1 . Earth Hour is organized by the World Wide Fund for Nature. It's a big event usually at the end of March every year. On this evening, people “go dark”.
It's true that turning off lights for just one hour saves only a small amount of power.
But on another level, a large number of people’s acting together sends a powerful message to governments and companies.
The logo(标识) of Earth Hour is “60+” .The number 60 is for the 60 minutes of Earth Hour.
| A．But this is only the beginning. |
| B．Earth Hour represents every hour of every day. |
| C．After all, everyone has to answer for what they have done. |
| D．Besides turning off the lights, people get involved in other events. |
| E．It pushes them to take urgent measures by making changes to policies. |
| F．That is, they switch off all unnecessary lights at the same time for one hour. |
| G．The plus invites people to continue their action even after Earth Hour is finished. |
In downtown Xiamen, Fujian Province, a 6-meter-high mound(土堆) that stretches for 60 to 70 meters stands in contrast to the high-rise
The blue-tailed bee-eater, or Merops philippinus, is known for its colorful plumage and on the Chinese mainland it
In recent years, with improved environmental conditions in Xiamen and the city government’s commitment
In 2015, the center
The birds,
The 13-year experience of preserving blue-tailed bee-eaters has given the center a grasp of their habits and made the Wuyuanwan Nature Reserve a stable home for them.
3 . Chaudhary weaves (编织) together lengths of rope and grass collected from the nearby riverbank in her village, skillfully shaping the materials into a gift box while instructing a group of women to follow suit.
The ropes being used were once the lifeline for mountain climbers tackling Nepal’s mountains and were then cast away. Diverse measures to remove such discarded materials have rocketed since 2019, when the government launched Clean Mountain Campaign.Around 140,000 tons of waste were collected on Mt. Everest alone, which were handled accordingly, either securely buried or recycled.
Some waste is now finding fresh life, transformed by skilled hands like Chaudhary’s into items to sell, thanks to an initiative led by Acharya, an owner of a waste processing business and an advocate for sustainable waste management. She has been working with the cleaning campaign, aiming at mountains like Mt. Everest.
“Metal waste goes through the recycling process, but we weren’t capable of recycling these ropes and cooking gas cans,” Acharya says. It didn’t occur to her that the waste which couldn’t be recycled could be reused until she met Rai at an art exhibition and a solution emerged.
Rai, a businessman dealing in craftworks, helped connect Acharya with Chaudhary and her team of craftswomen in hopes of unlocking the economic value of the mountain waste. With flexible hours, the project gives the craftswomen an opportunity to earn money even as they maintain their household responsibilities.
“While this seems insignificant compared to waste in the mountains, it’s a start. We can’t supply sufficient raw material with waste sorting and cleaning processes taking plenty of time and money,” Acharya says, desperate to expand the program to involve more women and treat more waste. But progress has been slow. “We need investment to mechanize the cleaning and processing of waste in the initial phase to provide the crafting team with enough materials to meet their demand,” she adds.
1. What were the ropes mentioned in paragraph 2 initially intended as?| A．Tools for tying up weeds. | B．Villagers’ basic necessities of life. |
| C．Raw materials tor unique artworks. | D．Life-saving devices for mountaineers. |
| A．A journey to the rural area. | B．An encounter with a trader. |
| C．Information from a product launch. | D．Attendance at an academic conference. |
| A．Train more senior technicians. | B．Obtain a better reputation. |
| C．Drop waste washing procedures. | D．Bring in advanced equipment. |
| A．Chaudhary: An Eco-Minded Folk Artist |
| B．Nepali Women Are Turning Garbage into Crafts |
| C．Clean Mountain Campaign Has Already Taken Effect |
| D．A Headache: Mt. Everest Is Heavily Littered with Waste |
4 . Sri Nihal Tammana, age 13, of Edison, New Jersey, was named a winner of the 2022 Gloria Barron Prize for Young Heroes. The Barron Prize annually honors 25 outstanding young leaders who have made a significant positive impact on people, their communities, and the environment.
Nihal founded Recycle My Battery to promote and facilitate the recycling of used batteries. His nonprofit places free battery recycling bins(箱子)and educates young people and adults about battery recycling. In just three years he has built a team of more than 250 student volunteers across the globe who have recycled nearly 200,000 batteries and educated millions of people. Nihal learned at age 10 that 15 billion batteries are thrown away each year and that most end up in landfills(垃圾填埋地)where they pollute groundwater, harm the ecosystem, and can cause catastrophic fires. Inspired to tackle the problem, he began collecting used batteries from his community. He put them in free recycling bins at stores like Staples until he was told he was bringing too many and had to stop.
Undeterred, he reached out for help from Call2Recycle, the largest battery recycling nonprofit in North America. Call2Recycle agreed to assist and provided recycling bins for free, which were placed in schools, libraries, and other public places. Nihal’s organization now operates across the U.S. and is expanding to other countries including Canada, Switzerland, and India. “Earth gives us so much — oxygen, food, water — everything! So it’s important that we give something back when we can,” says Nihal.
The Barron Prize was founded in 2001 by author T. A. Barron. “Nothing is more inspiring than stories about heroic people who have truly made a difference to the world,” says T. A. Barron. “And we need our heroes today more than ever. Not celebrities, but heroes — people whose character can inspire us all. That is the purpose of the Barron Prize: to shine the spotlight on these amazing young people so that their stories will inspire others.”
1. What does Recycle My Battery intend to do?| A．Protect the earth from used batteries. | B．Promote used batteries across the globe. |
| C．Make money by collecting used batteries. | D．Stop people throwing used batteries away. |
| A．Undiscouraged. | B．Unprepared. | C．Unsurprised. | D．Uninterested. |
| A．By making it go global. | B．By offering free recycling bins. |
| C．By providing financial support. | D．By buying more used batteries. |
| A．The importance of recycling batteries. |
| B．The impact of batteries on the environment. |
| C．The achievements of the Barron Prize winners. |
| D．The inspiring story of a young environmentalist. |
5 . The scientists who re-engineered the plastic-eating enzyme(酶) PETase have now created a new enzyme called “cocktail” , which can digest plastic up to six times faster.
PETase breaks down PET back into its building blocks, creating an opportunity to recycle plastic and reduce plastic pollution. PET is the most common thermoplastic(热塑性塑料) used to make single-use drinks bottles, which takes hundreds of years to break down in the environment, but PETase can shorten this time to days. The initial discovery set up the prospect of a revolution in plastic recycling, creating a potential low-energy solution to tackle plastic waste.
Now, the same trans-Atlantic team have combined PETase and its “partner”, a second enzyme called MHETase, to generate much bigger improvements: simply mixing PETase with MHETase doubled the speed of PET breakdown, and engineering a connection between the two enzymes to create a “super-enzyme”, increased this activity by a further three times.
The team was co-led by the scientists who engineered PETase, Professor John McGeehan and Dr Gregg Beckham. Professor McGeehan said: “Gregg and I were chatting about how PETase attacks the surface of the plastics and MHETase chops things up further, so it seemed natural to see if we could use them together. Our first experiments showed that they did work better together, so we decided to physically link them. It took a great deal of work, but it was worth the effort — we were delighted to see that our new enzyme is up to three times faster than the separate enzymes.”
The original PETase enzyme discovery indicated the first hope that a solution to the global plastic pollution problem might be within grasp, though PETase alone is not yet fast enough to handle the tons of PET bottles. Combining it with a second enzyme, and finding together they work even faster, means another leap forward has been taken towards finding a solution to plastic waste. PETase and the new combined MHETase-PETase both work by digesting PET plastic. This allows for plastics to be made and reused endlessly, reducing our reliance on fossil(化石) resources.
1. What can we learn about “cocktail” from the text?| A．It doubles the breakdown of plastics. |
| B．It takes hundreds of years to break down. |
| C．It contributes to breaking down plastic quickly. |
| D．It deals with the plastic waste three times faster. |
| A．A new study of PET. | B．The breakdown of PET. |
| C．The discovery of PETase. | D．The functions of PETase. |
| A．Co-leading the trans-Atlantic team. | B．Combining PETase and MHETase. |
| C．Attacking the surface of the plastics. | D．Talking about conducting experiments. |
| A．PET pollution is no longer a difficult problem to deal with. |
| B．New enzyme is speeding up our reliance on fossil resources. |
| C．MHETase-PETase makes the world free from plastic pollution. |
| D．Plastic-eating enzyme “cocktail” promises new hope for plastic waste. |
6 . How to Reduce Gift Wrap Waste
Wrapping paper may have “paper” in its name, but that doesn’t automatically mean it can be recycled.
Reuse what you have.
Use different materials.
Ask for better paper. Shops store what customers want, and recyclability should be a top priority, so let that be known when you’re out shopping. As explained by Simon Ellin, CEO of the Recycling Association, a trade body that represents about 90 waste management companies and paper merchants in the United Kingdom, “It’s a campaign we’ve been on all year — do you really need to design a non-paper wrapping paper? Make paper with recycling in mind!”
| A．Try zero waste. |
| B．Shop with that in mind, too. |
| C．You don’t have to choose shining paper to decorate a present. |
| D．In fact, many types of wrapping paper cannot due to their materials. |
| E．When wrapping paper is extremely thin, it has few good quality fibers for recycling. |
| F．Wrapping paper can be used many times if care is taken to unwrap it without tearing. |
| G．Having a mix of recyclable and non-recyclable papers is a real problem for companies. |
7 . A record surge in the creation of marine protected areas has taken the international community close to its goal of creating nature refuges on 17% of the world’s land and 10% of seas by 2020, according to a new UN report. Protected region snow cover more than five times the territory of the US, but the authors said this good news was often undermined by poor enforcement. Some reserves are little more than “paper parks” with little value to nature conservation. Atleast one has been turned into an industrial zone. More than 27m square kilometres of seas (7% of the total) and 20m sq km of land (15% of the total) now have protected status, according to the Protected Planet report, which was released on Sunday at the UN biodiversity conference in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt.
Almost all of the growth has been in marine regions, most notably with the creation last year of the world’s biggest protected area: the 2m sq km Ross Sea reserve, one-fifth of which is in the Antarctic. The no-fishing zone will be managed by New Zealand and the US.
“We have seen an enormous expansion in the past two years. There is now more marine protected area than terrestrial, which nobody would have predicted,” said Kathy McKinnon of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature. “I think we’ll continue to see a substantial increase, I’d guess, to at least 10% in the near future.”
The UN convention on biological diversity says it has received national commitments for an additional 4.5m sq km of land and 16m sq km of oceans to be given protected status in the next two years. This would put it on course to achieve one of the key aims of the 2010 Aichi biodiversity targets.
“This is the target with the most progress. In an ocean of bad news about biodiversity loss and eco-destruction, it is important to highlight that progress, though we still have a lot more to do to ensure not just the quantitive target but the effectiveness of the management,” said CristianaPașca Palmer, the head of UN Biodiversity.
The creation of protected areas has not been enough to halt a collapse of species and ecosystems that threatens civilisation. Since 1970 humanity has wiped out 60% of mammal, bird, fish and reptile populations, with a dangerous knock-on impact on food production, fisheries and climate stability.
Protected areas are important refuges from this wave of extinctions but many are underfunded and poorly policed. Only one in five have provided management assessments to the UN, which has raised questions about the viability of the rest.
Naomi Kingston, of UN environment world conservation monitoring centre, said: “There is a race to deliver on Aichi target 11. It is fantastic that countries are coming with more ambition, but not if it is just a number without substance.
“Some areas that have been reported to us as protected areas have been completely built over. We need datasets to define which areas are paper parks and which are real.”
Developing nations have better reporting standards because many are obliged to provide regular assessments in order to qualify for funds from the Global Environment Fund. By contrast, many wealthier nations devote few resources to monitoring.
Discussions will focus on a new, more flexible category for community land that is used by locals for both agricultural production and wildlife conservation. In Africa, Asia and Latin America, this is a model that has often helped improve biodiversity because residents — often from indigenous communities — live closely with nature and have an interest in protecting it.
1. What promotes the achievement of the goals of marine nature reserves?| A．Poor management of marine protected areas. |
| B．Loss of biodiversity and ecological destruction. |
| C．Rapid growth in the number of marine protected areas. |
| D．Commitments in the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity. |
| A．They have promoted the expansion of marine protected areas. |
| B．They have little value for nature conservation. |
| C．They all turn into industrial zones. |
| D．They will slow down the collapse of ecosystems. |
| A．NewZealand and the United States regulate fishing-ban zones. |
| B．In the near future, the number of marine refuges will increase by at least 10%. |
| C．The quantity and management quality of marine refuges are equally important. |
| D．Many countries have ambitions to achieve Aichi 11. |
| A．A recorded surge in the creation of marine protected areas. |
| B．Developing countries may receive funding from the Global Environment Facility. |
| C．The Increase of marine refuges and the views of relevant personnel. |
| D．Achieving Aichi 11 Goal. |
8 . Mark Covington, founder of the Georgia Street Community Collective in Detroit, stands in a corner of his urban farm, breathing the fresh air in the early morning.
In 2007, Covington lost his job and returned to his childhood street.
Covington started with a small community garden.
| A．But if he planted stuff, they might not. |
| B．It’s a typical morning scene at the collective. |
| C．He saw garbage piled high in vacant, abandoned lots. |
| D．Covington made the garden a little bigger to plant more. |
| E．And almost immediately neighbors began asking to participate. |
| F．He planted a garden to help feed residents and enrich their lives. |
| G．What began as an effort to remove trash has turned into a site of community. |
9 . When a heavy storm hit, residents of the floating community of Schoonschip in Amsterdam had little doubt about whether they could ride it out. They tied up their bikes and outdoor benches, and checked in with neighbors to ensure everyone had enough food and water as their neighborhood slid up and down its steel foundational pillars (支柱), rising along with the water and going back to its original position after the rain stopped.
“We feel safer in storm because we are floating,” says Siti Boelen, a Dutch television producer who moved into Schoonschip two years ago. As sea levels rise and supercharged storms cause waters to rise, floating neighborhoods offer an experiment in flood defense that could allow coastal communities to better fight against climate change.
A floating house can be constructed on any shoreline and is able to deal with rising seas by remaining on the top of the water’s surface. Unlike houseboats, which can easily be moved and relocated, floating homes are fixed to the shore and are usually connected to the local sewer (污水管道) system and power grid. They are structurally similar to houses built on land, but instead of a basement, they have a concrete hull (船体) that acts as a counterbalance, allowing them to remain stable in the water.
Severe wind and rain, or even the passing of large cruise ships, can make the buildings rock. Siti Boelen, the Schoonschip resident, says that when she first moved in, stormy weather made her think twice. “You feel it in your stomach,” she says, adding that she has gotten used to the feeling. Floating homes also require extra infrastructure and work to connect to the electricity grid and sewer system.
But the benefits may outweigh the costs. “If there are floods, it’s expected that many people will move to higher ground. But the alternative is to stay close to coastal cities and explore expansion onto the water,” says Rutger de Graaf. “If you consider that in the second half of the century, hundreds of millions of people will be displaced by sea level rise, we need to start now to increase the scale of floating developments.”
1. What did local residents think when a heavy storm hit?| A．They could get through it. |
| B．They could control the flood. |
| C．They could get some bikes after it. |
| D．They could gain enough food in it. |
| A．She has a sense of security in a storm. |
| B．She gets along well with her neighbors. |
| C．She has produced TV sets used in the storm. |
| D．She makes contributions to defending against flood. |
| A．By listing figures. | B．By giving examples. |
| C．By analyzing reasons. | D．By making comparisons. |
| A．The impacts of stormy weather. |
| B．The significance of thinking twice. |
| C．The higher costs of building houses. |
| D．The challenges faced by floating houses. |
10 . Scientists from the National University of Singapore studied how much time twins spent in natural spaces compared with each other and found that they shared a similar level of desire to be in nature.
“The reason we decided to study this in twins is that we could estimate heritability(遗传性)based on the genetic similarities in identical twins(100%)versus genetic similarities in non-identical twins(50%),” said Chia-chen Chang, who led the study. “If a trait(特性), such as the desire to be in nature, is clearly more similar between identical twins than non-identical twins, this will then suggest a trait is heritable.”
Using the TwinsUK registry, researchers surveyed 1,153 pairs of twins—identical and non-identical—about how they experienced nature. They were required to answer questions involving how frequently they visit natural spaces such as public parks and private gardens and rate their familiarity with nature. After comparing and analyzing the collected data, researchers found that identical twins were more similar to each other in their attitudes towards nature.
While previous studies have found that spending time in natural spaces improves mental well-being, this varies from person to person. For the first time, the researchers say, this study has indicated why that is by suggesting there is likely to be a genetic component in our preference for nature and our likelihood to visit natural spaces.
However, heritability declined with age, perhaps showing that environmental factors such as access to nature and green spaces bring about a love of the outdoors as one grows older. That is to say, a person's desire to be in nature and how often they experience it are influenced by both genes and personal experiences. Those who live in urban environments without access to nature could end up having a lesser appreciation of it. Hence, it's necessary that diverse urban planning is needed to provide access to natural spaces-and the benefits they offer—for all.
1. Why were twins chosen as subjects of the study?| A．To acquire more accurate results. | B．To confirm the previous studies. |
| C．To measure their gene similarity. | D．To identify their specific hobbies. |
| A．By analyzing previous data. | B．By referring to online resources. |
| C．By asking and answering questions. | D．By doing an experiment in the lab |
| A．It takes genes into consideration. | B．It takes advantage of the Internet. |
| C．It provides a new insight into the role of nature. | D．It reveals the link between nature and mental health. |
| A．One's love for nature is invariable. | B．City planning leaves much to be desired. |
| C．It may be a better choice to live in rural areas. | D．Genes are the only factor in shaping one's traits. |
