1 . Sea life near Turkey is being harmed by a layer of brown foam (泡沫) on the ocean’s surface. The foam, which many people are calling “sea snot”, is natural, but it’s caused by pollution and global warming.
The actual name for the foam is mucilage (粘液). Scientists first noticed and described mucilage in 2007, when it was found near Turkey. Then, it was also found in other parts of the Aegean Sea, near Greece. Mucilage covers the ocean’s surface with a thick, slimy layer that gives it the nickname of sea snot.
This year’s appearance of mucilage is the worst ever recorded. It’s been developing for seven months and is now covering large parts of the Sea of Marmara. The Sea of Marmara is an inland sea, surrounded by land belonging to Turkey, and connected to the Aegean Sea and the Black Sea.
There are many different kinds of algae (海藻), and it’s natural and normal for algae to grow in the ocean or in other bodies of water. But when there is lots of food for the algae, and other conditions are just right, algae would boom, which results in algae growing quickly and in huge numbers. And in very bad situations, mucilage is the result.
There are two main causes of the present appearance of mucilage. One is the heavy pollution — waste water and chemicals — flowing into the Sea of Marmara. The second cause is higher water temperatures because of climate change.
By covering the ocean’s surface, mucilage stops sunlight from reaching all the sea life below. “This mucilage is now covering the sea surface like a tent,” says Muharrem Balci, who teaches biology at Istanbul University. Because there is so much algae, it takes up lots of oxygen from the seawater. That means that there’s very little oxygen left for the other sea life that depends on it. The BBC reports that divers in the area are seeing large numbers of dying fish. After a while, the mucilage falls to the bottom of the ocean, where it covers the sea floor, poisoning sea life that lives there. The mucilage has already been found as deep as 30 meters below the surface.
Mahsum Daga, a local fisherman, told the reporter, “Do you know what it does to shellfish? When they open up, it prevents them from closing up again because it gets in the way. All the seasnails here are dead.”
1. What do we know about mucilage?| A．It generally doesn’t last long. | B．It was first noticed near Turkey. |
| C．It is the result of algae poisoning. | D．It is mainly formed in inland seas. |
| A．Shoot up. | B．Stand out. | C．Break down. | D．Take off. |
| A．The reason for the formation of mucilage is difficult to explain. |
| B．Mucilage is doing much more harm than good. |
| C．The present situation of mucilage needs attention. |
| D．Mucilage puts sea life in danger in different ways. |
| A．Sea life in Turkey is in great danger of extinction. |
| B．A new kind of poisonous algae is found in Turkey. |
| C．Turkey’s coastal waters are covered with mucilage. |
| D．Mucilage is likely to cause great damage to Turkey. |
2 . Dairy (奶品场) packaging has been changing a lot for so many years. Now, businesses are using technology to create more sustainable (可持续的) packaging options along the whole supply chain.
Ian Olmstead, program manager at Dairy Australia, says, “We’re trying to make sure the plastics we use are designed in a way that allows them to be recycled. Then we have partnerships in place that support the processes for recycling, and seek to increase the food-grade recycled content that can be used again in dairy packaging.”
Brownes Dairy — Australia’s oldest dairy has worked with Tetra Pak to make its next change. Brownes’ senior marketing manager, Nicole Ohm, says it has been important to create a product that not only is recyclable, but starts life in a sustainable way, too. “The start of life is just as important as the end of life,” she says. “Being able to make an effective change at the start of life just makes for a greener result.”
Milk packaging is made of three covers. Recyclable cardboard sits in the middle, with polyethylene (聚乙烯) plastic on both sides acting as a protection. Historically, these outer covers have been made from plastic, but Brownes’ new packaging will use a renewable resource: sugarcane, a kind of plant. “The plant-based protections behave in the same way,” Ohm says, “and so does the recyclability.” “Being Australia’s oldest dairy carries a level of responsibility,” Ohm says. “Even though we are very old, we are not at all traditional—we are very advanced.”
When it comes to plastic packaging, the dairy industry faces many challenges. Recyclable material must be food safe, for example. And one plastic milk bottle might contain a number of different plastics, from the bottle itself to its cover. Even the glue on the label becomes part of the recycling challenge that needs to be got over.
Dr Stephanus Peters is a managing partner at PEGRAS, a global technical solutions consulting company. Peters explains the problem PEGRAS has been asked to solve: make it easier to take away non-recyclable parts from milk bottles to avoid pollution. “You always have a little bit of glue left,” he says. “We have to take away the glue before the bottle can be recycled. If successful, this advance could be used in every industry.”
1. What change does Nicole Ohm expect to happen in dairy packaging?| A．It will be of excellent quality. | B．It will help keep the milk fresh. |
| C．It will reduce the cost of products. | D．It will be environmentally friendly. |
| A．It has more covers. | B．It is much more protective. |
| C．It uses plant-based materials. | D．It has a renewable middle cover. |
| A．The recycling may require a lot of steps. | B．The recycling may cause more pollution. |
| C．The recycling may take a mass of money. | D．The recycling may impact on food safety. |
| A．Set up a plastic-free dairy business. | B．Make its company a sustainable one. |
| C．Rid packaging of non-recyclable parts. | D．Come up with a type of recyclable glue. |
3 . The ocean covers more than 70 percent of the earth’s surface and the deep sea could contain as many as 100 million species. But it’s becoming worse. Overfishing, plastic pollution, rising sea levels, and climate change are to partly blame (责怪) for the ocean’s present state.
People are talking about plastics more than ever after recognizing the heavy effect the material has on our planet. Every year, thousands of seabirds, sea turtles, seals, whales, dolphins, and fish are killed after mistakenly eating plastics.
Keeping our coastlines clean is a simple way to help the planet. After a day at the beach, make sure you’ve taken everything with you, including rubbish.
Being mindful of what cleaning products you use is another effective way to reduce your effect on the earth. Chemicals like household cleaners can move through waterways and eventually end up in the sea, affecting the health of oceans and the animals in them.
| A．Got some spare change? |
| B．Are you a fan of meat pies? |
| C．These problems may be hard to deal with. |
| D．Apart from (除了......) litter, you can wear eco-friendly sun cream. |
| E．Choose eco-friendly products and limit chemical use when possible. |
| F．Once you arrive at your destination (终点)，be respectful of the life in the sea. |
| G．Plastics take years to break down, some taking hundreds or even more. |
4 . How to prepare for a wildfire
Before you can effectively prepare, it’s very important to understand how wildfires operate. Many think wildfires destroy homes because a wall of flames(火焰)moves across the landscape.
Creating a defensible space around your home acts as a barrier against wildfire flames. Home hardening involves constructing with fire-resistant materials. Investing $10,000 to $20,000 in these measures significantly reduces the chance of a home being ravaged by a wildfire, lowering risk by 75%.
Remove dead tree branches
Similar to dry or bagged leaves, dead tree branches are dry, which means they, too, can catch fire quickly. If you have any hanging from trees or laying in your yard, remove them ASAP. The same rule applies when removing dead tree branches:
Create an evacuation (撤离)plan
Families should go over an evacuation plan and practice it well before an emergency actually occurs. Knowing when to leave and being able to go quickly is crucial during an evacuation scenario.
Make sure gutters(水槽)are made of metal
| A．Do not store them close to the house |
| B．Replace plastic gutters with metal ones |
| C．Things we all have are around our homes |
| D．It’s important to keep away from wildfire |
| E．Build defensible space s and harden your home |
| F．Set a meet up destination for all family members first |
| G．Actually, it’s tiny wind-blown things that destroy most of them |
A talented British writer
Melati and Isabel deeply love their home on the island, surrounded by tropical rain forests, green fields, and a vast ocean. Enjoying a swim at their local beach was once a daily pleasure for them. But when Melati was fifteen, and Isabel just ten, the sisters started to lose their enthusiasm for swimming in the waters near their borne. More often than not, plastic bags would be around them as they swam and some were scattered on the beach. They got really upset about that.
Melati didn’t think much about it until one day her teacher gave a lesson on some world heroes. Each of those people had sparked movements of positive changes in the world. They believed in the impact they could have and they did inspire more people to do something meaningful. After school, Melati walked home slowly in silence, concerned about the vast amount of plastic rubbish on the beach. The heroes crossed her mind. If they could do it, we could do it too, she thought. The idea lit her up. She couldn’t wait to share what she thought with Isabel and quickened her pace.
“So many plastic bags around! The beach is dirty and messy! It’s so terrible! We have lost the clean and beautiful beach. Can’t we do something to get it back?” Melati said heartily. Isabel felt a bit puzzled at what to do, but she also had a strong desire to do something. Picturing a beach as fascinating as before in mind, the pair jumped with joy.
They talked a lot, anxious to know how Dad and Mom would respond to their ideas. That night when the family sat by the dinner table, the sisters eagerly got their ideas across. While Mom and Dad listened to the girls carefully, their eyes shone. “How amazing that would be! We are so proud of you!” Dad exclaimed. Mom came up, gave them a thumb up and hugged the sisters.
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。
Melati and Isabel decided to make a positive impact straight away.
______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________One month later, Melati received a call from the local newspaper.
______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________7 . Climate change leads to threat to the world’s sandy beaches, and as many as half of them could disappear by 2100, a new study has found. Even by 2050 some coastlines could be unrecognizable from what we see today, with 10% to 12% facing serious erosion (侵蚀).
Using updated sea level rise predictions, the researchers analyzed how beaches around the world would be in a future with higher seas and more damaging storms. They also considered natural processes like wave erosion, as well as human factors — like coastal building developments, all of which can affect a beach's health. The study found that sea level rise is expected to outweigh (胜过) these other factors, and that the more heat-trapping gases human put into the atmosphere, the worse the influences on the world’s beaches are likely to be.
It’s hard to overstate just how important the world's beaches are. They cover more than one third of the world’s coastlines, and protect coastal areas from storms. Beaches are also important economic engines, supporting relaxation, tourism and other activities. And in some areas, the beach is more than a vacation destination. In places like Australia, life near the coast revolves (围绕) around the beach for much of the year.
Some of the world’s most popular beaches are already taking action. Places like Miami Beach are trucking in thousands of tons of sand to patch up (修复) badly eroded shorelines, while others have built sea walls and breakwaters in an attempt to hold precious sand in place. But the financial and environmental costs of these projects are huge, and scientists say rising seas and more powerful storms, as well as a warmer climate, may make this a losing battle.
However, the researchers did find that humans have some control over what happens to the world's beaches. If the world’s governments are able to continue cutting heat-trapping gas pollution, the researchers found that 22% of projected beach losses by 2050 could be prevented, a number that grows to 40% by 2100 if greenhouse gases are limited.
1. Which of the following mainly causes serious beach erosion?| A．Higher seas. | B．Human factors. |
| C．Damaging storms. | D．Wave erosion. |
| A．Storms damage one third of world’s coastlines. |
| B．Significance of beaches can’t be underestimated. |
| C．Economic activities may cause damage to beaches. |
| D．Beaches are the only economic engine for Australia. |
| A．Costly but failed. | B．Effective but not enough. |
| C．Orderly but slow. | D．Enormous but not constant. |
| A．Actions have been taken to protect beaches. |
| B．Beaches are facing the threat of disappearing. |
| C．Life in coastal areas mainly depends on beaches. |
| D．There exist challenges to protect eroded beaches. |
增加：在缺词处加一个漏字符号（˄），并在其下面写出该加的词。
删除：把多余的词用斜线（\）划掉。
修改：在错的词下画一横线，并在该词下面写出修改后的词。
注音.1.每外错误及其修改均仅限一词；
2.只允许修改10处，多者（从第11处起）不计分。
Our school lies at the foot of a mountain with a small river passes by. It used to be a quiet, clean or beautiful place. It is a pity that things have changed since a chemical factory built near our school one year ago. Every one day the factory produces many waste water and some other solid waste things. The terribly pollution is harmful by our health. What's worse, the great noise from the factory had a bad effect on us activities. As a result, our school is no longer that it used to be. Our teachers and students are painful beyond expression.
9 . “I can’t turn the desert into an oasis, but I’m working hard to prevent any oasis from degrading (退化) into desert,” says 78-yearold Wang Tianchang in Wuwei city, in Northwest China’s Gansu province.
Sticking to the belief that “only by containing the sand, our children and grandchildren will survive and thrive”, Wang and his wife Li Lanying have been stationed in the Tengger Desert for 22 years, voluntarily dealing with sand encroachment (侵蚀) and planting more than 8,000 acres. They have helped turn the once endless desert into an oasis.
In the spring of 1999, the then 56-year-old Wang put forward the idea of afforestation (造林) in the Tengger Desert. Strongly opposed by his family and ridiculed by the villagers, Wang secretly sold the family’s cattle, sheep and camels. With the collected money, the couple brought their tents and sand control tools to the desert.
“It’s not easy to plant trees, especially in the desert. To improve the survival rate of sand-grown seedlings (幼苗) in the desert, Wang observed the flow of sand dunes (沙丘) in areas where it was most severe in the 12th lunar month in winter. He also explored the best spots for planting grass and trees, and gradually found effective methods for planting saplings in the desert. In order to solve the problem of water scarcity, Wang bought two-humped camels. His wife led the camels to transport water on a route of more than 3 kilometers between their home and the desert back and forth every four and five hours.
Over the past 22 years, Wang and his family have invested more than 1.2 million yuan ($ 187,770) to the task of containing the sand and planting trees in the Tengger Desert. During this period, in order to improve the progress of sand suppression (抑制), the couple spent more than 6,000 days in achieving more than 8,000 acres of sand afforestation, and used camels to transport 5,000 tons of water on the sand line. The round-trip journey was more than 12,000 kilometers.
Wang’s spirit of living in the desert for decades has moved many people. Every year, volunteers from all over the country and tens of thousands of local people come here to fight the sands with the couple and protect their home.
1. How did Wang manage to get the money he needed?| A．He borrowed some from his relatives. |
| B．The local government provided it for him. |
| C．Charity organizations donated much to him. |
| D．He sold the family’s cattle, sheep and camels. |
| A．Research. | B．Pollution. | C．Shortage. | D．Control |
| A．5,000. | B．6,000. | C．8,000. | D．12,000. |
| A．The sands of time blow toward a greener world |
| B．Wang observes flow of sand dunes in the desert |
| C．Wang’s spirit of living in the desert moves people |
| D．Planting trees and grass leads to success of afforestation |
10 . With the outbreak of the COVID-19, multiple kinds of protective medical equipment, such as disposable(一次性的)masks, have been consumed. Market research indicates a sharp increase rate of 53% in the mask market alone. People often use these types of protective equipment and then throw them without thinking of the consequences, both on the ecosystem and human beings.
Disposable surgical masks are severely affecting the ecosystem. When improperly-handled masks enter the water system, they break up into smaller pieces. Complete masks can trap marine animals, resulting in their impaired mobility and even death. Meanwhile, the poisonous plastic particles will cause marine animals to be poisoned to death or weakness when they consume plastic. Furthermore, these harmful pollutants can severely affect reproduction, growth, and the development of the young. Just like their effects on marine animals, these pollutants can also contribute to severe harm in human bodies, especially in the neuron system. Exposure to micro plastics may cause particle poisoning, cellular damage and neuro-degenerative (神经退化的) diseases like Alzheimer’s disease(阿尔茨海默症).
Despite the potential harm to the ocean system and human neuron system, improperly-handled disposable masks will likely become a dangerous public health threat under the environment of a global pandemic. Instead of helping us fight against the COVID-19, to some extent, micro plastic pollution also causes the potential risk of speeding up the spread of the virus. Micro plastic particles in the ocean can be mixed up with water vapour to form aerosols in the atmosphere because they are small enough to enter the water cycle, where they are transferred from the marine system to the atmosphere in vast amounts and become a source for the disease COVID-19. thus causing the virus to speed up the spread of the global pandemic.
Humans will eventually suffer from the wrongdoing in the ocean systems because humans are nothing but temporary residents of the planet. Just like what the famous English anthropologist, Jane Goodall, has said, “Every individual matters. Every individual makes a difference.”
1. The underlined word “impaired” in paragraph 2 probably means“_________”.| A．strengthened | B．damaged |
| C．completed | D．influenced |
| A．the impact on marine lives’ reproduction, growth and weakness |
| B．the destruction to human’s neuron system, cellular system |
| C．the huge economic loss for people living near the sea |
| D．the great burden of micro plastic particles on ecosystem |
| A．to describe the negative effects of disposed masks on nature and human beings. |
| B．to advise readers to deal with the improperly-handled masks. |
| C．how the improperly-handled masks help spread the virus. |
| D．how to deal with the virus. |
| A．To explain a serious phenomenon caused by the virus. |
| B．To advocate a proper solution to solving the disposable masks. |
| C．To compare the sufferings between marine animals and human beings. |
| D．To analyze the harmful results of the improperly-handled masks. |
