| in addition turn one’s back break down a variety of live in harmony run out maintain friendships be concerned with |
A
Friendship clubs provide a platform for people to take part in
B
Nature is our home. Humans and other living things on the planet couldn’t survive without the resources that come from nature. We should take care of our “home” before it’s too late. If we keep overusing and destroying nature, it will finally
Humankind’s growing need for food is running up against thousands of other species’ need for space. By 2050, humans may need to clear an additional 3.35 million square
3 . In Thailand, human-elephant conflict is increasing. To local farmers, elephants threaten their safety and economic livelihood.
Bring the Elephant Home (BTEH) is a non-profit organisation whose mission is to increase chances of survival for elephants and work towards a world in which people and elephants can live in harmony, benefting from each other’s existence. BTEH’s projects root in local communities. Their work is characterised by three principles:local involvement, a healthy ecology, and benefits for people and elephants simultaneously (同时地). They lead to shared decision making, ownership of local communities, sustainability, and a peaceful coexistence of people and animals.
A group of BTEH researchers and local farmer volunteers are experimenting with how to make the plantations less appealing to elephants and prevent them from coming into the farms. And the Tom Yum Project comes into being.
The name of the Tom Yum Project comes from the Thai soup. The ingredients (原料) for the soup are chilli, garlic, lemongrass, and onion—none of which are attractive to elephants. This project gives hope to alternative crops as a solution to human-elephant conflict in Thailand. The project works in the following steps.
The Tom Yum Project is the first research and community-based alternative crop planting initiative to promote human-elephant coexistence. Now, some similar projects will be carried out in Sri Lanka.
1. According to the passage, BTEH’s mission is to| A．develop rural communities | B．create healthy environments |
| C．improve local economic livelihood | D．promote human-elephant coexistence |
| A．form some guarding teams | B．volunteer to collect ingredients |
| C．experiment with alternative crops | D．provide elephants with the Thai soup |
| A．Step 2. | B．Step 3. | C．Step 4. | D．Step 5. |
| distance; remove; break away from; intend; eager; result in; surf; refer to; short; keep somebody company; recover; threat; stick |
The measures were effective. Up to now, the antelope population
Many animals and plants are endangered in the world today. These endangered species are threatened with becoming extinct, meaning they will no longer exist on Earth. Examples include the Cuban Macaw and the Sri Lankan Legume Tree. Hunting, and collecting of the Macaw bird for pets, led to its extinction. While the main reason the native Sri Lankan Legume Tree went extinct was due to habitat loss from development in the 20th century. The main cause for animals and plants disappearing is often a disruption to the food chain due to hunting, habitat loss or even the introduction of invasive (入侵的) species.
Every living thing from one-celled animals to a blue whale needs to eat. Nature is connected and controlled by many fragile food chains. A food chain describes who eats whom in a habitat. When one of the links in a food chain is no longer present — for example, a species goes extinct — the food chain breaks and sometimes this can cause other animals to disappear and the whole system can become imbalanced or even collapsed.
Humans can have disastrous effects on food chains. When people first explored the world, they took animal and plant species from their home countries to the places they explored and settled in. They did not realise the results of introducing invasive species. By doing so, they were disrupting the natural food chains of the areas they explored.
Nowadays there are strict rules controlling the movement of animals and plants between countries. But some parts of the world are still experiencing problems with invasive species introduced hundreds of years ago.
With rising awareness of how we affect the natural environment, hopefully we can learn to protect these food chains and help them to thrive. Otherwise the continued loss of species will eventually mean our own extinction.
1. What is a food chain?2. What may cause a disruption to the food chain?
3. Please decide which part is false in the following statement, then underline it and explain why.
●Due to strict rules controlling the movement of species between countries, we have solved the problem with invasive species.
4. What can you do to help protect food chains as an individual?
6 . 阅读下面短文，根据短文内容填空。在未给提示词的空白处仅填写1个适当的单词，在给出提示词的空白处用括号内所给词的正确形式填空。
Pandas
7 . 阅读下面短文，根据短文内容填空。在未给提示词的空白处仅填写1个适当的单词，在给出 提示词的空白处用括号内所给词的正确形式填空。
A new study shows rapid decline in insect populations. A growing number of the Earth’s insect population now can
8 . As humans encroach (侵入) more and more on wildlife habitats, animals are finding that the best way to survive isn’t to pack up and move — it’s to adapt to the night life. A variety of previously daytime animals such as foxes, deer and boars have become active at night to avoid human activity out of fear. But this nighttime switch comes with its own risks.
Researchers looked at how 62 species of animals on six continents changed their behavior in response to human activities such as hunting, farming, and development. The studies employed various technologies to follow the animals, from GPS trackers to motion-activated cameras.
Once night falls, the animals surveyed became far more active than they were before humans arrived, hunting and looking for food in the dark. For example, animals that used to split their activity evenly between day and night typically increased their nighttime activity to 68%.
The team also found the animals responded similarly to these human encroachments, regardless of whether human activity directly affected them. So, a deer might become more active at night simply because it sees humans hiking nearby, not because it’s being hunted.
The researchers believe these nighttime behaviors not only allow humans and animals to coexist more peacefully, they may be able to give us hints as to how to plan conservation efforts accordingly, such as limiting human activity during times when a specific species is more active. But moving to the nightlife could also have downsides for these animals. A nighttime lifestyle can reduce an animal’s ability to hunt and find food successfully and can even affect its ability to find a mate. Switching to a nighttime lifestyle can affect natural patterns of life even if these animals are doing so to reduce their interaction with humans. So, just because animals are becoming more active at night doesn’t mean they’ve escaped the influence of humans.
1. Why are animals becoming more active at night?| A．It is easier to find food at night. | B．It is easier to escape being hunted. |
| C．They can be less affected by human. | D．They have got used to nightlife. |
| A．Any human encroachment can affect animals. |
| B．Animals can be affected only when being hunted. |
| C．Deer can get used to nightlife easily. |
| D．Animals should stay away from humans. |
| A．The benefits and risks of animals’ nightlife style. |
| B．Animals have their own ways to get used to life changes. |
| C．Animals should be well protected before it is too late. |
| D．Animals move to nightlife due to human encroachments. |
9 . As Frans de Waal, a primatologist (灵长动物学家), recognizes, a better way to think about other creatures would be to ask ourselves how different species have developed different kinds of minds to solve different adaptive problems. Surely the important question is not whether animals can do the same things humans can, but how those animals solve the cognitive (认知的) problems they face, like how to imitate the sea floor. Children and some animals are so interesting not because they are smart like us, but because they are smart in ways we haven’t even considered.
Sometimes studying children’s ways of knowing can cast light on adult-human cognition. Children’s pretend play may help us understand our adult taste for fiction. De Waal’s research provides another interesting example. We human beings tend to think that our social relationships are rooted in our perceptions, beliefs, and desires, and our understanding of the perceptions, beliefs, and desires of others — what psychologists call our “theory of mind.” In the 80s and 90s, developmental psychologists showed that pre-schoolers and even infants understand minds apart from their own. But it was hard to show that other animals did the same. “Theory of mind” became a candidate for the special, uniquely human trick.
Yet de Waal’s studies show that chimps (黑猩猩) possess a remarkably developed political intelligence — they are much interested in figuring out social relationships. It turns out, as de Waal describes, that chimps do infer something about what other chimps see. But experimental studies also suggest that this happens only in a competitive political context. The evolutionary anthropologist (人类学家) Brain Hare and his colleagues gave a junior chimp a choice between pieces of food that a dominant chimp had seen hidden and other pieces it had not seen hidden. The junior chimp, who watched all the hiding, stayed away from the food the dominant chimp had seen, but took the food it hadn’t seen.
Anyone who has gone to an academic conference will recognize that we may be in the same situation. We may say that we sign up because we’re eager to find out what other human beings think, but we’re just as interested in who’s on top. Many of the political judgments we make there don’t have much to do with our theory of mind. We may show our respect to a famous professor even if we have no respect for his ideas.
Until recently, however, there wasn’t much research into how humans develop and employ this kind of political knowledge. It may be that we understand the social world in terms of dominance, like chimps, but we’re just not usually as politically motivated as they are. Instead of asking whether we have a better everyday theory of mind, we might wonder whether they have a better everyday theory of politics.
1. According to the first paragraph, which of the following shows that an animal is smart?| A．It can behave like a human kid. |
| B．It can imitate what human beings do. |
| C．It can find a solution to its own problem. |
| D．It can figure out those adaptive problems. |
| A．We talk with infants in a way that they can fully understand. |
| B．We make guesses at what others think while interacting with them. |
| C．We hide our emotions when we try establishing contact with a stranger. |
| D．We try to understand how kids’ pretend play affects our taste for fiction. |
| A．Neither human nor animals display their preference for dominance. |
| B．Animals living in a competitive political context are smarter. |
| C．Both humans and some animals have political intelligence. |
| D．Humans are more interested in who’s on top than animals. |
| A．we know little about how chimps are politically motivated |
| B．our political knowledge doesn’t always determine how we behave |
| C．our theory of mind might enable us to understand our theory of politics |
| D．more research should be conducted to understand animals’ social world |
10 . Plastic-Eating Worms
Humans produce more than 300 million tons of plastic every year. Almost half of that winds up in landfills (垃圾填埋场), and up to 12 million tons pollute the oceans. So far there is no effective way to get rid of it, but a new study suggests an answer may lie in the stomachs of some hungry worms.
Researchers in Spain and England recently found that the worms of the greater wax moth can break down polyethylene, which accounts for 40% of plastics. The team left 100 wax worms on a commercial polyethylene shopping bag for 12 hours, and the worms consumed and broke down about 92 milligrams, or almost 3% of it. To confirm that the worms’ chewing alone was not responsible for the polyethylene breakdown, the researchers made some worms into paste (糊状物) and applied it to plastic films. 14 hours later the films had lost 13% of their mass — apparently broken down by enzymes (酶) from the worms’ stomachs. Their findings were published in Current Biology in 2017.
Federica Bertocchini, co-author of the study, says the worms’ ability to break down their everyday food — beeswax — also allows them to break down plastic. “Wax is a complex mixture, but the basic bond in polyethylene, the carbon-carbon bond, is there as well,” she explains, “The wax worm evolved a method or system to break this bond.”
Jennifer DeBruyn, a microbiologist at the University of Tennessee, who was not involved in the study, says it is not surprising that such worms can break down polyethylene. But compared with previous studies, she finds the speed of breaking down in this one exciting. The next step, DeBruyn says, will be to identify the cause of the breakdown. Is it an enzyme produced by the worm itself or by its gut microbes (肠道微生物)?
Bertocchini agrees and hopes her team’s findings might one day help employ the enzyme to break down plastics in landfills. But she expects using the chemical in some kind of industrial process — not simply “millions of worms thrown on top of the plastic.”
It can be inferred from the last paragraph that the chemical might ________.
| A．help to raise worms |
| B．help make plastic bags |
| C．be used to clean the oceans |
| D．be produced in factories in future |
