1 . An unusual northern rātā tree that looks like it is striding across an empty field has won New Zealanders’ hearts. The giant plant, which looks strikingly similar to an Ent from “The Lord of the Rings”, is centuries old and has just been crowned New Zealand’s Tree of the Year, walking away with 42% of the public vote, which included five other finalists (决赛选手).
Standing alone in the middle of a large farm on the west coast of South Island, the strange tree, which has been nicknamed the “walking tree” because it looks like it’s striding across a field, is a northern rātā— one of New Zealand’s tallest flowering tree species that can live for up to 1,000 years. Its roots and long, arm-like branches make the tree look like an Ent— a fictional race of tree-like creatures that guard the forests of Middle-earth.
Measuring around 105 feet (32 meters) tall-around the same height as a seven-story building, the walking tree is an “exceptional feature” and a “prime example of the remarkable trees that we New Zealanders are fortunate to experience,” competition organizer Brad Cadwallader said in a statement.
Northern rātā trees are a type of tree that starts life growing on the surface of a host tree before growing aerial roots that eventually reach the ground. The walking tree likely began life high up in the canopy (树冠) of its host, living off air and rainwater before reaching the ground. Its unusual root layout was likely caused by how it grew around its host tree, which probably died off centuries ago.
Northern rātā trees were once one of the most common species in the country’s forests. However, their range has decreased over the last few decades and they are now listed as nationally vulnerable, according to the New Zealand Plant Conservation Network.
1. What does the underlined word “striding” mean in Paragraph 1?| A．Standing. | B．Walking. | C．Sitting. | D．Resting. |
| A．Its roots and branches contribute to its resemblance to an Ent. |
| B．It is just a fictional race existing in Middle-earth. |
| C．It is estimated to be already 1,000 years old. |
| D．It is guarding the forests of Middle-earth. |
| A．Joking. | B．Critical. | C．Admiring. | D．Objective. |
| A．The exact location of northern rātā trees. |
| B．The current situation of northern rātā trees. |
| C．The unique characteristics of northern rātā trees. |
| D．Public ignorance about building conservation parks. |
2 . Tiny city gardens can protect wildlife such as insects, a study of small city gardens in the Netherlands has found. The two factors that offer the biggest boost are having lots of plants and having lots of different types, but it makes no difference whether the plants are native or not.
“Even with these really small gardens, just planting a few plants can make a substantial difference,” says Joeri Morpurgo at Leiden University in the Netherlands.
While there have been some studies of biodiversity in large gardens, there are virtually none on small gardens, says Morpurgo. So in 2019, his team surveyed 65 urban front gardens in Amsterdam and the Hague that were less than 10 square metres in area.
The researchers measured factors such as the overall number of insects, the number of different species, whether plants were native or not, and the area covered by plants. They found insect numbers and species richness connected strongly with plant coverage and plant richness. But neither the size of the garden nor, to their surprise, the proportion (比例) of native plant coverage made any difference.
There are several possible explanations for why the proportion of native plants made no difference, says Morpurgo. It could be that the insects that thrive in cities are generalists, for instance, or that many of the insects are foreign, too. The study didn’t classify insects as native or not.
Morpurgo says he would still encourage people to grow native species. “There are more benefits to native plants than just helping insects,” he says, such as their cultural value.
His main advice is to do nothing, and just let plants — including those some call weeds — grow and attract wildlife. “Just leave everything as is, and nature will come around to your garden,” says Morpurgo.
1. What is a decisive factor to boost wildlife?| A．The diversity of urban plants. |
| B．The preference for city gardens. |
| C．The increase of native plants. |
| D．The urgency for protecting plants. |
| A．They connected with foreign plants. | B．They nurtured their natural habitats. |
| C．They adapted to the surroundings. | D．They lived a life in great numbers. |
| A．Neutral. | B．Supportive. | C．Doubtful. | D．Critical. |
| A．Plants reflect on cultural value. | B．City gardens are under control. |
| C．Small city gardens increase wildlife. | D．City plants improve insect species. |
1. How many types of flowers are there in the garden?
| A．Ten. | B．Twenty. | C．Thirty. |
| A．Cabbages. | B．Lettuce. | C．Carrots. |
| A．She covers her plants. |
| B．She clears out the dead plants. |
| C．She gives some food to the animals. |
| A．It needs a lot of work. |
| B．It takes too much time. |
| C．It can help save some money. |
4 . Plants might be able to hear their neighbors, according to a study that suggests plants use the sound signal to communicate with one another.
“We have shown that plants can recognize when a good neighbor is growing next to them,” said study co-author Monica Gagliano, an evolutionary ecologist at the University of Western Australia. “We found that this communication can be based upon an acoustic (声音的) exchange.”
The findings suggest that plants can not only “smell” the chemicals and “see” the reflected light of their neighbors, they may also “listen” to the plants around them.
“Plants are more intricate organisms than we’ve given them credit for,” Gagliano said.
In the study, Gagliano and her workmate Michael Renton showed that chili plants sprouted faster and were healthier, compared with those grown in isolation, when they were grown next to “good neighbors”, such as basil.
Remarkably, the scientists got the same result even when the plants were separated by black plastic so that they could not exchange light or chemical signals.
The scientists said the study is groundbreaking but still in its early days, and admitted there are still many unanswered questions. For example, are plants intentionally (有意地) communicating with one another? And if they are, do they all speak in a universal (通用的) “plant language”? To these questions and more, Gagliano said, the answer is “we don’t know”.
Gagliano thinks learning the secrets of plant communication could have practical applications (应用) that could benefit humans. She imagines farmers using music to encourage or discourage the growth of certain plants, reducing the need for pesticides.
Study co-author Renton warned, however, that the effects in their study were fairly small. “Whether it would be economically viable (经济上可行的),” he said, “for a farmer to play music to get that little extra growth speed, I think it’s pointless and costly.”
1. What did the study find out about plants?| A．They have a great influence on their neighboring animals. |
| B．They can sense their surroundings through sounds. |
| C．They can control their own growth in the dark. |
| D．They grow much healthier in isolation. |
| A．Endangered. | B．Natural. | C．Complex. | D．Productive. |
| A．It is inspiring but the findings are limited. |
| B．It is a failure but the methods deserve praise. |
| C．It can help plants send signals more effectively. |
| D．It will draw public attention to the protection of plants. |
| A．Hopeful. | B．Supportive. | C．Uncaring. | D．Opposed. |
5 . Scientists have been experimenting with playing sounds to plants since at least the 1960s, during which time they have been exposed to everything from Beethoven to Michael Jackson. Over the years, evidence that this sort of thing can have an effect has been growing. One paper, published in 2018, claimed that an Asian shrub known as the telegraph plant grew substantially larger leaves when exposed to 56 days of Buddhist music — but not if it was exposed to Western pop music or silence. Another, published last year, found that marigolds and sage plants exposed to the noise of traffic from a busy motorway suffered growth difficulty.
Plants have been evolving (进化) alongside the insects that eat them for hundreds of millions of years. With that in mind, Heidi Appel, a botanist now at the University of Houston, and Reginald Cocroft, a biologist at the University of Missouri, wondered if plants might be sensitive to the sounds made by the animals with which they most often interact. They recorded the vibrations made by certain species of caterpillars (毛毛虫) as they chewed on leaves. These vibrations are not powerful enough to produce sound waves in the air. But they are able to travel across leaves and branches, and even to neighbouring plants if their leaves touch.
They then exposed tobacco plant — the plant biologist’s version of the laboratory mouse — to the recorded vibrations while no caterpillars were actually present. Later, they put real caterpillars on the plants to see if exposure had led them to prepare for an insect attack. The results were striking. Leaves that had been exposed had significantly higher levels of defensive chemicals, making them much harder for the caterpillars to eat. Leaves that had not been exposed to vibrations showed no such response. Other sorts of vibration — caused by the wind, for instance, or other insects that do not eat leaves — had no effect.
“Now speakers with the right audio files are more often being used to warn crops to act when insects are detected but not yet widespread,” says Dr. Cocroft. “Unlike chemical pesticides, sound waves leave no dangerous chemicals.”
1. What can we learn about plants from the first paragraph?| A．They may enjoy Western music. | B．They can’t stand Buddhist music. |
| C．They can react to different sounds. | D．They can make different sounds. |
| A．Plants can make a cry for help. | B．Plants evolve alongside insects. |
| C．Plants are sensitive to the sounds. | D．Plants have been studied for years. |
| A．They can recongnize harmful vibrations. | B．They look like laboratory mice. |
| C．They can threaten the caterpillars. | D．They can release poisonous chemicals. |
| A．Disadvantages of chemical pesticides. | B．Application of the experimental results. |
| C．Interaction between plants and insects. | D．Warning system of widespread insects. |
6 . Bred to be more sweeter, today’s cherries, bananas and apples taste different than they used — to but not necessarily better. Among fruit farmers, the word “quality” is now routinely used as a standard for “high in sugar”, though firmness, color and size are also considerations. In a recent study about ways to enhance the sweetness of fruit using “molecular (分子的) approaches”, a group of plant scientists wrote that, in general, the sugar content of many fruits are now higher than before owing to continuous selection and breeding. Modern apple varieties, the scientists stressed, were on average sweeter than older ones.
The sweetness of fruit depends not just on how it is bred but also on growing conditions, yield and harvest. The lead researcher, Sugiura, said, “If you could taste an apple harvested 30 years ago, you would feel the difference.” He believed that modern apples are picked so early that even if they are bred for sweetness, they often don’t develop their full character. The fragrance (香味) never develops in fruit that is harvested too early.
Jim Cooper, an apple farmer in England, is regretful to admit the fact that many people will never taste the “strawberry hint” in a really ripe Pearmain, a type of heritage apple. In a way, the rise of consistently sweeter fruit in our lifetimes has been a victory of plant breeding. After all, it’s a rare person who would seek out bitter grapes if they could have sweet ones instead.
But the sweetness of modern fruit is not without its problems, especially for people with diabetes (糖尿病), who have to reduce their intake of higher-sugar fruits. Fruit that is bred sweeter also tends to be lower in the chemicals that make it healthy. Considering health, maybe the real problem with modern fruit is that it has become yet another sweet thing in a world with sugar. Even grapefruits, which used to be quite bitter, are sometimes now as sweet as oranges. If you’ve never tasted a sour cherry, how can you fully appreciate a sweet one?
1. In what aspect is many fruits different from before?| A．Sugar content. | B．Soft skin. | C．Bright color. | D．High yield. |
| A．They are bred too early. | B．They taste so sweet. |
| C．They are losing a good flavor. | D．They need a higher yield. |
| A．Favorable. | B．Critical. | C．Ambiguous. | D．Indifferent. |
| A．It’s a wise choice to breed fruits for sweetness. |
| B．Breeding sweet fruits improves the quality of fruits. |
| C．Some fruits like grapes and cherries taste the same. |
| D．The sweetness of fruits will cause health issues. |
7 . When most of us read the words “plant-based diet”, we tend to think of foods such as salads and grain. But there is another option — the newest super-food: seaweed. The brownish-green oceanic plant like matter that washes up on beaches is in fact edible. Nori, the papery sheets used to wrap sushi rolls, is likely the most well-known and enjoyed seaweed, but these large leafy algae (海藻) come in hundreds of colorful varieties. Seaweed helps to support other life in the ocean and to clean the water surrounding it. When out of the water, seaweed can bring more nutrition and minerals to our diets.
“Even though we try to eat healthily, we’re relying on land-based and soil-based agriculture for the most part,” said Sarah Redmond, founder and owner of Springtide Seaweed in Gouldsboro, Maine. “Seaweed is a really interesting alternative because it provides the nutrients that are really hard to find in other land plants.”
For humans, seaweed is a one-stop shop for our necessary nutrient needs. “Seaweed is an excellent source of dietary fiber and minerals,” said Mary Ellen Camire, professor of food science and human nutrition at the University of Maine.
Though nutrition varies slightly between green, brown and red varieties, across the board seaweed contains a number of vitamins, including B,C,E and K, omega-3 fatty acids, protein and 10 times more minerals than land-based plants, according to a recent study.
However, you don’t need to pile your plate high with seaweed. “Some brown seaweed is very high in iodine (碘),” Camire said. “It has so much iodine that consumers are advised to eat it no more than three times per week.”
Seaweed is just as beneficial to the planet as it is to our personal health. Seaweed pulls carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and uses it to make more carbohydrates (碳水化合物). “We are not sure how much seaweed farming it would take to have a significant effect on global warming, but it helps,” Camire said.
Seaweed also consumes elements that can harm the ocean. It can also provide a place for smaller sea creatures to hide from their enemies, establishing environments that can help restore diverse ocean life in over-fished habitats.
1. What does the underlined word “edible” in paragraph 1 mean?| A．Fit to be eaten. | B．Large in size. | C．Hard to notice. | D．Good for health. |
| A．It can replace most vegetables and grain. | B．It provides people with important nutrition. |
| C．It attracts Mary Ellen Camire to agriculture. | D．It is bad for people’s health in the long run. |
| A．Choose seaweed low in iodine. | B．Combine seaweed with other foods. |
| C．Control the amount of seaweed you eat. | D．Remove brown seaweed from your plate. |
| A．By setting up new habitats for sea creatures. |
| B．By releasing friendly gases into the atmosphere. |
| C．By providing plenty of carbohydrates for fishers. |
| D．By using carbon dioxide to produce useful substances. |
8 . Theoretically some trees could live forever, according to a recent essay that reviews growing evidence on long-lived trees.
Across the board, trees do not die so much as they are killed, write the authors of the review essay. Their killers are outer factors rather than old age alone. That is, there is no evidence that harmful genetic mutations (基因突变) occur over time or that trees lose their ability to continue to grow.
“Trees might live forever, but this does not happen,” says co-author Franco Biondi. “Tree killers include environmental risks such as droughts , wildfires, terrible weather and human behaviors such as woodcutting and fires set to clear forests for hunting or grassland.”
Tree longevity (长寿) interests researchers in part because trees and other plants remove carbon from the atmosphere, and older trees are thought to store more carbon than younger ones. The rings of old trees can also serve as an invaluable record of climate history, with wider rings indicating better years.
David Stahle, a geographer and tree longevity researcher at the University of Arkansas, takes issue with the belief that trees can possibly live forever. “The likelihood, all things being equal, that trees can live forever seems unlikely to me,” he says.
This hypothesis (假设) has become popular in the past 20 years as researchers continue to report having found little genetic evidence of aging in extremely old trees. And this is one of the review essay’s most important points. But evidence of aging could be out there and just not yet found.
1. What does the recent review essay mainly indicate?| A．There are a great variety of tree killers. | B．Trees could keep on surviving forever. |
| C．More trees die naturally than being killed. | D．Genetic mutations stop trees from growing. |
| A．Because the way trees grow rings is more interesting. |
| B．Because trees make clearer climate records than other plants. |
| C．Because older trees contribute more to the environment. |
| D．Because younger trees are less likely to have genetic mutations. |
| A．Doubtful. | B．Uninterested. | C．Reserved. | D．Favorable. |
| A．The assumption has been proved true. | B．Evidence of aging trees might exist. |
| C．Tree research has grown in the past 20 years. | D．Some key points disappear in the review essay. |
9 . On the streets of Manhattan and Washington, D. C., in neighborhoods in Seoul and parks in Paris, ginkgo (银杏) trees are losing their leaves in reaction to the first gust of cold winter air. This leaf drop, gradual at first, and then sudden, carpets streets with golden, fan-shaped leaves. Scientists are documenting evidence of the event happening later and later, a possible indication of climate change. But the story of ginkgos is not the familiar one of human carelessness with nature.
Thanks to fossils found in North Dakota, scientists found a ginkgo has genetically similar ancestors dating back 170 million years to the Jurassic Period. “It almost went extinct. Then humans rescued it and spread it around the world. It’s such a great evolutionary (进化) and cultural story,” says Peter Crane, a ginkgo expert.
One theory for the decline of the ginkgo species began 130 million years ago, when flowering plants began spreading. They grew faster and attracted more pollinators (传粉者) than ginkgos. “It’s possible that ginkgos were elbowed out of the way,” says Crane. Already competing to survive, ginkgos began to disappear during a time of global cooling that began around 66 million years ago. By the time the last ice age ended 11,000 years ago, the remaining survivors were found in China.
Ginkgo trees are smelly. “My guess is that they were eaten by animals that liked smelly things. They then passed through their body and grew.” Crane says. Those same seeds may have helped ginkgo find favor with humans 1,000 years ago. Once cleaned of their outer layer, ginkgo seeds are safe to eat. It’s then, when the trees had long since disappeared elsewhere, that people in China may have begun planting them and eating their seeds. Then gradually ginkgos spread across the world. Now it’s seemingly naturally resistant to insects and high levels of air pollution.
Crane isn’t worried about its future, though: The popularity of the species will help it survive. “Though its status in the wild may be difficult to access, it’s a plant that’s unlikely to ever go extinct,” he says.
1. What may have caused the further delay of ginkgo’s leaf drop?| A．The colder weather in winter. |
| B．The protection from city councils. |
| C．The global warming phenomenon. |
| D．The careless interaction with humans. |
| A．The reasons why ginkgos almost died out. |
| B．The advantages of ginkgos over other plants. |
| C．The theories of experts for multiplying ginkgos. |
| D．The competition between various flowering plants. |
| A．Their eatable seeds. | B．Their unpleasant smell. |
| C．The natural evolution. | D．The careful planting. |
| A．Worried. | B．Optimistic. | C．Uncertain. | D．Hopeless. |
1. How does the woman feel at first?
| A．Curious. | B．Surprised. | C．Excited. |
| A．Flowers. | B．Mushrooms. | C．Trees. |
| A．Two. | B．Three. | C．Four. |
| A．On Thursday. | B．On Friday. | C．On Saturday. |
