kurle, who is lead author of the study and a conservation ecologist at the University of California, San Diego. “It also highlights how everything is interlinked, especially in coastal systems.”

The greedy rodents colonized Hawadax after a Japanese shipwreck in the 1780s, and they quickly wiped out seabird communities. Kurle’s first findings, published in 2008, showed that the rats affected not just birds but the entire food chain — all the way down to algae (藻类). Without birds to eat seashore invertebrates (无脊椎动物), populations of snails and other species feeding on plants exploded and consumed much of the marine kelp (巨藻), which provides crucial habitat for other organisms. “Certain invasive species can have impacts beyond those that are most obvious,” Kurle says.

Those early findings inspired the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, in partnership with The Nature Conservancy and Island Conservation, to wipe out the rats by dropping poison on Hawadax. Kurle and her colleagues secured funding to survey the island 5 and 11 years after taking the action. They found that its ecosystem had steadily recovered and now resembles that of other Aleutian Islands that were never invaded by rats, with significantly fewer marine invertebrates and much more kelp cover.

“Very few rat-eradication projects have focused on the impact on marine ecosystems, so the Hawadax Island case is really noteworthy,” says University of Tennessee, Knoxville, ecologist Daniel Simberloff, who was not involved in the study. “This is a very cool, elegant result from an academic ecology standpoint and, of course, is important in terms of conservation.”

1. What does “cacophony” in paragraph 1 most probably mean?

A．Silent night.	B．Messy beach.
C．Limited space.	D．Disagreeable sounds.

2. According to paragraph 4, which of the following can be important for small animals or plants?

A．Greedy rodents.	B．Marine kelp.
C．Seashore invertebrates.	D．Invasive species.

3. The efforts made in the “Hawadax Island Case” include the following EXCEPT ________.

A．setting traps and catching rats

B．raising money for follow-up study

C．joining hands with conservation groups

D．comparing Hawadax with other rat-free islands

4. What is the main idea of this passage?

A．Birds and rats cannot co-exist.

B．Rats are invasive species that must be rooted out.

C．Ecosystem is too delicate to restore itself once disturbed.

D．Removing invaders on land can benefit marine populations.

10 . Directions: After reading the passage below, fill in each blank with a proper word chosen from the box. Each word can be used only once. Note that there is one word more than you need.

A. species	B. informed	C. awareness	D. indicate
E. additional	F. figures	G. advanced	H. sticking
I. state	J. reliance	K. based

Sensors for Houseplants

Over the past two years Jasmin Moeller, a 38-year-old in Germany, has been buying more houseplants, making her feel more comfortable.

Actually, the fact that people have spent much more time     1     at home has started a trend to bring more nature inside. In the UK, the latest     2     show that 2021 houseplant sales were 29% higher than in 2020. It is a similar picture in other countries, with sales of houseplants in the US rising by 18% last year, for instance.

Yet it is one thing to buy a houseplant and quite another to successfully look after it. Luckily, some     3     sensors for indoor plants may help those without professional skills in gardening. These devices, usually solar powered and connected wirelessly to a user’s smartphone, should be inserted into the soil next to the plants. Then, they show in real time the     4     of the plants.

A sensor made by German firm Greensens has approximately 5000 plant     5     on its app database. Like a traffic light system, the app uses red, yellow and green faces to     6     how plants are doing. For example, red reveals that the plant is dying, while green means it’s in perfect condition. Besides, users are regularly     7     of what they should do with plants.

Another app released by German business Fyta tells users how their plants are by analyzing the uploaded pictures of the plants. It also includes     8     content other apps rarely offer, such as cultural history of some plants, so users can learn more about their plants.

However, Botanist Silver Spence is worried that     9     on these sensors may affect users’ gardening skills negatively. And David Anglov recommends that amateurs try their best to establish their own     10     of what a plant needs in various situations through careful observation.

Back in Germany, Ms Moeller says she is sure that the sensors are helping her improve gardening skills.