1 . To produce the classic clothing, blue jeans, producers rely on indigo dye (靛蓝染料), the only molecule known to provide jeans’ unique, beloved color. While indigo itself naturally comes from a plant, growing demand for blue jeans throughout the 20th century gave rise to synthetic (合成的) indigo, which is now more commonly used.
Indigo is the dye that makes jeans blue, but it doesn’t mix with water. To dye clothes, usually, chemicals are needed to make the color stick to the cloth. But in Denmark, scientists have created a new way to dye clothes using an enzyme (酶), which is a kind of protein that can cause chemical reactions, instead of harmful chemicals. This new method is better for the environment and doesn’t use poisonous stuff.
The chemical process for dyeing blue jeans has persisted for the last century. Workers are exposed to the poisonous chemicals, which also pollute the environment near factories. Waste water from those factories often ends up in waterways, decimating local ecosystems and even dyeing rivers blue.
Ditte Hededam Welner, the study’s lead researcher, says their new enzyme works really well and is strong enough for making lots of jeans without breaking down. This enzyme makes dyeing with indican, which is like indigo, much less harmful to the planet — about 92% better than the old way.
However, the new method doesn’t fix all the environmental problems of making jeans. Making a single pair of jeans uses a lot of water — enough to fill many bathtubs — from growing the cotton to putting the final touches on the jeans.
Even though the new dyeing process is better for the environment, it’s not always easy or cheap to change to it. Welner’s team isn’t sure if jeans companies will find it easy or affordable to switch to this method. It costs a little bit more — just seven cents extra per pair of jeans — to use the enzyme for dyeing. But Welner believes it’s worth it because it’s much better for the environment.
1. Why was synthetic indigo created in the 20th century?| A．It made jeans’ color unique. | B．It was easy to dye cloth with it. |
| C．People liked jeans made from it. | D．People were in greater need of jeans. |
| A．Troubling. | B．Entering. | C．Destroying. | D．Defeating. |
| A．The colour is more beautiful than the synthetic indigo. |
| B．The market can keep stable goods supplies. |
| C．Enzyme facilitates the advance of science. |
| D．The dye is more environmentally friendly. |
| A．Production costs. | B．Environmental benefits. |
| C．Water consumption. | D．Laborer shortage. |
1. Where is the typhoon expected to come from?
| A．The western Pacific. | B．The mainland. | C．The man’s city. |
| A．Tomorrow morning. | B．Today. | C．Tomorrow evening. |
| A．Ways to save water. | B．Schools’ facilities. | C．Cities’ water supply. |
1. What is the relationship between the speakers?
| A．A couple. | B．Classmates. | C．Colleagues. |
| A．Stop using paper cups. |
| B．Prepare boxes for different waste. |
| C．Reduce the use of paper, plastic and cans. |
5 . When Alex Lin was 11 years old, he read an alarming article in the newspaper about e-waste. The article said that people were throwing away their e-waste in places it should never go. This was dangerous, the article said, because e-waste contains poisonous chemicals and metals like lead. These harmful substances (物质) can leak into the environment, getting into crops, animals, water supplies — and people.
Alex showed the article to a few of his classmates. They were worried too. But what could they do about this problem with e-waste? How would they even start? “The first thing we did,” Alex says, “was to learn more about the problem.” Alex and his friends spent several weeks gathering information about the chemicals in e-waste and their effects on humans. They learned how to dispose (处理) of e-waste properly and how it could be recycled. “Then,” he says, “we had to find out what the situation was in our town. So we sent out a survey.”
What they found shocked them: Of the people who answered the survey, only one in eight even knew what e-waste was, let alone how to properly dispose of it. Alex and his friends went into action. They advertised in the local newspaper and distributed notices to students, asking residents to bring their unwanted electronics to the school parking lot. The drive lasted two days, and they collected over 21,000 pounds of e-waste.
The next step was to set up an e-waste drop-off center for the town and to find a responsible company to recycle the waste. That was when Alex and his friends learned another scary fact about e-waste — some irresponsible recycling companies don’t break down the e-waste and dispose of it safely themselves. Instead, they ship it overseas to countries such as China and Nigeria, where local environmental laws are not applied. “We checked carefully online to make sure the company we chose didn’t do this,” Alex says.
Because of the work of people like Alex and his team, more and more people are getting the message about safe disposal of e-waste. As Alex says, “Today’s technology should not become tomorrow’s poisonous trash.”
1. What can we learn about Alex from paragraph 1 and paragraph 2?| A．He was curious about chemistry experiments. |
| B．He possessed a strong sense of responsibility. |
| C．He set out to solve the problem individually. |
| D．He formed the habit of reading newspapers. |
| A．Campaign. | B．Imagination. | C．Performance. | D．Technology. |
| A．Lack of available space was the reason for shipping. |
| B．Recycling was totally banned in their own country. |
| C．They were running their companies on a tight budget. |
| D．They were not charged with insecurely disposing it. |
| A．Reusing School Computers | B．Recycling Electronic Waste |
| C．Meeting a challenge | D．Doing Scientific Experiment |
Aubrey, a mom of three, was breastfeeding her 10-month-old daughter in her Maui home last week when alarms started going off and she saw her entire neighborhood was covered in black smoke.
Aubrey and her husband Alex rushed out of the home and into their car, escaping with their 10-month-old daughter as well as their 6-year-old twin daughters. They didn’t take any necessities. In fact, they had never thought the wildfires would ever get to where they lived. After all, they were very far.
While Aubrey and her family eventually made it to safety, a relative’s home, they later learned their own home was burned to the ground.
They were left with no possessions, so Alex had to go to the neighborhood surrounding his relative’s home searching for supplies for his baby daughter Blue. He went door-to-door, asking if anyone had a baby and if there was a bottle or a diaper (尿布) and some extra milk.
One neighbor just had a baby so he gave Alex two bottles. And some neighbors gave Alex two diapers and some gave her three. Alex later said. “They were holding onto their own diapers too, which I understand.”
The disaster turned into a crisis for countless parents like Aubrey and Alex, who had to escape quickly and now needed basic supplies to keep their children alive and safe.
The wildfires claimed the lives of over 100 people, while many more remained missing. Officials on Maui warned that their supplies were running out.
Aubrey and Alex decided to travel to another island, Oahu, where they could stay in the home of Alex’s brother’s. There, they had more access to supplies like diapers and milk. Then they managed to contact with volunteers and left in a lifeboat for Oahu. Thinking those helpless people, they cried in pain.
注意：
1. 续写词数应为150左右；
2. 请按如下格式在答题卡的相应位置作答。
Now on Maui, situations were becoming worse.
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Together with other volunteers, Alex and his brother collected large quantities of supplies on Oahu.
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7 . Endangered polar bears are breeding with grizzly bears, creating “pizzly” bears, which is being driven by climate change, scientists say.
As the world warms and Arctic sea ice thins, starving polar bears are being forced ever further south, where they meet grizzlies, whose ranges are expanding northwards. And with that growing contact between the two come increasing hybrids (杂交种), “pizzly” bears.
With features that could give the hybrids an advantage in warming northern habitats, some scientists guess that they could be here to stay. “Usually, the hybrids,“pizzly” bears aren’t better suited to their environments than their parents, but these hybrids are able to search for a wider range of food sources, ” Larisa DeSantis, an associate professor of biological sciences at Vanderbilt University, told Live Science.
The rise of “pizzly” bears appears with polar bears’ decrease: their number is estimated to go down by more than 30% in the next 30 years. This sudden fall is related partly to “pizzly” bears taking up polar bears’ ranges, but also to polar bears’ highly specialized diets.
“Polar bears mainly consumed soft foods even during the Medieval Warm Period, a previous period of rapid warming,” DeSantis said, referring to fat meals such as seals. “Although all of these starving polar bears are trying to find alternative food sources like seabird eggs.” Actually, the calories they gain from these sources do not balance out(抵消) those they burn from searching for them. This could result in a habitat ready for the hybrids to move in and take over, leading to a loss in biodiversity if polar bears are replaced.
“We’re having massive impacts with climate change on species,” DeSantis said. “The polar bear is telling us how bad things are. In some sense, “pizzly” bears could be a sad but necessary compromise(妥协) given current warming trends.”
1. Why do polar bears move further south?| A．To create hybrids. | B．To expand territory. |
| C．To deal with hunger. | D．To contact grizzlies. |
| A．Wider habitats. | B．More food choices. |
| C．Climate preference. | D．Improved breeding ability. |
| A．Polar bears are increasing. | B．Polar bears like soft foods. |
| C．Polar bears hate fat meals such as seals. | D．Climate change can benefit polar bears. |
| A．Polar bears are changing diets for climate change. |
| B．Polar bears have already adjusted to climate change. |
| C．“Pizzly” bears are on the rise because of global warming. |
| D．“Pizzly” bears have replaced polar bears for global warming. |
8 . Balancing preservation of the land with our desire to travel is a challenge for us travelers. When seeing cities face constant resource and waste problems, I couldn’t help but think about how much travel can affect the environment.
Back in my youth, I was an environmental activist. But over the years, I leave the lights on. I fly a lot. I drink out of plastic bottles. I eat a lot of meat. And I love fish, especially tuna. However, recently, I’ve begun thinking harder about how travel affects the environment and how I affect the environment. In doing so, I’ve tried to be a lot more aware of my actions.
I don’t know if there is an easy solution for this problem. The most environmentally friendly activity is not to travel at all, but that’s unrealistic and too extreme. There’s so much money in travel that I don’t think the government and regulation can do much. Only when their profits are hurt will hotels, operators, and the industry as a whole begin to listen. Instead, it’s all about the consumers. The only good way is to get people to be more environmentally conscious and make better decisions.
Consumers have a lot of power. Why did Wal-Mart start selling only sustainable fish and whole milk? Consumers wanted it. I think if we as travelers begin to demand more environmentally friendly practices and avoid companies with poor environmental records, we can change things.
Now, I recycle more, I use fewer water bottles, I shut off the lights. Most importantly, I use operators and stay at places that are reducing their environmental impact.
Travel can destroy the environment but it doesn’t have to. We have the power to make things better. We can do small things and demand more of the places we stay and visit. We can and should demand more of places, and of ourselves.
1. Which of the following might be the best title for the text?| A．My experiences of protecting the environment |
| B．Can we balance travel and the environment? |
| C．Is there an easy way to solve environmental problems? |
| D．How can we travel in an environmentally friendly way? |
| A．To show he is wealthy. | B．To tell he is fond of travelling. |
| C．To indicate he has become less environmentally conscious. | D．To explain his hobby. |
| A．People do not travel at all. | B．The government takes effective measures. |
| C．Tourism industry follows environmental rules. | D．Consumers become more environmentally conscious. |
1.现状说明；
2.具体措施；
3.发出倡议。
注意：
1.词数80左右；
2.可以适当增加细节，以使行文连贯。
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10 . To solve a big environmental problem, chemists have been thinking small. Really small: a new mini robot with the purpose of helping clean up tiny plastic that pollutes water across the world.
The new microrobots, each of which is no bigger than the tip of a pencil, are magnetic(有磁性的)and shaped like four-pointed stars. When the sunlight shines on them, they can swim in a direction; when the sunlight disappears, they stop moving. Finding a piece of plastic, they hold onto it, produce chemical reactions and start to break it down.
The project is led by chemist Martin Pumera, a researcher who also studies ways to build microrobots at the Czech University of Chemistry and Technology in Prague. About ten years ago, he noticed the microplastic was everywhere, from the bottom of the ocean to the ice on the top of mountains. It even turned up in drinking water, both bottled and tap water. Just think about how much plastic you meet every day. It doesn’t easily degrade ( 降 解 ) which is a big problem. Therefore, Pumera chose to focus on the problem of water pollution caused by microplastic.
The researchers tested the microrobots on four types of plastic in the lab. After a week, all four began degrading, losing around 3 percent of their weight, which showed the microrobots were breaking the plastic down. The robots also turned the plastic’s smooth surface into the rough one. Finally, the scientists showed that magnets could attract the microrobots at the end of the test - along with the plastic waste.
In fact, Pumera says they still have a long way to go. These microrobots are unlikely to succeed in degrading all types of plastic. They’ll also need a lot of testing to show that they’re safe in open waterways, such as at sea. But he thinks that these challenges can be overcome. Someday, the microrobots will play a big role in a worldwide cleanup effort.
1. What can be learned about the new microrobot?| A．It is in the shape of a ball. | B．It is as small as a pencil. |
| C．It is driven by sunlight. | D．It uses physical reactions. |
| A．The microplastic pollution. | B．The ice on the mountains. |
| C．The need for drinking water. | D．The development of ocean resources. |
| A．Sorting it into four types. | B．Making its surface smooth. |
| C．Taking in it completely. | D．Breaking it down to some degree. |
| A．Doubtful. | B．Confident. | C．Regretful. | D．Uncertain. |
