1 . In the rich countries of the West, the electric vehicle revolution is well underway. Climate-conscious consumers drive Teslas or Polestars for reasons of morality and fashion. Poorer countries are also experiencing a wave of electrified trend. In Bangladesh, electric three-wheeler taxis, known as tuk-tuks, are rapidly replacing gas-powered ones on the streets. Such electric vehicles are climate friendly, cost effective, and help reduce air pollution.
Yet a glance under the hood (引擎盖) of these vehicles reveals a poisonous secret: each tuk-tuk runs on five massive lead-acid batteries, containing almost 300 pounds of lead in total. Every year and a half or so, when those batteries need to be replaced and recycled, about 60 pounds of lead leak into the environment. Battery recycling, often at small-scale unregulated factories, is a highly profitable but deadly business.
Lead is dangerous, and any exposure to it is harmful to human health. Lead that has entered the environment hurts people on an extraordinary scale. The numerous ways lead enters air, water, soil, and homes across the developing world — and the enormous damage it does to human health, wealth, and welfare — causes one of the biggest environmental crises in the world yet receives little attention.
The World Bank estimates that lead kills 5. 5 million people per year, which would make it a bigger global killer than AIDS, malaria, diabetes, and road traffic deaths combined. On top of the shocking deaths, the social burden of lead poisoning is extraordinary, as is its contribution to global inequality — our research on the cognitive effects of lead poisoning suggests that it may explain about one-fifth of the educational achievement gap between rich and poor countries.
But unlike many challenges faced by developing countries, lead poisoning is a problem that is fixable with some attention and a relatively modest financial investment. Better monitoring, research, and rules can help protect children all over the world from the dreadful effects of lead poisoning and reduce the massive global costs it brings.
1. How does the author describe the lead problem in paragraph 2?| A．By making a comparison. | B．By analyzing hidden causes. |
| C．By listing convincing numbers. | D．By explaining its working principle. |
| A．Lead enters rich countries in various ways. |
| B．Lead poisoning may make poor societies poorer. |
| C．Exposure to lead doesn’t necessarily harm someone. |
| D．Lead leaking has caused great panic in both countries. |
| A．Fixing these used batteries. | B．Putting certain effort and money. |
| C．Prohibiting the illegal use of lead. | D．Reducing the cost of recycling lead. |
| A．The Impacts of Lead Poisoning on Human Health |
| B．The Outcomes of Using Electric Vehicles |
| C．The Ways to Solve Lead Problem |
| D．The Global Lead Poisoning Crisis |
2 . Dry lightning(雷电)can still be harmful even when conditions aren’t so dry, said a study published in Geophysical Research Letters last month. Dry lightning during little to no rainfall was previously thought to cause wildfire danger only with less than 2.5mm of rain in a day. A Washington State University-led study of wildfires in the US West found dry lightning caused wildfires despite up to 7.7 mm of rain.
“The rainfall amounts we recorded should help provide a better understanding of just how much rain can cause a fire risk,” said Dmitri Kalashnikov, lead author of the study.
The researchers analyzed(分析)cases on more than 4,600 naturally caused fires from 2015 to 2020. They matched 3,726 of those to the lightning strikes that likely started them with the help of National Lightning Detection Network.
The study found that 15.3% of those were holdover fires which burn without smoke, bringing about over a hundred fires each year. Analyzing the rainfall amounts around the time of the lightning strikes showed greater rainfall than previously thought among the earlier found fires ranging from 1.7 mm to 4.6 mm.
While humans still cause most fires either by accident or on purpose, lightning-caused wildfires burn the most areas. Nearly 70% of the wildfire-burned land in the West was from lightning-caused fires according to the study. For example, the largest wildfire burn area in California history took place in August 2020 after dry lightning caused many wildfires at once.
Dry lightning can also start wildfires in places that are hard for firefighters to reach. This study found the places where holdover fires happened repeatedly were in the forested mountains of the Southwest as well as the middle and southern Rocky Mountains. Holdover fires cause the problem because they are so hard to notice.
1. The new study found dry lightning can still cause wildfires with a daily rainfall of __________.| A．7.7 mm | B．8.0mm | C．9.4mm | D．10.2mm |
| A．The finding of the research. | B．The number of the cases. |
| C．The process of the study. | D．The designers of the test. |
| A．They are difficult to notice. | B．The fire service is short-handed. |
| C．Campers often smoke there. | D．The locals fail to call firefighters. |
| A．A history textbook. | B．A science magazine. |
| C．A course plan. | D．A book review. |
3 . A Swedish company came up with a creative and cheap way to clean up its streets: to hire birds. Crows, especially, have been trained to collect cigarette butts (烟头) off roadways and put them in a machine that rewards the clever birds.
The pilot project called Corvid Cleaning comes from The Keep Sweden Tidy Foundation and aims to lower the cost of street cleaning in the city of Sodertalje.
Founder Christian Gunther-Hansen thought crows would be the best choice because they are very clever. “They are easier to teach and there is also a higher chance for them to learn from each other,” he told Swedish news agency TT. “At the same time, they have a lower risk of eating any rubbish by mistake”.
The birds are trained through a step-by-step process to pick up rubbish and place it into a machine that offers them food.
Tomas Thernstrom, a waste expert for the Sodertalje Municipality, said one of the most interesting things about the project was that crows could be taught to pick up cigarette butts but humans can’t learn not to throw them on the ground in the first place.
1. Why did the Swedish company prefer to choose crows instead of other birds to collect cigarette butts?| A．Because crows are clever. |
| B．Because crows like eating cigarette butts. |
| C．Because there are plenty of crows in Sweden. |
| D．Because people there are interested in crows. |
| A．punishes | B．discovers | C．searches | D．awards |
| A．To train crows to collect cigarette butts. |
| B．To set up the Keep Sweden Tidy Foundation. |
| C．To lower the costs of street cleaning. |
| D．To make the Keep Sweden Tidy Foundation famous. |
| A．It’s difficult to train crows to pick up rubbish on the ground. |
| B．It’s difficult to stop people from throwing away rubbish everywhere. |
| C．It’s interesting to train crows to pick up rubbish on the ground. |
| D．People who throw away rubbish everywhere are not as clever as crows. |
4 . The sound of leaves underfoot is usually associated with autumn. But this year, it was the soundtrack to summer walks across Europe, as maximum temperature records fell and the continent suffered its worst drought in 500 years.
The drought had been building for months after a dry winter and spring, but it was worse by a series of fierce heatwaves over the summer, says Sim on Parry at the UK Centre for Ecology &Hydrology. In France, nuclear power plants were forced to reduce their output as low river flows meant there wasn’t enough water to cool their reactors. Water levels on the Rhine river dropped so far that ships loaded with goods in Germany and the Netherlands, including coal and petrol, were unable to travel. Besides, farmers saw crops wither(枯萎). Harvests of soya-beans and sunflower seeds were predicted to fall by between12 and 16 percent.
This was a crisis caused in large part by climate change, says Richard Allan, who is also at the University of Reading. “Warming due to human-caused climate change made this event much more extreme,” he says. Studies suggest that the drought was made at least 20 times more likely by global warming.
However, that missing rainfall ends up somewhere, says Peter Gleick at the Pacific Institute in California. This year’s disastrous floods in countries including Australia and Pakistan are the “flip side” of the droughts, he says. “The droughts and the extreme floods that we are seeing are tied together, and are part and parcel of the broader challenge of climate change,” says Gleick.
In the wake of a drought, it is critical that nature gets time to recover. But for Europe, this was the second severe drought in four years. “My grass has already recovered from this summer... but if I had a tree that survived it, that would take 10 years or more to get back to a normal state,” says Niko Wanders at Utrecht University in the Netherlands.
1. What is the author’s purpose in mentioning the sound?| A．To show the seasonal cycle. | B．To describe the beauty of autumn. |
| C．To emphasize the dry weather. | D．To clarify trees’ survival mode. |
| A．The reduction of river water. | B．The duration(持续)of the drought. |
| C．The causes of various losses. | D．The consequences of the disaster. |
| A．Expanding climate monitoring. | B．Improving human behavior. |
| C．Promoting natural restoration. | D．Balancing water distribution. |
| A．Conservative. | B．Unclear. | C．Concerned. | D．Hopeful. |
5 . Want to help fight global warming? Take off your tie, says the Italian health ministry. It has urged employers to let their staff dress casually at work in the summer so that the air conditioning can be turned down.
“Taking your tie off immediately lowers the body temperature by 2 or 3 degrees centigrade,” the ministry said in a statement. “Allowing a more sensible use of air conditioning brings about electricity savings and protects the environment.”
It called on all public and private offices to let employees wear no tie during heatwaves like the one that has brought Africa-like temperatures to many parts of Italy this week.
The move reacts to a similar action from Italy’s biggest oil group, ENI, which told its staff earlier this month they need not wear a tie at work. The tie makers, however, were left hot under the collar.
“Italy confirms (证实) that it is a strange country,” Flavio Cima said angrily in a letter to financial daily IL Sole~24ORE under the headline: “I, tie maker, am responsible for global warming.”
“We can now happily continue with our lifestyle, using cars, consuming fuel, heating and cooling our homes at leisure. On one condition: we should not wear a tie while we do so,” he wrote.
“I should have listened to my friends and become an oil producer instead.”
Italy is one of the European Union’s worst performers on the pollution front and is among the EU countries expected to exceed (超出) their greenhouse gas emission (排放) targets.
1. What’s the purpose of the move of taking off ties?| A．To dress casually. | B．To fight global warming. |
| C．To keep the body temperature. | D．To improve working conditions. |
| A．ENI. | B．Flavio Cima. |
| C．A financial daily. | D．The Italian health ministry. |
| A．Angry. | B．Speechless. |
| C．Delighted. | D．Puzzled. |
| A．He stands by the oil group. | B．He agrees with the ministry. |
| C．He admits his responsibility. | D．He argues against taking off ties. |
6 . Depleted forests are never out of the headlines, but do you know that several tech-led techniques are being employed to improve reforestation and bring these lungs of nature, a key source of oxygen in the atmosphere, back to life? Nature news website, Mongabay, recently devoted a mini-series to exploring the newest technological solutions that support worldwide reforestation efforts, but not without pointing out that reforestation efforts often have weaknesses.
This Mongabay review speaks frankly about the blemishes of labor-intensive reforestation efforts as poor planning leads to underreported tree planting outcomes. For example, perhaps trees were planted where they didn’t suit the chosen habitats.
According to Mongabay, the challenge is to match rising demand for restoration with ecologically sound, scalable (可扩展的) reforestation methods. “Scale is the biggest challenge to restoration and reforestation projects worldwide,” said Charlotte Mills, chief ecologist at AirSeed Technologies in Australia. The good news is that new tech solutions can help make tree planting at scale easier, faster and more successful.
For instance, solar-powered, seed-planting robots, able to plant up to 600 trees in a morning, are being carried out by conservationists working in the Peruvian Amazon. Drones (无人机) are employed to drop seeds in precise areas, especially at remote and difficult-to-access sites. One company operating them is Mast Reforestation, a Seattle-based one working on North America’s conifer (针叶树) forests destroyed by logging, insects and wildfire.
The Globe and Mail reports on how Canadian start-up, Flash Forest, uses drones that fire seeds at a high speed into the soil. It has a great goal to go beyond changing forestry to slow down climate change and finally conserve ecological diversity.
Sending people out on field monitoring to assess the health of new trees which take years to mature is time-consuming and costly. Here, satellites are stepping up to provide large-scale data sets over time on how huge reforested sites are going. Food giant Nestle announced in April 2023 that it’s working to monitor its reforestation efforts long-term using satellites.
1. What does the underlined word “blemishes” in Paragraph 2 mean?| A．Dangers. | B．Disadvantages. | C．Features. | D．Results. |
| A．To criticize the underdeveloped technologies. |
| B．To tell the rising demand for restoration. |
| C．To call on practicable reforestation methods. |
| D．To show the trouble with global reforestation. |
| A．Preserving biodiversity. | B．Making a change to forestry. |
| C．Dropping seeds at remote areas. | D．Driving drones at high speeds. |
| A．Trees Are Suffering | B．Forests Are Recovering |
| C．Technology for Trees | D．Technique for Challenges |
7 . Plant a tree!
What’s causing global warming? Is it man-made? Or are temperatures simply changing naturally? Whatever the case, we can at least try to slow things down. But how?
The Wilderness Project has an idea.
Now, lots of people all over the world have already been planting more trees. In fact, if everyone plants one tree, just one, it will do great good to our environment.
So, what can you do to help?
So, go on, plant a tree…and save the earth!
| A．Maybe you can buy a young tree to grow |
| B．They suggest that we should plant more trees |
| C．Another question is how quickly the sea level will rise |
| D．Many countries are calling on people to plant more trees |
| E．What’s more, they improve human health by producing oxygen (氧气) |
| F．He was nine when he came up with the idea of planting trees around the world |
| G．Farmers don’t want to go and help them plant more trees |
8 . The world’s first 3D-printed wood log hive (蜂箱) is a new project developed by the Lacrima Foundation in Edinburgh to reduce the troubling decline of honey bee populations around the world.
The Lacrima Foundation is a charity that is “committed to the conservation and protection of one of the Earth’s most important inhabitant.” The charity teamed up with beekeepers in Europe to work towards a rewilding approach that would offer bees a natural nest habitat and, in turn, create resilience (复原力) among bee communities.
Honey bees are one of the most important pollinators (授粉者), and although they may seem small and insignificant, they are vital for the production of our food — we couldn’t eat without them! However, in recent years, bee populations have been severely impacted by the growing climate emergency and our intensive agriculture practices, including the overuse of pesticides.
With help from local partners, the Foundation created 3D-printed wood log hives, which allow the bees to live in an undisturbed ecosystem where they can carry out their lives. They install these hives in high sections of tree trunks to model natural conditions for the big honey bee populations.
Vince Moucha, chairman of the Lacrima Foundation, said, “Even though there are other people and organisations working in the field of natural beekeeping, the impact, progress and scope of these projects is minimal and slow, due to limited access to resources and clear vision. I am driven by responsibility and decided to act on it due to the urgency and importance of this matter.”
The Foundation will continue to work with beekeepers in the UK, Europe, and the United States to help our bee populations survive and thrive for them and us! Check out the Lacrima Foundation, where you can see their mission and donate to the cause and even get a honey bee gift bracelet in return.
1. What is the project of the Lacrima Foundation aimed at?| A．Increasing the production of human’s food. |
| B．Studying the cause of bees’ population loss. |
| C．Developing new habitats for struggling bees. |
| D．Teaming up with beekeepers for fundraising. |
| A．To help bees avoid pesticides. | B．To adapt bees to the new habitats. |
| C．To test the first 3D-printed hives. | D．To protect bees from climate crisis. |
| A．The progress of other projects. | B．The effect of other organizations. |
| C．The difficult position of bees. | D．The responsibility to care about people. |
| A．Live in harmony with nature. | B．Benefit from the Foundation. |
| C．Help bees survive with beekeepers. | D．Support the work of the Foundation. |
9 . After decades of work trying to save the giant panda, Chinese officials have announced the species is no longer endangered. The pandas have been reclassified in the country from endangered to vulnerable (易危的) after efforts to increase the population. Now the number has risen to 1,800 in the wild.
“China has established a relatively complete nature reserves system,” Cui Shuhong, director of the Department of Natural Ecological Protection of the Ministry of Ecology and Environment, said on Wednesday. “Large areas of natural ecosystems have been systematically and completely protected, and wildlife habitats have been effectively improved.” The latest classification upgrade reflects their improved living conditions and China’s efforts in keeping their habitats integrated, Cui added.
Bamboo makes up 90% of pandas’ diets, and the animals would likely starve without the shoots (竹笋). Experts believe China’s efforts to replant bamboo forests have been the key to the increase in the population of pandas. Generally speaking, a panda has to eat at least 26 pounds of bamboo every day to maintain its energy, so large areas of bamboo forests are primary to their survival.
Planting bamboo also has advantages for the planet, as the bamboo is grass, not a tree, and is incredibly efficient at absorbing carbon dioxide, as well as emitting (排放) 35% more oxygen than trees.
“The Chinese have done a great job in investing in panda habitats, expanding and setting up new reserves,” Ginette Hemley, senior vice president of conservation at the World Wildlife Fund, told the media. “They are a wonderful example of what can happen when a government is committed to conservation.”
Continuing China’s success will be dependent on the country protecting land from agricultural and urban development. As land becomes rarer, measures will need to be extended to protect more land, to ensure bamboo forests can thrive and as a result, protect the future of the world’s most lovable, lazy, and monochrome (black and white) creature.
1. What do we know about the giant panda according to paragraph 1?| A．It is an endangered species. | B．It increases by 1,800 each year. |
| C．It has seen a decline in population. | D．It has got a classification upgrade. |
| A．Social media makes a difference. | B．Panda habitats are getting smaller. |
| C．Government’s commitment is crucial. | D．Setting up new reserves is impossible. |
| A．Lazy and monochrome animals. |
| B．Lack of support from the World Wildlife Fund. |
| C．The emission of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. |
| D．The influence of agricultural and urban development. |
| A．A news report. | B．A educational journal. |
| C．A travel magazine. | D．A biology textbook. |
10 . For every goal that Lesein Mutunkei scores, trees get planted. It’s a simple yet effective message that appeals, and leads to a satisfying way of motivating us to promote environmentalism in our own way.
Born in Nairobi, Lesein is in his late teens, and his Trees4Goals is the means with which he intends to make the world greener. It unites two of his passions in life: love of the outdoors and love of football. Lesein enjoyed walking in the forest. He recognised his country was experiencing a serious loss of tree cover. Between 2001 and 2020, Kenya lost an estimated 11% of trees, releasing 176 million tons of CO2.
In a blog post for WWF Kenya, Lesein revealed that, once he started the Trees4Goals initiative, he originally planned to plant one tree per goal. In 2020, he wanted to take his efforts even further. What started as one tree planted per goal mushroomed into 11 trees planted per goal. Explaining the reason behind expanding the tree-planting, he said, “It represents team efforts in football and the contribution by my team. I have planted over 1,000 trees in the last two years.”
While it’s something of an own goal to destroy the forests and jungles providing enormous biodiversity, initiatives like Trees4Goals are an assured way to score an environmentalist hat-trick. Sports such as football are popular with the booming Kenyan population and have the ability to cut through cultural barriers regardless of the countries they are played in. Sports have the power to unify and excite large audiences. Lesein Mutunkei has taken this strategy and scored a winning goal of his own.
Like a seed, best ideas start small and change into something that can become far larger than anticipated. While Lesein continues planting 11 trees per goal, the Kenyan government is aiming to plant 1.8 billion trees to reach a point where 10 per cent of the country is covered by trees. The science behind is clear; a report in 2019 claimed that if 900 million hectares were devoted to additional tree planting of half a trillion trees, the world could offset (抵消) half of all carbon emissions produced since 1960.
1. What gave Lesein the idea of launching the project?| A．Release of too much CO2. | B．His dream of motivating others. |
| C．His passion for sports and nature. | D．Habit of exercising in the woods. |
| A．He created a blog for WWF. | B．He set a higher aim. |
| C．He planted one tree for each goal. | D．He extended his work to other teams. |
| A．The aim that is intended to achieve. | B．Action that harms one’s own interests. |
| C．Pursuit of one’s personal success. | D．The goal that is scored for the opposing team. |
| A．United, we win. | B．No pains, no gains. |
| C．Love me, love my dog. | D．Small deeds, big difference. |
