1 . Not much happens in the sleepy village of Colaton Raleigh, where almost half of the residents are retired, so local walkers were horrified when they discovered 100 ancient beech trees were cut down.
Residents in the east Devon community are saddened by the loss of the beloved trees, which were cut down by a government agency without consulting the community or council. They were located in a special conservation area and site of special scientific interest, and were home to lots of local plants and animals.
An application was made by a local landowner to the Forestry Commission, a branch of the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs. It would not comment on individual cases, but said all decisions were taken in line with its standards. Alan Pearce, a local tree manager, said, “It certainly ought to be a fairly wide consultation because it’s part of our heritage. Once they’re gone you’re talking about 200 years to regrow. The stumps (树桩) look, nearly all of them, perfectly sound and solid. I can’t see they can say they were diseased or dying. We’re meant to be planting trees, not felling (砍) them.”
He said people were “absolutely horrified”, with one walker in tears over the felling, which he suggested may have been taken to improve grassland in the nearby field.
Resident Fiona Carroll said, “Many people walk in this area as it is part of a large expanse of heathland and they are at a loss as to why this has been allowed to happen. These were valuable landscape and wildlife trees situated along an extensive ancient Devon bank. The roots had grown into large supporting structures giving many a distinctive look.”
Ewan Macdonald, a research fellow at the University of Oxford, who studies how people engage with the environment, said he was not surprised the felling had caused such an emotional reaction because of the way people connected with trees. He said, “It highlights how intrinsically (内在地) bound up things like trees, the environment and conservation are with our culture.”
1. What happened in Colaton Raleigh?| A．Half of its residents retired from their jobs. |
| B．A government agency felled 100 ancient beech trees. |
| C．The Forestry Commission made an application to cut down trees. |
| D．The felling of the trees was done to improve their living conditions. |
| A．The trees were cut down because of disease. |
| B．The local council didn’t approve of the application. |
| C．The local residents are eager to protect the environment. |
| D．The trees were cut down without consulting local villagers. |
| A．Supportive. | B．Opposed. | C．Indifferent. | D．Doubtful. |
| A．Protecting trees is protecting our culture. |
| B．The felling of trees doesn’t cause emotional reactions. |
| C．The environment, conservation, and trees are closely linked to our culture. |
| D．People’s engagement with the environment has no influence on their emotions. |
2 . As a committed citizen, I would never exchange the industrial style of my home city of Wolverhampton, UK, for a view of rolling hills and valleys, let alone rainforests or mountain peaks. For me, the glories of untamed nature feel a planet away.
Wilderness with Simon Reeve, a four-part BBC travel documentary, aims to fill this gap. Reeve and his crew seek out corners of our rapidly urbanizing globe so far relatively untouched by humanity.
Travelling across rainforests and ice fields, deserts and oceans, including the Pacific Ocean’s Coral Triangle, and Patagonia, they reveal the pressures there and how we might protect them from us.
Travel programmes have a rather worrying relationship with conservation, predicated as they are on “selling” a destination. When it comes to the places least influenced by humans, I realize that travelogues can lead to mass tourism and damage.
Happily, based on its first episode (集), Wilderness with Simon Reeve seems more about finding a balance between “right” and “wrong” kinds of tourism. In this episode, we visit the Congo basin, home to the world’s second-largest tropical forest, which stretches for more than 2 million square kilometers across central Africa. The three-week journey begins along the Republic of the Congo’s Motaba river in search of the Baku, hunter-gatherers who live in the jungle. After an old-fashioned knees-up to welcome Reeve, several young Baku men agree to take a camera as they climb 20 metres into the top of the tree. One man puts his arm into a beehive (蜂箱) and collects the honey.
This is just one example of the extraordinary nature in the Congo rainforest. For me, it showed the joy and surprise I felt learning about this region and its people, who aren’t treated as guardians of mysterious knowledge, but as an adaptable, responsible community moving with the times.
All told, the first episode is informative and entertaining. I still have reservations about the impact of such travel shows on conservation, but the series makes a strong case that the first step to preserving an ecosystem is to see its value.
1. What does the underlined word “untamed” in Paragraph I probably mean?| A．Wild. | B．Unpredictable. | C．Distinctive. | D．Complex. |
| A．To promote tourism in remote areas. |
| B．To encourage people to move to urban areas. |
| C．To show the beauty of rainforests and ice fields. |
| D．To raise awareness about the value of untouched nature. |
| A．Friendly but poor. | B．Honest and generous. |
| C．Curious but backward. | D．Adaptable and trustworthy. |
| A．An introduction to a book. | B．A review of a travel documentary. |
| C．A guidebook to a tourist destination. | D．An essay on influence of mass tourism. |
3 . Improper disposal of electronic devices can lead to negative impacts on the environment. So if you are in possession of an “old electronics” box or merely an old iPhone, consider recycling as an option. Here are some organizations worth checking out.
EcoATM
EcoATM is an automated kiosk that collects your unwanted cellphones and tablets and gives you cash for them. You'll find them by the checkout lines at various grocery store chains. It accepts devices from any era or in any condition, and offers anywhere between a few bucks to a few hundred dollars in return.
Best Buy
Best Buy offers a simple, straightforward recycling program. You can take your old phone to any of its retail stores and it'll take care of the entire recycling process for you. Best Buy will even give you a gift card for the value of the device you give them.
Call2Recycle
Call2Recycle is one of the largest recycling programs in the United States. The company collects used smartphones and batteries and has them either recycled or refurbished (翻新) for future use. It partners with various retailers to provide recycling services in stores like Lowe’s, The Home Depot and other smaller businesses.
Eco Cell
Eco Cell takes a unique approach to recycling phones. The program collects used smartphones and other gadgets for recycling through local zoos and other wildlife organizations. It then gives what it makes from recycling or refurbishing the devices back to those organizations in order to continue their work.
1. What do EcoATM and Best Buy have in common?| A．They are based in grocery stores. |
| B．They offer a reward for recycling. |
| C．They collect various kinds of devices. |
| D．They refurbish recycled items. |
| A．Call2Recycle | B．Eco Cell | C．Best Buy | D．EcoATM |
| A．The variety of items it recycles. |
| B．Its marketing strategies. |
| C．Its pricing policies and structures. |
| D．Its dedication to preserving wildlife. |
4 . Plastic is everywhere in our environment, especially in the ocean. Actually, a large amount of plastic waste is floating around the world’s oceans today, waiting to be eaten by some fish or oyster, and finally perhaps by one of us.
Because plastic wasn’t invented until the late 19th century, and its production only really took off around 1950, we have a mere 9.2 billion tons of the stuff to deal with. Of that, more than 6.9 billion tons have become waste. And of that waste, a surprising 6.3 billion tons never made it to a recycling bin. No one knows how much unrecycled plastic waste ends up in the ocean. In 2015, Jenna Jambeck, an engineering professor, caught everyone’s attention with a rough estimate: between 5.3 million and 14 million tons of plastic waste each year just come from coastal regions.
Meanwhile, ocean plastic is estimated to kill millions of marine (海洋的) animals every year. Nearly 700 species, including endangered ones, are known to have been affected by it. Some are stuck by abandoned things made of plastic. Many more are probably harmed invisibly. Marine species of all sizes, from zooplankton to whales, now eat microplastics. We are closely related to oceans so the consequences of throwing plastic away may return to affect us some day.
“This isn’t a problem where we don’t know what the solution is,” says Ted Siegler, a Vermont resource economist, “We know how to pick up garbage. Anyone can do it. We know how to deal with it. We know how to recycle.” It’s a matter of building the necessary systems, he says, ideally before the ocean turns into a thin soup of plastic.
1. What’s the function of the first paragraph?| A．To prove plastic was difficult to invent. | B．To tell us what marine animals like eating. |
| C．To call on us to protect marine animals. | D．To introduce the topic of the passage. |
| A．By listing figures. | B．By giving examples. |
| C．By analyzing reasons. | D．By making comparisons. |
| A．results | B．functions | C．causes | D．aims |
| A．Some people don’t know the solution of plastics waste. |
| B．It’s time to take measures to deal with plastic waste. |
| C．Plastics will turn the ocean into a soup of plastic. |
| D．People should avoid using plastics to protect the ocean. |
1. 节能必要性；
2. 具体做法；
3. 词数80字左右。
Save energy in the home
___________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________While there is growing consumer
According to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), in 2020 over 12 million tons of furniture
With growing calls for sustainability, many brands are announcing to change though it remains
7 . A shocking 53.6 million metric tons of electronic waste was discarded last year, a new UN-backed report has revealed. The report shows that e-waste is up by 21% from five years ago. This isn’t surprising, considering how many more people are adopting new technology and updating devices regularly to have the latest versions, but the report also shows that national collection and recycling strategies are nowhere close to matching consumption rates.
E-waste contains materials including copper (铜), iron, gold and silver, which the report gives a conservative value of $ 57 billion. But most are thrown away or burned rather than being collected for recycling. Precious metals in waste are estimated to be worth $ 14 billion, but only $ 4 billion-worth is recovered at the moment.
While the number of countries with national e-waste policies has grown from 61 to 78 since 2014, there is little encouragement to obey and a mere 17% of collected items are recycled. If recycling does occur, it’s often under dangerous conditions, such as burning circuit boards to recover copper, which “releases highly poisonous metals” and harms the health of workers.
The report found that Asia has the highest amounts of waste overall, producing 24.9 million metric tons (MMT), followed by Europe at 12 MMT, Africa at 2.9 MMT, and Oceania at 0.7 MMT.
But whose responsibility is it? Are governments in charge of setting up collection and recycling points, or should companies be responsible for recycling the goods they produce? It goes both ways. Companies do need to be held accountable by government regulations and have incentives to design products that are easily repaired. At the same time, governments need to make it easy for citizens to access collection points and deal with their broken electronics in a convenient way. Otherwise, they may turn to the easiest option — the landfill.
1. What does the underlined word “discarded” most probably mean?| A．increased | B．distributed | C．thrown away | D．consumed |
| A．The functions of policies. | B．The great damage to environment. |
| C．The change of consumption rates. | D．The urgency of recovering e-waste. |
| A．It does harm to the workers’ health. | B．It lacks national policy support. |
| C．It hardly makes profits. | D．It takes too much time. |
| A．New technology should be used to update old devices. |
| B．Governments and companies should take responsibilities. |
| C．Non-poisonous metals had better be used in e-device. |
| D．Citizens must play a key role in recycling e-waste. |
Air pollution has largely gone under-reported by the media, yet despite
Then how can we measure and end such a problem? The answer is
A new book for children
Last Friday, Juniper went to
10 . In a world-record effort to help save a valuable sea creature, Australian scientists have released hundreds of baby seahorses into the wild. The tiny seahorses are endangered, and the scientists hope the new seahorses will help their numbers grow.
Seahorses get their name because they look a bit like horses. They aren’t great swimmers, even though they’re fish. They often use their tails to hold onto something in the water. They mostly live in warm, shallow waters around the world. They are often found in coral reefs, in beds of seagrass, and areas where rivers empty into the sea. Seahorses form an important part of the ocean’s food chain. They eat tiny sea creatures and are eaten by bigger sea animals.
Many kinds of seahorses are often threatened by the human actions. Sometimes they’re caught and sold as pets. They are also caught by accident when people are trying to catch other fish.
To begin the project, scientists collected three pregnant seahorses in January. Those seahorses were brought back to the aquarium (水族馆) in Sydney. After the babies were born, the scientists kept them there for five months, feeding the baby seahorses shrimps (小虾) to help them grow strong. Scientist Mitchell Brennan says, “They don’t have a stomach, so they have to eat constantly.”
About a month before the young seahorses were released, the scientists created eight underwater “hotels” for them. The hotels look like cages, providing a safe place for the seahorses to develop. Putting the hotels into the sea early allowed the cages to be covered with small sea life that can help provide food for the seahorses.
This is the fifth time the scientists have released seahorses into the area, and this time was a record. Around 380 seahorses were released. The researchers put tiny tags (标记) under the skin of many of the seahorses to help track them in the future.
1. What can be learned about seahorses from paragraph 2?| A．They look exactly like horses. | B．They have a gift for swimming. |
| C．They mostly live in the deep sea. | D．They feed on small sea creatures. |
| A．The types of the seahorses. | B．Living conditions the seahorses need. |
| C．Areas the seahorses live in. | D．Dangers the seahorses face. |
| A．To differ the project from the former ones. |
| B．To avoid danger the seahorses may face. |
| C．To offer food to the seahorses. |
| D．To help track the seahorses in the future. |
| A．A New Study on Endangered Seahorses |
| B．Underwater “Hotels” for Baby Seahorses |
| C．A Record Number of Baby Seahorses Were Released |
| D．New Methods of Finding Endangered Seahorses |
