How long has the world been in high speed of burning fossil fuel for energy?
| A．For half a century. | B．For nearly sixty years. |
| C．For over 70 years. | D．For more than a century. |
2 . 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 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 |
Which of the following is the best title of the passage?
| A．Greenhouse Gas Emission Largely Reduced |
| B．Roles of Carbon Sinks Proved by New Study |
| C．China’s Forest Carbon Absorption Underestimated |
| D．Climate Impacts Balanced Due to China’s Afforestation |
4 . Even before they became fashionable companions for humans, Asia’s wild otters faced plenty of threats. Their habitats are disappearing. They have long been hunted for their coats, or killed by farmers who wish to prevent them consuming fishes. The pet trade, which began picking up in the early 2000s but appeared to speed up a few years ago, has made things worse. The numbers of wild Asian small-clawed otters and smooth-coated otters, two species that are in highest demand, have declined by at least 30% in the three decades to 2019.
The international agreement that governs trade in wildlife, known as CITES, now prohibits cross-border trade in these species. But laws banning ownership are often poorly implemented, as in Thailand, or full of holes, as in Indonesia. And the otter-keeping craze has been dramatically improved by the internet, says Vincent Nijman of Oxford Brookes University.
The purpose of the writing is to ________.
| A．advertise for a photo-sharing app |
| B．introduce the popularity of pet otters |
| C．discourage the illegal otter pet trade |
| D．describe the characteristics of otters |
5 . Otters, are cute, this no one can deny. They have big eyes, short and flat noses and claws (爪子) like tiny hands. They look even cuter when they wear hats and throw food balls into their mouths as if they were bar snacks, like Takechiyo, a pet otter in Japan. Documenting Takechiyo’s funny behavior has earned his owner nearly 230,000 followers on Instagram, a photo-sharing app.
The function of the first paragraph is to ________.
| A．present the main idea | B．introduce the main topic |
| C．set readers thinking | D．illustrate the writer’s point |
6 . There was a time when we thought humans were special in so many ways. Now we know better. We are not the only species that feels emotions, or follows a moral code. Neither are we the only ones with personalities, cultures and the ability to design and use tools. Yet we have all agree that one thing, at least, makes us unique: we alone have the ability of language.
It turns out that we are not so special in this aspect either. Key to the revolutionary reassessment of our talent for communication is the way we think about language itself. Where once it was seen as an unusual object, today scientists find it is more productive to think of language as a group of abilities. Viewed this way, it becomes apparent that the component parts of language are not as unique as the whole.
Take gesture, arguably the starting point for language. Until recently, it was considered uniquely human - but not any more. Mike Tomasello of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, and others have collected a list of gestures observed in monkeys and some other animals, which reveals that gestures plays a large role in their communication. Ape(猿) gestures can involve touch, vocalising or eye movement, and individuals wait until they have another ape’s attention before making visual or auditory gestures. If their gestures go unacknowledged, they will often repeat them.
In an experiment carried out in 2006 by Erica Cartmill and Richard Byrne from the University of St Andrews in the UK, they got a person to sit on a chair with some highly desirable food such as banana to one side of apes and some undesirable food such as vegetables to the other. The apes, who could see the person and the food from their enclosures, gestured at their human partners to encourage them to push the desirable food their way. If the person showed incomprehension and offered the vegetables, the animals would change their gestures - just as a human would in a similar situation. If the human seemed to understand while being somewhat confused, giving only half the preferred food, the apes would repeat and exaggerate their gestures - again in exactly the same way a human would. Such findings highlight the fact that the gestures of the animals are not merely inborn but are learned, flexible and under voluntary control - all characteristics that are considered preconditions for human-like communication.
1. It is agreed that compared with all the other animals, only human beings ________.| A．own the ability to show their personalities |
| B．are capable of using language to communicate |
| C．have moral standards and follow them in society |
| D．are intelligent enough to release and control emotions |
| A．involve some abilities that can be mastered by animals |
| B．is a talent impossibly owned by other animals |
| C．can be divided into different components |
| D．are productive for some talented animals |
| A．Apes can use language to communicate with the help of humans. |
| B．Repeating and exaggerating gestures is vital in language communication. |
| C．Some animals can learn to express and communicate through some trials. |
| D．The preferred food stimulates some animals to use language to communicate. |
| A．Language involves gestures! | B．Animals language - gestures! |
| C．So you think humans are unique? | D．The similarity between humans and apes. |
Are People Unique?
It is human beings' pride that we are the only species on the Planet that can speak and think. However, recent research casts doubt on that common belief.
Zuberbuhler, a psychologist at St Andrews University, and his colleagues recorded thousands of calls made by Diana monkeys and noticed that the monkeys adapted their calls to change the meaning to warn one another about different situations. For example,they made a "krack" alarm call at the sight of a tiger. However,when they merely repeated calls made by other monkeys they added an "oo".
The researchers found that the same calls would be recognized by other species, like Campbell's monkeys. So they are communicating across species."And since then we have found that hornbill birds can understand these calls and they too can understand all the different meanings, said Zuberbuhler. What is also surprising is that signs of intelligence have been found in birds whose small brains were long assumed to be a complete barrier to intelligence. However, all that is changing fast. A few years ago, Irene Pepperberg of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology taught a parrot to recognize and count up to six objects, which couldn't have been achieved if birds were unable to memorize.
Last year that was topped by Alex Kacelnik, a professor of behavioral ecology at Oxford, who discovered that crows (乌鸦) are capable of using tools in complex orders, the first time such behavior had been observed in non-humans. In an experiment seven crows successfully grabbed a piece of food placed out of reach using three different lengths of stick. Crucially, they were able to complete the task without any special training, suggesting the birds were capable of a level of abstract reasoning normally associated only with humans.
All this is powerful evidence against the idea that people are unique.
________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
8 . You’ve heard that plastic is polluting the oceans — between 4.8 and 12.7 million tonnes enter ocean ecosystems every year. But does one plastic straw or cup really make a difference? Artist Benjamin Von Wong wants you to know that it does. He builds massive sculptures out of plastic garbage, forcing viewers to re-examine their relationship to single-use plastic products.
At the beginning of the year, the artist built a piece called “Strawpocalypse,” a pair of 10-foot-tall plastic waves, frozen mid-crash. Made of 168,000 plastic straws collected from several volunteer beach cleanups, the sculpture made its first appearance at the Estella Place shopping center in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam.
Just 9% of global plastic waste is recycled. Plastic straws are by no means the biggest source (来源) of plastic pollution, but they’ve recently come under fire because most people don’t need them to drink with and, because of their small size and weight, they cannot be recycled. Every straw that’s part of Von Wong’s artwork likely came from a drink that someone used for only a few minutes. Once the drink is gone, the straw will take centuries to disappear.
In a piece from 2018, Von Wong wanted to illustrate (说明) a specific statistic: Every 60 seconds, a truckload’s worth of plastic enters the ocean. For this work, titled “Truckload of Plastic,” Von Wong and a group of volunteers collected more than 10,000 pieces of plastic, which were then tied together to look like they’d been dumped (倾倒) from a truck all at once.
Von Wong hopes that his work will also help pressure big companies to reduce their plastic footprint.
1. What are Von Wong’s artworks intended for?| A．Beautifying the city he lives in. | B．Introducing eco-friendly products. |
| C．Drawing public attention to plastic waste. | D．Reducing garbage on the beach. |
| A．To show the difficulty of their recycling. |
| B．To explain why they are useful. |
| C．To voice his views on modern art. |
| D．To find a substitute for them. |
| A．Calming. | B．Disturbing. |
| C．Refreshing. | D．Challenging. |
| A．Artists’ Opinions on Plastic Safety |
| B．Media Interest in Contemporary Art |
| C．Responsibility Demanded of Big Companies |
| D．Ocean Plastics Transformed into Sculptures |
Could goats become our new best friends?
In a new paper in the journal Biology Letters, researchers from QMUL's School of Biological and Chemical Sciences found that goats respond to people by gazing at them when facing a problem they cannot solve alone, and their responses change depending on the person's behaviour.
To investigate, the team trained goats to remove a lid from a box to receive a reward. They made the reward inaccessible and recorded their reaction. In the test, the goats redirected their gaze frequently between the inaccessible reward and human experimenters. They also gazed towards a forward facing person earlier, more often and for longer compared to when the person was facing away.
The results provide strong evidence for complex communication between humans and goats, which were domesticated primarily for agricultural production, and show similarities with animals bred to become pets or working animals, such as dogs and horses.
The research indicates that the domestication of animals has a much broader impact on our knowledge about human-animal relationship than previously believed. For example, it's thought that the capacity of dogs to be aware of information from humans is the result of changes to the brain from becoming a companion animal through domestication.
“Goats were the first livestock species to be domesticated, about 10,000 years ago,” said lead author Dr Alan McElligott from the School's Department of Biological and Experimental Psychology.
From our research, we know that many domesticated animals for agricultural production are smarter than their reputation suggests, and these results show how they can communicate and interact with their human handlers just as pets or working animals.
The researchers hope the study will lead to a better understanding of how skilled livestock are in their ability to solve problems and interact with humans. They also wish that an improvement in animal welfare would be reached ultimately.
Will Experimentation on Animals End?
One of the most debatable issues in science is the use of animals in research. Scientists experiment on animals for different reasons, including basic research to explore how organisms function, investigating potential treatments for human disease, and safety and quality control testing of drugs, devices and other products.
In 1959, William Russell and Rex Burch proposed their “3Rs” guidelines for making the use of animals in scientific research more humane: restrict the use of animals; refine experiments to minimize distress; and replace tests with alternative techniques.
For example, researchers previously had to do experiments with multiple mice at different stages of cancer development, but now they can watch the disease develop in a single living animal using a dye. Similarly, as brain-imaging techniques become more advanced, some questions that were addressed with experiments in monkeys before may be better answered by looking into the human brain now. “
| A．Over the course of five decades their guidelines have become widely accepted worldwide. |
| B．The awareness of animal protection contributes to the decline of the number. |
| C．Human volunteers must be able to replace monkeys more and more in the next 10 to 20 years. |
| D．New experimental techniques help to push numbers down. |
| E．Its supporters point to the long list of medical advances made possible with the help of animal research. |
| F．The number of the animals used in research is still considerable. |
