1 . Here are four organizations that rescue and train shelter dogs to be service animals.
Merlin’s Kids
Merlin’s Kids is a wonderful organization that rescues and trains shelter dogs to become service animals for children and adults with special needs for physical or emotional support. Merlin’s Kids dogs are also trained for disease detection by screening people for cancer, diabetes and so on. Other dogs have been used to go into hospitals or assist living facilities. In the public’s eyes, these working dogs have proved that shelter animals are amazing.
Pets for Vets (退伍军人)
This organization recognizes that many veterans return home with scars, both seen and unseen,which makes it difficult for them to live a normal life. Many suffer from severe anxiety. Pets for Vets was founded to rescue and train shelter animals to provide therapy (治疗) dogs for the retired service people.
Paws with a Cause
This organization has been around since 1979 and improves the independence and quality of life for people with disabilities. Paws with a Cause specializes in helping people with disabilities complete essential tasks and the pups can open doors, pull a wheelchair, alert (使警觉) a hearing-impaired person, and offer help whenever necessary.
Service Dog Express
This organization’s motto is “A dog’s life saved, a human’s life enriched” and believes that the connect ion between the service dog and his or her person is life transforming. Service Dog Express specializes in the training of service dogs for wounded service people. People in need of a service dog are encouraged to go to a rescue organization to choose a dog. This reduces the cost of services and saves a dog who may otherwise have been out to sleep.
1. What do we know about shelter dogs from Merlin’s Kids?A.They can cure people of cancer. |
B.They often bring the public amazement. |
C.They repair living facilities in the hospital. |
D.They benefit ones with physical and mental health problems. |
A.Merlin’s Kids. | B.Pets for Vets. | C.Paws with a Cause. | D.Service Dog Express. |
A.It teaches dogs to pull a wheelchair. | B.It focuses on injured soldiers. |
C.It charges for services. | D.Its motto moves people in need. |
2 . On a typical day, off the coast of a small Brazilian island, Joao Pereira de Souza, who was a fisherman, headed out fishing. He was sad to find a lot of oil on the water. Staring at the waves with the oily shine, he decided it was not a good day to fish. But walking along the beach that day, he found a struggling penguin(企鹅), covered with oil and going to die because of hunger.
Pereira took the penguin home, gently cleaned it and spent the next week nursing it back to health. He named it Dindim, a Portuguese word meaning “ice pop”.
Dindim is a Magellanic penguin, a species known for living in the seas of South America. In order to breed(繁殖), he must return to Patagonia, 8,000 kilometers from Pereira’s home. Pereira took Dindim back to the ocean and taught him how to swim again. Soon, it was time for Dindim to return to life in the wild. Pereira watched Dindim swim away, believing it would be the last time to see him.
But the next June, Dindim returned. The two shared a gentle mouth-to-nose greeting (问候), and Dindim stayed for a month, swimming around Pereira’s house. The time to leave arrived, and Pereira thought this surely would be the last time he would see Dindim. But 11 months later, the penguin returned again.
Pereira was unsure whether the returning penguin year after year was the same one. He put a tracking device on Dindim. To his surprise, it was Pereira’s Dindim, returning year after year, for more than a decade.
Pereira and Dindim share a friendship that bridges human life and the natural world.
1. What can we know from paragraph 1?A.A penguin was freed. | B.Pereira caught a lot of fish. |
C.The water was polluted heavily. | D.Fish and penguins lived peacefully. |
A.He took Dindim to a doctor. | B.He trained Dindim to swim again. |
C.He shared a greeting with Dindim. | D.He made Dindim stay for a month. |
A.Patient and caring. | B.Brave and honest. |
C.Self-confident and humorous. | D.Outgoing and active. |
A.To record how penguins breed. | B.To search for more penguins. |
C.To find the source of the pollution. | D.To find out if the returning penguin was Dindim. |
3 . The problem with a catchy name is that sometimes it catches on too well. Take the hygiene hypothesis (卫生说) outlined in 1989 by David Strachan of St George’s, a hospital and medical school in London. It suggests that the rise of allergenic (致敏的) sensitivity observed in rich countries over the course of the 20th century may have been caused by a shift from rural to urban living, so that children are no longer routinely exposed to farm animals.
Dr Strachan’s work still has much to recommend it. What the catchy label has encouraged, however, is a false belief that cleanliness is not necessarily a health benefit. In reality, says Thomas Marrs, an allergist at King’s College, London, hygiene is usually about bacteria (细菌) causing infection—and the bacteria that may be beneficial are different from those which do that. But it is plain to see why alternative descriptions, such as “the high turnover and diversity hypothesis” or the “the microbial deprivation hypothesis (微生物剥夺假说)”, have not caught on, more accurate though they may be.
In an attempt to collect further data on the matter, Hisao Okabe of Fukushima Medical University and his team have looked through the Japan Environment and Children’s Study, which tracked over 100,000 births between 2019 and 2022.
Pursuing the animal connection, they looked for correlations between household pet ownership before and immediately after a child’s birth, and any food allergies found in that child’s first three years.
Of the 66,000 or so children they chose to look at, 22% had been born into households with pets. Children in households with dogs, the researchers found, had lower rates than average of allergies to eggs, milk and nuts. Those cohabiting with cats seemed more tolerant of eggs, wheat and beans. However, children whose parents kept turtles (龟) appeared unaffected. And, curiously, those exposed to hamsters (仓鼠) appeared more likely than average to be allergic to nuts.
Confirming or denying this will need more study. Nevertheless, Dr Okabe’s contribution is an interesting addition to the debate about Dr Strachan’s brainchild.
1. What does the hygiene hypothesis suggest?A.Children in rich countries are more likely to have allergies. |
B.Urban living leads to less exposure to allergens. |
C.Allergies are linked to bacteria that cause infection. |
D.Farm animals reduce childhood allergies. |
A.Doubtful | B.Favorable | C.Critical | D.indifferent |
A.pet ownership and uncomfortable childbirth | B.pet ownership and child food allergies |
C.environments and animals | D.food and allergies |
A.Dogs and cats | B.Dogs and turtles | C.Cats and hamsters | D.Turtles and hamsters. |
1. 保护野生动物的重要性;
2. 提出合理建议(至少两点);
3. 发出呼吁。
注意:1. 词数80左右;
2. 可适当增加细节,以使行文连贯。
Protecting the Wild Animals
_______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________Macquarie Island was a beautiful place where its native
6 . One afternoon in 2022, something on the Internet caught my eye:a tiny hedgehog (刺猬) held by a big hand. The post read: “HELP! My hedgehog abandoned (抛弃) her two babies, and I cannot raise both of them because I have to go to school fulltime. Good home with experience needed as soon as possible!”
I had no experience with baby hedgehogs. I was an animal person through and through and had raised cats, dogs, birds, and guinea pigs. But this tiny animal was new to me, and it touched me that he was abandoned, that maybe I could love him and be the best mom for him.
I wrote the most heartfelt email I could. That was how I found my Louie. True to my word, he was my baby. Louie didn’t know he was a hedgehog. He never curled (蜷缩) into a ball, and he liked my two cats, no fear. The cats, however, were afraid of him, as he often moved into the room, running after the cats and blocking my way.
By the time he reached old age, Louie had only three feet. However, he still managed to climb the stairs to visit other animals. He helped me realize my dream of hedgehog photography, a hobby that began during childhood with cats and dollhouses. I love showing off his modeling.
Life has meaning because of the purpose we have. Louie needed a good home and mom, and in return, I got to be a good mother and be needed. Hedgehogs require great amounts of patience, trust, and knowledge—but the payoff (回报) is pretty great.
1. The author got Louie from .A.a pet shop | B.a family friend |
C.a hedgehog owner | D.a hedgehog rescue center |
A.Frightened. | B.Relaxed. | C.Lonely. | D.Tired. |
A.He disliked climbing stairs. | B.He enjoyed being left alone. |
C.He always refused to be in photos. | D.He was active despite his difficulty in moving. |
A.It was easier than expected. | B.It gave her a sense of safety. |
C.It made her lose her patience. | D.It was satisfying and meaningful. |
7 . Many people regard sharks as dangerous monsters. But human beings cause a far greater danger to them than they do to us. Although shark attacks do occur, they are quite rare. According to a survey, however, humans kill 100 million sharks every year.
Why should we save the sharks?
Sharks take up the top position on the food chain in the ocean. As sharks die off, the population of the animals that sharks eat will increase. This, in turn, means that the number of the creatures those animals eat will drop.
Don’t use shark products
First, vitamin energy drinks and leather goods can be made from shark parts.
Shark fin soup is a popular dish. However, the process of getting fins is cruel. Fishermen cut the shark’s fins off and then throw the shark back into the water, still alive.
A.Actually, the killing of sharks will affect the whole planet. |
B.Shark oil is also used in many popular beauty products. |
C.Then the shark dies slowly, sometimes over several days. |
D.It is time for children to learn about sharks. |
E.People in some countries are especially keen on shark products. |
F.This number is a warning that many kinds of sharks may die out. |
G.Among them are some sea fish that humans eat every day. |
A.Keep his body clean. |
B.Take him for a walk. |
C.Provide food and water. |
9 . Grizzly bears, which may grow to about 2.5 m long and weigh over 400 kg, occupy a conflicted corner of the American psyche — we revere (敬畏) them even as they give us frightening dreams. Ask the tourists from around the world that flood into Yellowstone National Park what they most hope to see, and their answer is often the same: a grizzly bear.
“Grizzly bears are re-occupying large areas of their former range,” says bear biologist Chris Servheen. As grizzly bears expand their range into places where they haven’t been seen in a century or more, they’re increasingly being sighted by humans.
The western half of the US was full of grizzlies when Europeans came, with a rough number of 50,000 or more living alongside Native Americans. By the early 1970s, after centuries of cruel and continuous hunting by settlers, 600 to 800 grizzlies remained on a mere 2 percent of their former range in the Northern Rockies. In 1975, grizzlies were listed under the Endangered Species Act.
Today, there are about 2,000 or more grizzly bears in the US. Their recovery has been so successful that the US Fish and Wildlife Service has twice attempted to delist grizzlies, which would loosen legal protections and allow them to be hunted. Both efforts were overturned due to lawsuits from conservation groups. For now, grizzlies remain listed.
Obviously, if precautions (预防) aren’t taken, grizzlies can become troublesome, sometimes killing farm animals or walking through yards in search of food. If people remove food and attractants from their yards and campsites, grizzlies will typically pass by without trouble. Putting electric fencing around chicken houses and other farm animal quarters is also highly effective at getting grizzlies away. “Our hope is to have a clean, attractant-free place where bears can pass through without learning bad habits,” says James Jonkel, longtime biologist who manages bears in and around Missoula.
1. How do Americans look at grizzlies?A.They cause mixed feelings in people. |
B.They should be kept in national parks. |
C.They are of high scientific value. |
D.They are a symbol of American culture. |
A.The European settlers’ behavior. |
B.The expansion of bears’ range. |
C.The protection by law since 1975. |
D.The support of Native Americans. |
A.The opposition of conservation groups. |
B.The successful comeback of grizzlies. |
C.The voice of the biologists. |
D.The local farmers’ advocates. |
A.Food should be provided for grizzlies. |
B.People can live in harmony with grizzlies. |
C.A special path should be built for grizzlies. |
D.Technology can be introduced to protect grizzlies. |
Shark fin soup,
Sharks are
Environmental protection