1 . The Fight against Fast Furniture

Fast furniture is a term that refers to furniture that is produced cheaply and quickly. These items are often bad for the environment because they are made from materials that break easily and need to be replaced often.     1    

To help protect the environment, a movement to move away from fast furniture has begun. Many companies are joining the fight by finding cleaner ways to manufacture furniture. For example, IKEA has agreed to switch to using renewable or recycled materials for their furniture by the year 2030.     2    

There is also a push to encourage shoppers to buy more used furniture for their homes. Small businesses that help transform old chairs and sofas into completely new products have even popped up recently. At the end of the day, consumers will play the most important role in the fight to end fast furniture. Shoppers should try to think more about the long term when preparing to purchase new furniture. They should stay away from furniture that is made from cheap materials like fiberboard or plastic because they will often fall apart after a few years.     3    

A much better alternative is furniture made from real wood because it won’t break as easily. If wood furniture is damaged, it can often be repaired to last longer. High-quality metals are another good material, as they are durable. If the furniture is no longer fit for use, these metals can still be recycled and used to make new products.

    4     So, the next time you buy furniture, think about whether it’s something that will last a long time or it’s just fast furniture that will break soon and go into the trash.

2 . THE GLOBAL WASTE TRADE IS ESSENTIALLY BROKEN

Cut into hillside in northern Malaysia stands a large, open-air warehouse. This is a recycling factory, which opened last November. On a very hot afternoon in January, Shahid Ali was working his very first week on the job. He stood knee-deep in soggy, white bits of plastic. Around him, more bits floated of the conveyor belt and fell to the ground like snowflakes.

Hour after hour, Ali sorts through the plastic jumble moving down the belt, picking out pieces that look off-color or soiled-rejects (废品) in the recycling process. Though it looks like backbreaking work, Ali says it is a great improvement over his previous job, folding bed-sheets in a nearby textile factory, for much lower pay. Now, if he eats simply, he can save money from his wages of just over $l an hour and send $250 a month to his parents and six brothers and sisters in Peshawar, Pakistan, 2,700 miles away, “As soon as I heard about this work, I asked for a job,” says Ali, 24, a bearded man with glasses and an easy smile. Still, he’s working 12 hours a day, seven days a week. “If I take a day off, I lose a day’s wages,” he says.

In the warehouse, hundreds of bags are stacked more than 60 feet high-each stuffed with plastic wrappers and bags thrown away weeks earlier by their original users in California. The fact that the waste has traveled to this distant corner of the planet in the first place shows how badly the global recycling economy has failed to keep pace with humanity’s plastics addiction. This is an ecosystem that is deeply dysfunctional, if not on the point of collapse: About 90% of the millions of tons of plastic the world produces every year will eventually end up not recycled, but burned, buried, or dumped.

Plastic recycling enjoys ever-wider support among consumers: Putting yogurt containers and juice bottles in a blue bin is an eco-friendly act of faith in millions of households. But faith goes only so far. The tidal wave of plastic items that enters the recycling stream each year is increasingly likely to fall right back out again, casualties of a broken market. Many products that consumers believe (and industries claim) are “recyclable" are in reality not, because of hard economics. With oil and gas prices near 20-year lows, so-called virgin plastic, a product of petroleum feed-stocks, is now far cheaper and easier to obtain than recycled material. That unforeseen shift has yanked the financial rug out from under what was until recently a practical recycling industry. “The global waste trade is essentially broken,” says the head of the global plastics campaign at Greenpeace. “We are sitting on vast amounts of plastic with nowhere to send it and nothing to do with it.”

Urban Trees Are Threatened by Climate Change

By 2050, about three-quarters of the species will be at risk as a result of climate change, a study has found. Cities around the world may need to start planting different types of trees and shrubs that can     1     warmer and drier conditions.

“By ‘at risk’, we mean these species might be     2     stressful climatic conditions,” says Manuel Esperon-Rodriguez at Western Sydney University in Australia. “Those trees are likely to die.”

City trees have many benefits, from making urban spaces look beautiful and providing a refuge for wildlife to keeping places up to 12°C cooler than they would otherwise be in summer. Losing tree     3     would lead to cities becoming even hotter as the planet heats up.

To     4     the threat, Esperon Rodriguez and his colleagues used database called the Global Urban Tree Inventory to work out the conditions required by 3100 tree and shrub species currently grown in 164 cities worldwide. The researchers then looked at how these conditions would be affected by climate change under medium-emissions scenario known as RCP 6.0.

By 2050, 76 per cent of these species will be at risk from rising     5     temperatures and 70 percent from decreasing rainfall, the team concludes.

The study doesn’t take account of       6     urban growth, which could warm cities even faster. Nor does it take account of greater weather     7     caused by climate change, or the effects of pests and diseases. Warmer conditions are allowing more pests, such as bark beetles, to survive winters as well as to reproduce faster in summer, greatly increasing their     8    .

“Our     9     have scientific basis,” says Esperon-Rodriguez. There are some things that can be done to help trees survive. The best strategy is to choose tough species when     10     trees or planting new ones, the team concludes.

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.

The nature is part of us. Therefore, it holds a mysterious     1     for me. In my memory, the valley was quiet and calm, only to see the wheat all over the mountains waving together in rhythm when the wind blew through, like a ballet troupe. The sun rose every morning as usual, sweeping across the valley and ultimately falling behind the peaks. The snow that falls in winter always melts in spring, bringing new hope to this nature where everything was pleasant and beautiful.

Led by fate, I have became an environmentalist and had the honor of being invited to address students about my green lifestyle for a long time. The students were surprised at my lifestyle and maybe they thought my lifestyle was no longer suitable for modern life. Fortunately, they were still listened to whole lecture, saluting or     2     me——to some extent the applause implied their encouragement to me. As I began to interact with them under the stage, I was     3     by kids’ lack of knowledge of nature so that they had little knowledge of protecting environment.

After the address, I put up a stand in the     4     offering green food, hoping them interested in it to get the     5     experiencing a first-hand feeling of the green lifestyle no one shows any interest in. So I decided to team up with the concert     6     to run a campaign: “anyone who can answer a(n)     7     environmental question is qualified to attend the concert. Soon the music can     8     them coming here”.

Since then , I have been considering why kids today do not have the same deep appreciation for nature that I do. One of the significant factors may be that the former rural civilization has been replaced by the urban civilization. In the past, the poor played the     9     role in the nature, so they cleared the wasteland, planted crops and reproduced civilization. With the massive invasion of industrialization and urbanization, people were forced to move away from nature. The struggle between tradition and modernity, the confrontation between humans and nature has led people to believe that they are the masters of the universe. Is this really the case? It is time to think about who     10     us to destroy nature.

9 . The misery of my bike commute in Calgary, Alberta, is the river valley hill. It’s not particularly steep, but at about a mile long, I rarely climbed up without arriving with sweat. Studies have shown the prospect of arriving at work sweaty is one of the biggest _________ to getting would-be bike commuters out of their cars. That’s especially true in a city like Los Angeles, where _________ may face long routes , hills or hot streets with a lack of shade.

“Pedelec”, or pedal electric-assisted bikes like the one I rode, can end that worry. They look and act like traditional bicycles, but their motors make pedaling much easier when required. Sometimes called the most energy-efficient motorized mode of transportation ever built, they’re also incredibly green. The biggest barrier may be the outdated attitude that sees bikes only as a recreational athletic opportunity rather than a practical _________ option.

At a time when cities across North America are struggling to combat crippling traffic and reduce climate emissions, e-bikes have the _________ to ease the both problems. And yet ridership has yet to truly _______.About 152,000 e-bikes were sold last year in the U.S., a figure that would be more than 5 million if Americans used them at the same rate as western Europeans.   

Many of the barriers to e-bike _________in North America are legislative. Patchwork rules treat e-bikes more like mopeds than traditional pedal bikes in some jurisdictions,meaning they are _______from bike lanes and from boarding public transportation.

Few places on the continent, _________, are better poised to break through barriers than California. Legislation was approved last year to encourage e-bike use, by legally differentiating the cycles from mopeds. In an attempt to head off worries about turbocharged machines flying down sidewalks and bike lanes at unsafe speeds, the law classifies bikes into different tiers to _______ lower-speed e-bikes, which top out at 20 mph, from faster-moving “speed pedelecs”, which are restricted from protected bike paths.

Amid these legislative ________, e-bikes have become more accessible to consumer. Finding them in bike shops isn’t as __________ as it once was, and their cost has fallen as the price of lithium-ion batteries has dropped. Today, a decent e-bike, while still __________, is comparable in price to a high-end mountain bike. After years of ____________over mixing pedal and motor power, cycling advocacy organizations also are finally throwing their support behind e-bikes. Dave Snyder, the executive director of the California Bicycle Coalition, __________ the state’s new legislation based partly on the __________that e-bikes help out those who“just can’t ride as far or as fast as they need to”.