1 . A couple has recently placed their garbage can out for collection for the first time in 14 months, all thanks to their recycling skills. Richard and Louise Arnold have established such an effective routine that they only need to put their garbage can on the side of the street once a year.

Louise explained that making small monthly changes in her life has resulted in her family producing very little waste. She said, “It’s not as difficult as you might think if you start with small steps. We began with soap, switching from bath cream to natural soap without packaging. These bars are large enough that we cut them in half, using one for the sink and the other half for the shower. It’s both cost-effective and environmentally friendly.”

“So it’s actually quite easy. Just go around your house and think of little things you can do gradually, and you’ll start noticing the difference,” Louise added. Currently, the couple takes recyclable waste to the tip, donates clothes to charity shops, and brings soft plastics and batteries to a shop that accepts them.

In 2017, the couple established No Waste Living, which initially started as a weekend stall at the local market and has since developed into a website. Louise regularly writes a newsletter for her hundreds of subscribers. They also started selling eco-friendly products, ranging from non-chemical household cleaning and washing solutions for a “less toxic home” to bamboo washing-up brushes. Louise mentioned, “I started No Waste Living because I wanted to show our achievement s and lead by example.”

Although the family occasionally faces criticism, Louise remains determined. She said, “The main point of contention(争论) for people regarding new waste rules is having to drive their waste to a recycling center, which adds to their already busy lives. However, in the long run, you will create more space in your home, save money, and spend less time dealing with garbage cans.”

1. How did the couple start their waste reduction journey?

A．By replacing small soaps with large ones.	B．By using a small amount of bath cream.
C．By using unpackaged soap bars.	D．By recycling soft plastics and batteries.

2. Why did the couple found No Waste Living?

A．To bring eco-products to market.	B．To inspire others to follow in their footsteps.
C．To treat recyclable waste from the neighborhood.	D．To answer the call of their subscribers.

3. Why do some people dislike new waste rules?

A．They mean more work to deal with garbage.

B．They increase the cost of garbage collection.

C．They establish a set time for waste management.

D．They limit the daily amount of garbage for collection.

4. What is the text mainly about?

A．A business - minded couple.	B．The “less poisonous home” concept.
C．The global trend in recycling.	D．A planet- friendly lifestyle.

3 . 阅读下面短文，在空白处填入1个适当的单词或括号内单词的正确形式。

In the past 10 years, China has added more than 22 million hectares of forest. Thanks to     1     (generation) of tree planters, our surroundings are becoming much greener.

In 2022, China completed the afforestation (植树造林) of 3.83 million hectares and treated 1, 847, 300 hectares of rock-deserted land. After continuous effort, China has achieved     2     (remark)progress.

China’s forest coverage rate has reached 24 percent, and forest accumulation has reached 19 billion cubic meters,     3     has laid a solid foundation for maintaining national ecological security and     4    (improve)people’s well-being.

In terms of vegetation (植被) restoration, in 2020 China published a guideline to perform a forest chief scheme nationwide. Principal leaders of governments should     5     (appoint)as “forest chiefs” at various levels ranging from the provincial level     6     the village level.

Bazhou District in China’s Sichuan Province is     7     unique biodiversity ecological zone. In the past, the surface of the mountain there was exposed due to mining;     8    , after the government’s management, the area has returned to its former green self.

In terms of ecological civilization education, in Shanghai, for example, an elementary school has     9     (creative)combined traditional Chinese medicine resources with AR technology to help children to learn plants. Meanwhile, Suzhou in Jiangsu Province has digitized tree planting activities through a mini-game on how     10    (identify)different types of trees.

5 . Even chess experts perform worse when air quality is lower, suggesting a negative effect on cognition(认知). Here’s something else chess players need to keep in check: air pollution.

That’s the bottom line of a newly published study co-authored by a researcher, showing that chess players perform objectively worse and make more suboptimal(次优的) moves, as measured by a computerized analysis of their games, when there is more fine particulate matter(颗粒物) in the air, notated as PM 2.5.

More specifically, given a modest increase in fine particulate matter, the probability that chess players will make an error increases by 2.1 percentage points, and the spectrum of those errors increases by 10.8 percent. In this setting, at least, cleaner air leads to clearer heads and sharper thinking.

“We find that when individuals are exposed to higher levels of air pollution, they make more mistakes, and they make larger mistakes,” says Juan Palacios, an economist in Sustainable Urbanization Lab.

“It’s pure random exposure to air pollution that is driving these people’s performance,” Palacios says. “Against comparable opponents in the same tournament round, being exposed to different levels of air quality makes a difference for move quality and decision quality.”

The researchers also found that when air pollution was worse, the chess players performed even more poorly when under time limitation. “We find it interesting that those mistakes especially occur in the phase of the game where players are facing time pressure,” Palacios says.

“There are more and more papers showing that there is a cost with air pollution, and there is a cost for more and more people,” Palacios says. “And this is just one example showing that even for these very excellent chess players, who think they can beat everything, it seems that with air pollution, they have an enemy who harms them.”

1. What effect does air pollution have on chess players?

A．They make fewer good choices.	B．They perform subjectively worse.
C．They suffer body discomfort.	D．They lose all games with computers.

2. What does the underlined word “spectrum” in paragraph 3 probably mean?

A．Magic.

B．Process.

C．Range.

D．Balance.

3. What does Palacios express in the last paragraph?

A．His appeal for attention to chess players.

B．His concern about air pollution.

C．An example of chess players’ performance.

D．Approaches to dealing with air pollution.

4. What’s the main idea of the text?

A．Air pollution is a tough enemy chess players face.

B．Chess players make more and more mistakes.

C．There is a cost with air pollution for more people.

D．Chess players perform poorly under time limitation.

6 . Sustainability for kids can start with a seed. We put together some ways to involve the whole family in protecting the environment.

Go on a hike. Parental involvement in early childhood education looks different in various settings from preschool to home and to the grocery store.     1     Going on a hike together can be an ideal thing to investigate a local ecosystem, look for signs of the changing season, and gain an overall appreciation of the world outdoors. Plus, by bringing an extra garbage bag and gloves to pick up trash along the way, parents can show kids some educational activities.

Go green for holidays. Make holidays fun while also supporting a green environment for kids. Use LED lights for decorative lighting.     2     Decrease your carbon footprint and purchase holiday gifts from local shops.

    3     Parents don’t need an acre of land to teach their children that food doesn't grow at the grocery store. All they need is sunlight, water and dirt. A windowsill is the perfect spot to grow herbs. A back deck can grow beautiful tomatoes. Plant peach seeds in a small container.     4    

Recycle together. Recycling activities for kids can be fun and support family involvement in education at the same time.     5     Then work with them to make something new out of the recycled items, such as making boxes out of recycled cardboard and storage tins out of recycled cans.

A．Plant a “garden”.

B．Don’t buy food from the grocery.

C．Protecting the environment for kids is important.

D．Parents should tell children what they can recycle.

E．And the children can watch a little peach tree grow.

F．Recycle Christmas trees instead of throwing them away.

G．To a child, every setting and every moment can be a teachable one.

7 . About 400 pounds of food is wasted per day from 5 pm to 8 pm in Douglass Dining Hall. “We scrape(刮掉) the food from the conveyor belt into the buckets by hand. Working for Dining Team Green, I don’t expect to basically become a garbage girl,” Roll said. “We do the work because we care much about it. We all have a responsibility to take care of the environment.”

To have more approachable composting(把……制成堆肥) machines on campus, Roll now has a new sustainable project investing in Lomi, an automated compost machine. “I learned about Lomi through an ad,” Roll said. “Funny enough, I just saw it and thought it perfect. It really interested me how the mechanism worked. ”

Lomi is a new technology that can break down food waste into natural compost. According to Roll, it breaks down waste in the way: grinding(碾碎) the food into plant fertilizer. Unlike most composting machines, Omi can compost animal products, such as small bones. Another huge benefit is that it doesn’t have smell and can convert waste to compost in a shorter time.

Roll plans on using the compost in the Gilbert community garden so that Dining Team Green can give back to the community. “It’s very exciting to see our food waste that would otherwise have gone in the trash and pollute the environment go to our community,” she said.

Roll is excited to introduce a new form of composting to the residents. She hopes that this machine will inspire other composting machines in all residential buildings. “I want Lomi not only to be a way to reduce food waste on the floor, but an educational tool to make people compost in a real way and not just talk about it in a theoretical sense,” Roll said.

1. Which of the following can best describe Lomi?

A．Elegant.	B．Widespread.
C．Low-powered.	D．Environmentally friendly.

2. What does paragraph 3 mainly talk about?

A．The reasons for designing Lomi.	B．The impact of wasting food.
C．The solution to food waste.	D．The advantages of Lomi.

3. What may be Roll’s expectation?

A．More people will get involved in composting initiatives.

B．Dining Team Green will become an educational tool.

C．More developed composting machines will be invented.

D．Dining Team Green will build community gardens.

4. What can we know about Roll?

A．She lives in the Gilbert community.

B．She is a member of Dining Team Green.

C．She knows a lot about residential buildings.

D．She plans to design more composting machines.

8 . The process by which rich land becomes desert is called desertification(沙漠化).     1    The U. N. says up to 45 percent of Africa’s land is impacted by desertification, worse than any other continent.

Africa’s Great Green Wall is a project to build an 8000-kilometer-long forest across 11 of the continent’s countries. The project is meant to contain the growing Sahara Desert and fight climate change.     2    They include limited political support, lack of money, weak organizational structures, and not enough consideration for the environment. Just 4 million hectares of land have been turned into forest since the work on the Great Green Wall began 15 years ago.     3    

Launched in 2007, the project aims to plant a forest from Senegal on the Atlantic Ocean in western Africa to Eritrea, Ethiopia and Djibouti in the east.     4     It could also reduce levels of climate-related migration in the area and capture hundreds of millions of tons of carbon dioxide from the air.

    5    They say some progress has been made in recent years in the east of the continent. For example, efforts in Eritrea and Sudan have resulted in nearly 140, 000 hectares of newly planted forest.

The U. N. desertification agency says the project will need to plant an average of 8. 2 million hectares yearly to reach its goal of 100 million hectares by 2030.

A．It has severe impacts on the environment.

B．That is only 4 percent of the program’s goal.

C．However, it is difficult to carry out the project.

D．But the project has been facing many problems.

E．The project would create millions of green jobs in rural Africa.

F．Despite many problems, those involved in the project remain hopeful.

G．Some countries have struggled to keep up with the demands of the project.

9 . Microplastics are “one of the greatest man-made disasters of our time”, according to the Natural History Museum. That’s bad news, given they are also everywhere: in tap water, the food you buy, the clothes you wear and the air you breathe.

The largest microplastics can be seen by the naked eye and are anything under half a cen- timetre in size. But many of them are small enough to act like spots of dust which we can unconsciously breathe in or eat in food. The smallest particles are called nanoplastics and they are small enough to get their way deep into the human body.

New findings from the University of Portsmouth show that there is so much synthetic material in our homes that we might be breathing in up to 7, 000 microplastic particles a day. Using special equipment, researchers measured a typical family home and found the highest concentration of it was in the bedroom of the eight-year-old daughter, whose room was decorated with plastic-based bedding, carpet and soft toys.

Although research is in its early stage, the risks of these plastics could be serious—some studies have linked high exposure to cancer risk and disrupting our hormones. In animal studies, the particles have been shown to affect metabolism, gut bacteria and the immune system, among other things.

It is not yet known what a healthy level of microplastics might look like, but Dr Sabine Donnai, CEO of the Viavi clinic, thinks that many people in the West are over the limit. In tests at her clinic, patients often come back with dangerously high levels of plastic in their bodies, she says.

1. What does paragraph 2 talk about?

A．The seriousness of microplastics.	B．The size of microplastics.
C．The solution to microplastics.	D．The effect of microplastics.

2. How did researchers determine the amount of microplastics of a home?

A．With technical instrument.	B．By referring to previous data.
C．Through experiments.	D．By observing environment.

3. What does the underlined word “disrupting” in paragraph 4 probably mean?

A．Deciding.

B．Disturbing.

C．Discovering.

D．Defending.

4. What would be a suitable title for the text?

A．New study found microplastics	B．Microplastics are found in clothes
C．Microplastics are threatening our life	D．We breathe in microplastics every day

10 . 阅读下面短文，在空白处填入1个适当的单词或括号内单词的正确形式。

Every day we use energy. We use it for cooking, for heating and for lighting our cities. The energy comes from many different     1     (source). It can come from the sun, wind and water, but the energy we depend on the most comes from deep inside the Earth. These include coal, oil, and natural gas.

These fuels come from the remains of plants and animals. It takes millions of years     2     (make) them. However, with the world’s population     3    (grow), more and more of these fuels are dug up from the ground. Yet these fuels are non-renewable. When they     4    (use) up, they will be gone forever.

We need to have a strong sense of     5    (responsible) and it’s high time for us to think about     6     we can help save energy and preserve these fuels.

What about turning off anything     7     (electricity) we are not using? That’s a start! We can also recycle things such as newspapers, cans, bottles, and plastic—including plastic bags. Plastic bags start out as either oil     8     coal, and one big city can use millions of plastic bags in a year. When we use recycled things, it takes less energy     9     making something new.

Cars consume a lot of fuel, but there     10     (be) a variety of measures that car owners can take to preserve fuel. Try asking your family whether we can take a bus or walk instead of using the car.