1 . The beauty, majesty, and timelessness of a primary rainforest are indescribable. It is impossible to _______ on film, to describe in words, or to explain to those who have never had the awe-inspiring experience of standing in the heart of a primary rainforest.

Rainforests have _______ over millions of years to turn into the incredibly complex environments they are today. Rainforests represent a store of living and _______ renewable natural resources that for an immeasurably long period of time, by virtue of their richness in both animal and plant species, have _______ a wealth of resources for the survival and well-being of humankind. These resources have included basic food supplies, clothing, shelter, fuel, spices, industrial raw materials, and medicine for all those who have lived in the majesty of the forest. _______, the inner dynamics (动力学；相互作用的方式) of a tropical rainforest is a complex and fragile system. Everything is so _______ that upsetting one part can lead to unknown damage or even destruction of the whole. Sadly, it has taken only a century of human intervention to destroy what nature designed to _______ forever.

The scale of human _______ on ecosystems everywhere has increased enormously in the last few decades. Since 1980 the global economy has tripled in size and the world population has increased by 30 percent. Consumption of everything on the planet has risen — at a cost to our _______. In 2001, The World Resources Institute estimated that the demand for rice, wheat, and corn is expected to grow by 40% by 2025, increasing irrigation water demands by 50% or more. They further reported that the demand for wood could double by the year 2050; ________, it is still the tropical forests of the world that supply the most part of the world’s demand for wood.

In 1950, about 15 percent of the Earth’s land surface was covered by rainforest. Today, more than half has already gone up in ________. In fewer than fifty years, about half of the world’s tropical rainforests have fallen ________ to fire or deforestation, and the rate of destruction is still ________. Unbelievably, more than 200,000 acres of rainforest are burned every day. That is more than 150 acres lost every minute of every day, and 78 million acres lost every year! More than 20 percent of the Amazon rainforest is already gone, and much more is severely ________ as the destruction continues. If nothing is done to control this ________, the entire Amazon could well be gone within fifty years. Fewer rainforests mean less rain, less oxygen for us to breathe, and an increased threat from global warming.

1.

A．establish

B．claim

C．capture

D．prove

2.

A．extended

B．evolved

C．expanded

D．resolved

3.

A．energizing

B．healing

C．isolating

D．breathing

4.

A．destroyed

B．contributed

C．reduced

D．affected

5.

A．However

B．Furthermore

C．Therefore

D．Otherwise

6.

A．active

B．positive

C．interdependent

D．dominant

7.

A．restore

B．support

C．relieve

D．last

8.

A．pressure

B．resources

C．concern

D．strengths

9.

A．existence

B．ecosystem

C．species

D．survival

10.

A．unfortunately

B．consequently

C．naturally

D．similarly

11.

A．store

B．food

C．smoke

D．wealth

12.

A．subject

B．down

C．apart

D．victim

13.

A．running out

B．going up

C．holding back

D．falling down

14.

A．released

B．revealed

C．threatened

D．boosted

15.

A．trend

B．practice

C．intention

D．attitude

2 . People are looking for ways to reduce their carbon footprint. Purchasing property that is environmentally responsible is a good investment for those who are _______ their own health and the well-being of the earth. Based on this trend, eco-communities are being designed with a green _______ in mind. Dockside Green in Victoria, British Columbia is one of them.

If everything goes according to plan, Dockside Green will be a _______ community along the harbor front of British Columbia’s capital city. The community will be home to 2,500 people and will _______ residential, office, and retail space. Builders of Dockside Green have the environment in mind with every choice they make. They ensure proper ventilation (通风), and guarantee residents 100% fresh indoor air. Building materials, such as paints and wood, are _______ and non-poisonous. Eco-conscious builders use bamboo wherever possible because it grows fast and does not require _______ to grow.

Energy efficiency is one of the _______ concerns in eco-communities, such as Dockside Green. Not only do energy-efficient appliances and light fixtures (照明设备) reduce the environmental _______ of heating and hot water, but they also save residents and business owners money. Dockside Green claims that homeowners will use 55% less energy than average residents in Canada. Residents will have individual water metres (水表) _______ studies show that people use around 20% less energy when they are billed for exactly what they use. ________, water is treated at Dockside Green and reused for flushing toilets.

Planners of eco-communities such as Dockside Green must take the ________ into consideration. Dockside Green plans on reusing 90% of its construction waste. They also plan to continue using local suppliers for all of their transport and maintenance needs. This is a great way to reduce ________.

Dockside residents will be encouraged to take advantage of a mini transport system and buy into the community’s car share program. Finally, plans are underway for a high-tech heating system that will use ________ energy instead of fossil fuels.

Dockside residents will ________ excellent local services with high-quality healthcare, shopping and education at the heart of the community, along with excellent leisure facilities and plentiful green open spaces. Eco-communities will prefer the use of locally-sourced goods and services; they will be ________ places to live, promoting a sense of civic pride, responsibility and, as the name suggests, community.

1.

A．ashamed of

B．concerned about

C．connected with

D．proud of

2.

A．scene

B．memory

C．focus

D．diet

3.

A．harmonious

B．digital

C．crowded

D．self-sufficient

4.

A．put aside

B．belong to

C．consist of

D．make up

5.

A．natural

B．mixed

C．historic

D．fancy

6.

A．animals

B．pesticides

C．consumers

D．conferences

7.

A．top

B．embarrassing

C．global

D．questionable

8.

A．convenience

B．advantage

C．protection

D．impact

9.

A．for fear that

B．so that

C．because

D．although

10.

A．However

B．In particular

C．Therefore

D．In addition

11.

A．image

B．future

C．label

D．decoration

12.

A．emissions

B．accidents

C．unemployment

D．crime

13.

A．traditional

B．man-made

C．renewable

D．enough

14.

A．result from

B．refer to

C．contribute to

D．benefit from

15.

A．desirable

B．reliable

C．recyclable

D．imaginary

5 . Ask someone what they have done to help the environment recently and they will almost certainly mention recycling. Recycling in the home is very important of course. However, being forced to recycle often means we already have more material than we need. We are dealing with the results of that over-consumption in the greenest way possible, but it would be far better if we did not bring so much material home in the first place.

The total amount of packaging increased by 12% between 1999 and 2005. It now makes up a third of a typical household’s waste in the UK. In many supermarkets nowadays food items are packaged twice with plastic and cardboard.

Too much packaging is doing serious damage to the environment. The UK, for example, is running out of it for carrying this unnecessary waste. If such packaging is burnt, it gives off greenhouse gases which go on to cause the greenhouse effect. Recycling helps, but the process itself uses energy. The solution is not to produce such items in the first place. Food waste is a serious problem, too. Too many supermarkets encourage customers to buy more than they need. However, a few of them are coming round to the idea that this cannot continue, encouraging customers to reuse their plastic bags, for example.

But this is not just about supermarkets. It is about all of us. We have learned to associate packaging with quality. We have learned to think that something unpackaged is of poor quality. This is especially true of food. But it also applies to a wide range of consumer products, which often have far more packaging than necessary.

There are signs of hope. As more of us recycle, we are beginning to realize just how much unnecessary material we are collecting. We need to face the wastefulness of our consumer culture, but we have a mountain to climb.

1. What can we learn from the last paragraph?

A．Fighting wastefulness is difficult.

B．Needless material is mostly recycled.

C．People like collecting recyclable waste.

D．The author is proud of his consumer culture.

2. What does the underlined word “over-consumption” refer to?

A．Using too much packaging.

B．Recycling too much waste.

C．Making more products than necessary.

D．Having more material than needed.

3. The author uses figures in Paragraph 2 to show 　　　.

A．the tendency of cutting household waste

B．the increase of packaging recycling

C．the rapid growth of supermarkets

D．the fact of packaging overuse

4. What can be inferred from Paragraph 4?

A．Unpackaged products are of bad quality.

B．Supermarkets care more about packaging.

C．It is improper to judge quality by packaging.

D．Other products are better packaged than food.

7 . In Singapore, most of us love window­shopping while some others enjoy having a picnic at East Coast Park or Changi Beach on sunny days. Singaporeans are never bothered by the occasional (偶尔的) thunderstorms. However, we know that if it rains for long continuous periods, there will be more serious effects. Just recently the main shopping street of Orchard Road was flooded and some parts of Bukit Timah was impossible to traffic. People reacted by writing in to the newspaper to complain about this! We forget that other countries suffer much worse effects.

Elsewhere, heavy tropical (热带的) storms often result in floods that ruin crops especially in Thailand and Malaysia. This in turn usually means that the price of rice and vegetables here in Singapore will rise because we import these products from them. If there is a typhoon or tsunami, thousands of lives are lost too. This happened in Indonesia and Phuket in Thailand in 2004 and it serves to remind us of how Mother Nature can cause great damage.

Weather patterns in general have changed dramatically in recent years. Scientists believe that global warming and the resulting melting of the polar ice­cap has caused the level of the ocean to rise. This in turn causes flooding of low­lying areas in countries where the land is rather flat and some parts of which is below sea level. It is believed that human activities have caused Mother Nature to show her extreme anger, so it is now important that we really work together to cut down on harmful activities, for example, illegal logging (伐木) or irresponsible forest­burning to clear land for farming.

1. From Paragraph 1, we can see that most Singaporeans love ________.

A．making complaints

B．going out for picnics

C．doing window­shopping

D．travelling along the coast

2. What will happen in Singapore if there are floods in its neighboring countries?

A．Heavy tropical storms will follow shortly.

B．The price of rice and vegetables will go up.

C．Many people will write in to the newspaper.

D．More rice and vegetables will be imported.

3. The underlined word “it” in the passage refers to ________.

A．the arrival of heavy tropical storms

B．the import of rice and vegetables

C．the rising price of rice and vegetables

D．the loss of lives in natural disasters

4. What should we do in order not to make Mother Nature angry?

A．Clear more land for farming.

B．Reduce harmful human activities.

C．Bring down the price of food.

D．Improve the quality of weather.

8 . Cowboy or spaceman? A dilemma for a children’s party, perhaps. But also a question for economists, argued Kenneth Boulding, a British economist, in an essay published in 1966. We have run our economies, as he warned, like cowboys on the open grassland: taking and using the world’s resources, confident that more lies over the horizon. But the Earth is less a grassland than a spaceship-a closed system, alone in space, carrying limited supplies. We need, according to Boulding, an economics that takes seriously the idea of environmental limits. In the half century since his essay, a new movement has responded to his challenge. “Ecological economists”, as they call themselves, want to revolutionize aims and assumptions of economics. What do they say—and will their ideas achieve lift-off?

To its advocators, ecological economics is neither ecology nor economics, but a mix of both. Their starting point is to recognize that the human economy is part of the natural world. Our environment, they note, is both a source of resources and a sink for wastes. But it is ignored in conventional textbooks, where neat diagrams trace the flows between firms, households and the government as though nature did not exist. That is a mistake, say ecological economists.

There are two ways our economies can grow, as ecological economists point out: through technological change, or through more intensive use of resources. Only the former, they say, is worth having. They are suspicious of GDP, a crude measure which does not take account of resource exhaustion, unpaid work, and countless other factors. In its place they advocate more holistic(全面的) approaches, such as the Genuine Progress Indicator (GPI), a composite index(复合指标) that includes things like the cost of pollution, deforestation and car accidents. While GDP has kept growing, global GPI per person peaked in 1978: by destroying our environment we are making ourselves poorer, not richer. The solution, according to Herman Daly, a former World Bank economist and eco-guru, is a “steady-state” economy, where the use of materials and energy is held constant.

Mainstream economists are unimpressed. The GPI, they point out, is a subjective measure. And talk of limits to growth has had a bad press since the days of Thomas Malthus, a gloomy18th-century cleric who predicted, wrongly, that overpopulation would lead to famine. Humanbeings find solutions to some of the most annoying problems. But ecological economists warn against self-satisfaction. In 2009 a paper in Nature, a scientific journal, argued that human activity is already overstepping safe planetary boundaries on issues such as biodiversity(生物多样性) and climate change. That suggests that ecological economists are at least putting forward some important Questions, even if their answers may turn out to be wrong.

1. Why does Boulding compare the way economy is run with cowboy and spaceship?

A．To advocate the importance of space programmes.

B．To applaud the appearance of ecological economists.

C．To arouse people’s interest in cowboys’ adventures on grassland.

D．To awaken people to the need of sustainable development of economy.

2. Ecological economists will disagree that ________ .

A．economies are worth growing through intensive use of resources

B．economics should attach importance to the idea of environmental limits

C．ecological economics is neither ecology nor economics

D．the human economy is part of the natural world

3. According to the passage, which of the following about GPI is true?

A．It keeps growing although the peak appeared in the year 1978.

B．Mainstream economists regard it as a holistic and objective approach.

C．Ecological economists believe it is a better indicator of economy than GDP.

D．It fails to take the factors such as deforestation and car accidents into consideration.

4. We can infer from the last paragraph that the mainstream economists’ attitude towards ecological economics is ________ .

A．doubtful

B．sensitive

C．optimistic

D．over-concerned

9 . More than half the world’s population live in cities, and by 2050 the UN expects that proportion to reach 68%. This means more homes, roads and other infrastructure. Such a construction ________ does harm to tackling climate change, though, because making steel and concrete generates around 8% of the world’s carbon-dioxide emissions. If cities are to ________ and become greener at the same time, they will have to be made from something else.

As it happens, Chicago might become part of the ________. In recent years, as architects have become increasingly interested in modern timber (木材) — construction methods, wooden buildings have been getting steadily ________. The current record is held by the 85-metre-tall Mjostarnet building in Norway, completed in 2019. But this would be ________ by the River Beech Tower, a 228-metre building proposed for a site beside the Chicago river.

As the AAAs meeting heard this week, wood is one of the most ________ sustainable alternatives to steel and concrete. It is not, however, everyday wood but a material called engineered timber, composed of different layers for specific purposes. Besides engineering the shape of a component, designers can arrange the grains (纹理) in the layers to provide levels of ________ that equal steel, in a product that is up to 80% lighter. Engineered timber is, ________, usually assembled into large sections of a building in a factory. That cuts down on the number of ________ that have to be made to a construction site.

All this ________ to carbon-dioxide emissions. Michael Ramage of the University of Cambridge told the meeting of a 300-square-metre four-storey wooden building that generated 126 tonnes of CO₂. Had it been made with ________, emissions would have risen to 310 tonnes. If steel had been used, they would have topped 498 tonnes. Indeed, from one point of view, this building might actually be viewed as “carbon ________”. When trees grow, they lock carbon up in their wood — in this case the equivalent of 540 tonnes of CO₂, representing a long-term reduction of CO₂ from the atmosphere.

If building with wood takes off, it does raise concern about there being enough trees to ________. But with sustainably managed forests that should not be a problem, says Dr Ramage. A family-sized apartment requires about 30 cubic metres of timber, and he estimates Europe’s sustainable ________ alone grow that amount every seven seconds. Nor is fire a risk, for engineered timber does not burn easily, because the inner cores of large ________ timbers are protected by a charring (炭化) layer if burnt.

1.

A．project

B．ambition

C．boom

D．security

2.

A．expand

B．reform

C．contract

D．survive

3.

A．rebel

B．outcome

C．answer

D．issue

4.

A．greener

B．friendlier

C．lighter

D．taller

5.

A．overbalanced

B．overshadowed

C．overlooked

D．overstated

6.

A．domestic

B．promising

C．debatable

D．artificial

7.

A．beauty

B．strength

C．friction

D．dimension

8.

A．nevertheless

B．instead

C．moreover

D．meanwhile

9.

A．deliveries

B．checkouts

C．purchases

D．payments

10.

A．adds value

B．gives credit

C．gives a boost

D．makes a difference

11.

A．cement

B．timber

C．concrete

D．synthetics

12.

A．positive

B．negative

C．friendly

D．resistant

13.

A．go round

B．go away

C．go over

D．go down

14.

A．advocates

B．strategies

C．forests

D．farmers

15.

A．imposing

B．visible

C．universal

D．structural

10 . There has, in recent years, been an outpouring of information about the impact of buildings on the natural environment. Information which explains and promotes green construction design strives to _________ others of its effectiveness and warns of the dangers of ignoring the issue. Seldom do these documents offer any advice to practitioners, such as those designing mechanical and electrical systems for a building, on how to use this knowledge on a _________ level.

Although there are a good many advocates of “green” construction in the architectural industry, able to list enough reasons why buildings should be designed in a (n) _________ way, that doesn’t translate into a booming green construction industry. Likewise, the fact that plenty of architectural firms have experience in green design is not enough to make green construction _________. The driving force behind whether a building is constructed with minimal environmental impact _________ the owner of the building; that is, the person financing the project. If the owner considers green design unimportant, or of secondary importance, then more than likely, it will not be _________ into the design.

The commissioning (委任) process plays a key role in _________ the owner gets the building he wants, in terms of design, costs and risk. Owners who _________ the commissioning process, or fail to take “green” issues into account when doing so, often run into trouble once their building is up and running. Materials and equipment are installed as planned, and, at first glance, appear to fulfil their purpose adequately. _________, in time, the owner realizes that operational and maintenance costs are higher than necessary, and that the occupants are dissatisfied with the results. These factors in turn lead to higher ownership costs as well as increased environmental impact.

In some cases, an owner may be __________ of the latest trends in green building design, which, however, does not necessarily lead to an interpretation that the client already has an idea of how green he intends the structure to be. Indeed, this initial interaction between owner and firm is the ideal time for a designer to outline and __________ the ways that green design can meet the client’s objectives. In this way, he may turn a project originally not   __________green design into a potential candidate.

Typically, when condiering whether or not to adopt a green __________, an owner will ask about additional costs or return for investment. In a typical project, landscape architects, mechanical and electrical engineers are not involved until a much later stage. However, in green design, they have a role to play from they outset, since green design demands__________between these disciplines, which requires additional cost. However, there are examples of green design which have demonstrated__________costs for long-term operation, ownership and even construnction.

1.

A．preserve

B．convince

C．exploit

D．accuse

2.

A．pracical

B．measured

C．tremendous

D．theoretial

3.

A．professional

B．groundbreaking

C．innovative

D．sustainable

4.

A．tap into experience

B．live up to its name

C．rise to fame

D．come into being

5.

A．refers to

B．lies with

C．races against

D．calls on

6.

A．knocked

B．loaded

C．factored

D．stuffed

7.

A．concluding

B．stressing

C．ensuring

D．acknowledging

8.

A．skip

B．transport

C．isolate

D．cover

9.

A．As a result

B．On the contrary

C．What’s more

D．However

10.

A．ignorant

B．aware

C．critical

D．capable

11.

A．promote

B．perceive

C．attribute

D．impose

12.

A．applited to

B．anxious for

C．destined for

D．specific about

13.

A．gesture

B．approach

C．origin

D．patent

14.

A．competition

B．calculation

C．cooperation

D．distinction

15.

A．increased

B．extra

C．fixed

D．lower