1 . Last year, the bushfires in Australia burned more than 12.35 million acres of land. At least 25 people were killed and 2000 homes destroyed. According to the BBC, that was the most casualties(伤亡) from wildfires in the country since 2009. The University of Sydney estimates that 480 million animals have died in South Wales alone.
Zeke Hausfather, an energy systems analyst and climate researcher at Berkeley Earth, said warmer temperatures and extreme weather made Australia more susceptible to fires and increased the length of the fire season. "The drier conditions combined with record high temperatures in 2019 created main conditions for the disastrous fires. Australia's fires were worsened by the combination of those two. 2019 was the perfect storm for being the warmest year on record for Australia and the driest year on record for Australia," Hausfather added on Friday.
Kevin Trenberth, a senior scientist at the US National Center for Atmospheric Research, said warmer ocean temperatures are also contributed to more variable weather around the world. Trenberth believes that global warming contributed to energy imbalances and hot spots in the oceans, which can create a wave in the atmosphere that locks weather patterns in places, causing longer rain events in Indonesia, for example, and at the same time contributing to drought in Australia. He said that once an area experiences drought conditions for two months or more, it increases the risk of fires catching and spreading. Those changing weather patterns due to global warming make drought events longer.
Climate experts stress that climate change is not the only factor in the severity(严重) of wildfires. How land is managed can also impact the amount of fuel available for fires. Practices like controlled bums and other factors can impact the risk to people and property, such as warning systems and the type of development in a given area. Changing those policies has great potential to limit future damage from wildfires along with changes to how fire management resources are dispatched(派遣).
1. What are the numbers about in paragraph 1?| A．The causes of Australian fires. | B．The results of Australian fires. |
| C．The damaged areas of Australian fires. | D．The property destruction of Australian fires. |
| A．Very quickly to adapt to. |
| B．Very seriously to focus on. |
| C．Very likely to be influenced by. |
| D．Very easily to be protected against. |
| A．Longer dry weather contributes to global warming. |
| B．Global wanning is also a main cause of the bushfires. |
| C．Warmer ocean temperatures leads to the fires directly. |
| D．The imbalanced energy leads to the temperature rising. |
| A．To stress the effects of Australia fires. |
| B．To show the methods for land management. |
| C．To predict the seriousness of Australia fires. |
| D．To provide some advice about reducing fire damage. |
1.对该主题的理解；
2.具体的倡议内容。
注意：
1.词数 120 左右；
2.开头和结尾已给出，不计入总词数.
Good morning, everyone!
________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
That’s all. Thank you.
3 . Watford and her family have lived in Curtis Bay, Baltimore for generations. Her community has faced environmental injustice. Heavy industries continued to move in her community. As a result, her neighbors have had to live with serious respiratory (呼吸的) problems.
When she knew a plan to build the nation’s largest trash-burning incinerator (焚化炉) less than a mile away from her high school, she realized she had to take action. The incinerator was being sold wrongly as clean, renewable energy equipment but actually it would be a source of brain-damaging chemicals and would release 200 million tons of greenhouse gases per year, both worse than coal burning. Watford felt she had a responsibility to warn her community to work together to shut this plant down.
She co-founded Free Your Voice (FYV), a 10-person student organization devoted to community rights and social justice. Together, they decided to start a campaign to take down Energy Answers, the incinerator’s developer. They went door-to-door talking to neighbors and organizing protests.
When it was discovered that Baltimore City Public Schools (BCPS) was going to be a customer of Energy Answers, the organization fought with the board and presented their case, urging BCPS to withdraw from the project. BCPS was convinced to cancel their contract, which in turn inspired 22 other customers to do the same. Without any financial gain, Energy Answers had no market to move forward with its plan.
Watford continues to work with Curtis Bay residents toward fair development. They have a vision for the future which includes building a zero-waste movement, a solar farm, and green jobs. She wants the entire human family to join the fight for environmental justice because survival as a species depends on our ability to take action.
1. What caused respiratory problems in Watford’s community?| A．Poor medical care. | B．Terrible environmental conditions. |
| C．Constant bacterial infection. | D．Unbalanced distribution of resources. |
| A．Unfavourable. | B．Doubtful. | C．Unclear. | D．Indifferent. |
| A．BCPS lost financial support. | B．Energy Answers stopped its plan. |
| C．The investors found new market. | D．Many customers revised their contracts. |
| A．A teenage hero against urban pollution |
| B．A teenage hero fighting for an advanced city |
| C．A battle for Baltimore’s sky by a teenage hero |
| D．The social justice challenge for a teenage hero |
4 . Damon Carson calls himself a matchmaker (媒人) of the never-ending waste of American society, trying not to pair people with people, but things with people.
In the late 1990s, Carson was on break from business school in Vail, Colorado, when he discovered the vast world of waste. He began thinking about creating a secondhand store that would sell old materials and keep them out of being wasted. As a result, in 2010, his company, Repurposed Materials appeared.
For nearly ten years, his company, Repurposed Materials, has not been looking to recycle the waste he gets — breaking it down to make something new — but rather finding new homes for thrown-away goods in their original forms.
Carson, a husband and father of three adult children, is far from wasteful. Frugal is how he describes himself. The clothes he’s wearing all came from a charity shop; his truck was bought with 290, 000 kilometers driven.
“Why break something down, why melt something down, if it still has value?” he asks. An old oil-field pipe might be melted down and turned into a car bumper, but it still takes an amount of power to finish the complete change. Why not leave it as a steel pipe? Why not turn it into a fence post on a farm? The only cost is transport.
American industrial facilities create and throw about 7.6 billion tons of unwanted industrial materials every year. For the moment, Carson’s unique business finds new lives for millions of kilograms of industrial waste every year.
1. What is paragraph two mainly about?| A．Carson’s school lessons. |
| B．Carson’s journey to Colorado. |
| C．The start of Carson’s business. |
| D．The serious waste of materials. |
| A．Marketing wastes to people in need. |
| B．Breaking down the wasted goods. |
| C．Manufacturing industrial products. |
| D．Recycling the thrown-away stuffs. |
| A．Economical. | B．Poetic. | C．Tough. | D．Risky. |
| A．Well began, half done. |
| B．Innovative thinking counts. |
| C．One is never too old to learn. |
| D．Hard work will pay back. |
5 . Coral reefs are the rainforests of the ocean. They exist on vast scales and are equally important havens of biodiversity. Reefs occupy 0.1% of the oceans.
Corals are useful to people. Without the protection which reefs afford from crashing waves, low-lying islands such as the Maldives would have flooded long ago, and a billion people would lose food or income. However, reefs are under threat from rising sea temperatures. Heat causes the algae (海藻) with which corals are living together to generate toxins (毒素) that force those coral to leave.
Research groups around the world are coming up with plans of action to see if that will help, such as identifying naturally heat-resistant corals and cross-breeding such corals to create a new type.
Doubters doubt humanity will get its act together in time to make much difference.
| A．This can cause a coral’s death. |
| B．But there are grounds for optimism. |
| C．And they host a quarter of marine species. |
| D．Coral’s global ecosystem services are worth up to $10trn a year. |
| E．This mix of natural activity and human intervention is important. |
| F．This research can also be brought to bear on trying to save entire ecosystems. |
| G．However, the assisted evolution of corals does not meet with universal enthusiasm. |
6 . A Plastic Ocean is a film to make you think. Think, and then act. We need to take action on our dependence on plastic. We’ve been producing plastic in huge quantities. Drinking bottles, shopping bags and even clothes are made with plastic.
The film begins as a journey to film the largest animal on the planet, the blue whale. But during the journey the filmmakers make the shocking discovery of a huge, thick layer of plastic floating in the Indian Ocean.
In the film there are beautiful shots of the seas and marine life.
We make a shocking amount of plastic. Over 300 million tons of plastic are produced every year, and at least 8 million of those are thrown into the oceans. The results are very harmful, but it isn’t too late to change.
| A．It has raised public concern all over the world. |
| B．In conclusion, we only have one earth to live on. |
| C．But the film doesn’t only show the negative side. |
| D．These are contrasted with plastic rubbish thrown around. |
| E．Once you’ve seen the film, you’ll realize it is time to do our part. |
| F．This causes them to travel globally to look at other affected areas. |
| G．We live in a world full of plastic, and only a small amount is recycled. |
1. 保护环境的重要性；
2. 如何低碳生活；
3. 发出倡议。
注意：
1. 词数80左右；
2. 可适当增加细节，以使行文连贯。
Dear fellow students,
_______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
8 . Research has found that using wood for construction instead of concrete and steel can reduce emissions. But Tim Searchinger at Princeton University says many of these studies are based on the false foundation that harvesting wood is carbon neutral (碳中和). “Only a small percentage of the wood gets into a timber (木料) product, and a part of that gets into a timber product that can replace concrete and steel in a building,” he says. Efficiencies vary in different countries, but large amounts of a harvested tree are left to be divided into parts, used in short-lived products like paper or burned for energy, all of which generate emissions.
In a report for the World Resources Institute, Searchinger and his colleagues have modelled how using more wood for construction would affect emissions between 2010 and 2050, accounting for the emissions from harvesting the wood. They considered various types of forests and parts of wood going towards construction. They also factored in the emissions savings from replacing concrete and steel.
Under some circumstances, the researchers found significant emissions reductions. But each case required what they considered an unrealistically high portion of the wood going towards construction, as well as rapid growth only seen in warmer places, like Brazil. In general, they found a large increase in global demand for wood would probably lead to rising emissions for decades. Accounting for emissions in this way, the researchers reported in a related paper that increasing forest harvests between 2010 and 2050 would add emissions equal to roughly 10 percent of total annual emissions.
Ali Amiri at Aalto University in Finland says the report’s conclusions about emissions from rising demand are probably correct, but the story is different for wood we already harvest. “Boosting the efficiency of current harvests and using more wood for longer-lived purposes than paper would cut emissions,” he says. “We cannot just say we should stop using wood.”
1. What is wrong with previous researches according to Searchinger?| A．They got wrong statistics. | B．They used an incorrect concept. |
| C．They included too many factors. | D．They were applied in limited countries. |
| A．The process of the new research. | B．The background of the new study. |
| C．The challenge of the new research. | D．The achievements of the new study. |
| A．When wood grows slowly. |
| B．When wood is largely used to make paper. |
| C．When wood is largely used in construction in countries like Brazil. |
| D．When wood is largely harvested in countries like Brazil. |
| A．Favorable. | B．Doubtful. | C．Critical. | D．Objective. |
Rising sea levels are threatening coastlines in China, for example in
The good news is
The development of electric vehicles is particularly
Ecological civilization has become the cornerstone (基石) of China’s long-term development strategy, much like climate action is
10 . In 2022, campaign group Fashion Revolution Chelsea dye a garden for its Chelsea Flower Show presentation. An ancient craft, natural dyeing is a practice whose time has come again, with hand tie-dyed fashion also making a comeback in recent years.
The revival has been encouraged by Covid lockdowns, “which allowed people to explore the craft at home, says natural-dyeing enthusiast and teacher Susan Dye. It’s unlikely, though, that the practice would have caught on in quite the same way if not for a continually growing discomfort about fashion’s heavy footprint. From carbon emissions to animal cruelty, fashion is under considerable inspection. “Put it this way, 97% of dyes used in the industry are petrochemically (石油化学产品) based,” says sustainable fashion consultant Jackie Andrews, who helped advise the UN Ethical Fashion Initiative. We’ve got net zero targets which mean we’re going to have to remove all those petrochemicals from the manufacturing cycle.
Fashion is a huge polluter. According to the UN Environment Program, the industry is responsible for up to one-fifth of all industrial water pollution—due to the fact that most clothes today are produced in poorer countries where regulation is weak and enforcement weaker. Waste water is dumped directly into rivers and streams, poisoning the land as well as the water sources of people and animals who rely on them.
It’s easy to see why someone who cares about people, planet and animals, as well as clothes, might turn to natural plant dyeing. From the beauty of the raw materials—often wild plants-to the property of only bonding with natural fiber like cotton and linen (亚麻布) from the minor footprint of recycling old clothing that has grayed or faded over time to the vibrant and long-lasting dyeing results, plant dyeing feels like a quiet act of rebellion. This is why, while beginners start with simply changing their clothes’ color, new worlds open. Many of today’s natural dyers grow their own dye plants, run local community workshops, and advocate for change in industrialized fashion systems and beyond.
1. What is the main reason for the growing discomfort mentioned in paragraph 2?| A．The adoption of petrochemical-based dyes |
| B．The disturbing consequences of the fashion industry. |
| C．The fashion industry’s focus on luxurious designs. |
| D．The challenging net zero targets to be achieved. |
| A．By making a comparison. | B．By listing numbers |
| C．By giving examples. | D．By introducing a new topic |
| A．A protest against turning to natural fiber. |
| B．An objection to recycling old clothing |
| C．A resistance to vibrant colors in natural dyeing |
| D．A struggle for a sustainable fashion industry |
| A．The Environmental Impact of Natural Dyeing |
| B．The Return of Natural Dyeing with Ethical Appeal |
| C．Fashion Revolution’s Dye Garden Presentation |
| D．The Petrochemical Dye Industry and Its Challenges |
