1 . Most of the new diseases we humans have faced in the past several decades have come from animals. The more we come into contact with wild animals, the more we risk a so-called disease “spillover” from animals to humans.
“As people move and wildlife move in response to a changing environment, humans and wildlife and animals will come in contact more regularly,” said Jeanne Fair from the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico. Fair argues that by shifting animal habitats, climate change will also make the opportunities for disease spillover more frequent. “Everything is sort of shifting and will shift into the future as the environment changes through climate change,” Fair said.
Scientists, including climatologists and epidemiologists (流行病学家) on Fair’s team at Los Alamos, are beginning to model how changes to the climate will impact the spread of infectious diseases. It’s early days for this kind of research, but previous studies suggest that extreme weather has already played a role in at least one outbreak. Scientists say drought and deforestation have combined to force bats out of rain forests and into orchards (果园) in Malaysia to find food. Those bats, a common disease reservoir, then passed the Nipah virus through pigs to humans for the first time in the late 1990s.
“We’re going by the past data to really predict what’s going to happen in the future,” Fair said, “And so, anytime you increase that wildlife-human interface, that’s sort of an emerging disease hot spot. And so, that’s just increasing as we go forward.”
Jeffrey Shaman, head of the climate and health program at Columbia University’s public health school, argues we don’t yet know whether climate change will cause a net increase in infectious disease rates globally. For example, mosquitoes carry disease that affects millions of people across the world every year. As their habitats expand in some parts of the world, they might contract diseases elsewhere. Shaman says what we know for certain about climate change is that it will make it harder to predict where disease outbreaks will pop up.
1. How does climate change affect the spread of disease according to Fair?| A．By breaking animals’habits. | B．By increasing animals’varieties. |
| C．By promoting animals’breeding. | D．By changing animals’living environment. |
| A．Explaining the influence of Nipah virus. |
| B．Proving the harm of bats to human beings. |
| C．Showing the effects of climate change on disease. |
| D．Presenting scientists’early study about the cause of disease. |
| A．Humans should give up studying animals. |
| B．Frequent contact with animals can cause disease outbreaks. |
| C．Disease hot spots will disappear if animals die out. |
| D．Past data can solve the problems in the future. |
| A．Climate Change and Disease Spillover |
| B．Animals’Interaction with Humans |
| C．Early Studies about Extreme Weather |
| D．Scientists’Prediction for Disease Outbreaks |
2 . Just a year ago, the colors were bright under the waves. Now it’s gray — the Maldivian reef is dead. The coral is killed by the pressure of rising temperatures.
Coral reefs are areas underwater where small creatures live. The coral is hard material formed on the bottom of the sea by the skeletons of those creatures. But the world has lost about half its coral reefs in the last 30 years. Scientists are working to prevent their destruction. Due to global warming, over 90 percent of corals are expected to die by 2050. “To lose coral reefs is to fundamentally undermine the health of a very large proportion of the human race,” said Ruth Gates, director of the Hawaii Institute of Marine Biology.
Why are coral reefs important? Coral reefs support a fourth of all marine species, as well as half a billion people worldwide. They serve as barriers to protect coastlines from the storms. They provide billions of dollars from tourism, fishing and other trade. They are also used in medical research for cures for diseases. “Everyone should be concerned,” said biologist Ove Guldberg at Australia’s University of Queensland. “This is not just some distant dive destination. This is the basic structure of the ecosystem we depend on.”
The ocean is getting warmer. A rising temperature of just one to two degree Celsius can force coral to expel the algae (驱逐海藻) that live there. This leaves their white skeletons uncovered. It is a process called “bleaching”. Sixteen percent of the world’s corals died of bleaching in 1998. The problem has become much worse in recent years.
“We’ve lost 50 percent of the reefs, but that means we still have 50 percent left,” said Ruth Gates, who is working in Hawaii to breed corals that can better withstand increasing temperatures. She is also trying to “train” corals to survive rising temperatures. Gates says it is time to start “thinking outside the box”— find creative ways to help them.
1. The underlined word “undermine” in paragraph 2 means ___________.| A．weaken | B．regain | C．promote | D．overlook |
| A．People won’t find a dive destination in the future. |
| B．The effort to save corals will turn out to be fruitless. |
| C．The destruction of coral reefs will affect the earth ecosystem. |
| D．The bright sea has lost its charm because of those dead corals. |
| A．the harm of algae | B．the process of “bleaching” |
| C．the importance of coral reefs | D．the change of ocean temperature |
| A．proud | B．cautious | C．optimistic | D．casual |
