1 . Directions: After reading the passage below, fill in the blanks to make the passage coherent and grammatically correct. For the blanks with a given word, fill in each blank with the proper form of the given word; for the other blanks, use one word that best fits each blank.

Throughout the world, only 15% of the material that are used to make clothing is properly recycled, according to the Alle SacUrthur Club, an organization in Liverpool, UK, that boosts the circular economy. Most clothing waste—an     1    (estimate) 82 million tonnes from the fashion industry alone-produced every year ends up buried or burnt.

    2    (handle) all that waste, methods to recover and reuse the material are intended as an active response to the future risks by researchers and start-up companies. Much of their focus is on chemical recycling,     3     the material is broken down into its building blocks and applied to create new materials, including fibres that     4     (weave) into new clothes. The challenges lie in     5     (develop) the processes for such treatment. They have to be practical, but they also have to be at least as cost-effective as simply making new fibres.

    6     the natural cellulose fibres from cotton, some other materials include human-made cellulosic fibres. They are derived from wood-pulp cellulose and may be used to produce materials such as viscose (rayon) and a similar material called lyocell.

A change in the manufacturing process is being applied to the textile-waste problem by Essen, a start-up in Seattle, Washington.     7     the company has fundamentally devoted to the process is that it uses discarded textiles, instead of wood, as the source of its cellulose. It has also adjusted the process to produce a fibre that the firm’s co-founder and president Christo Stan says is superior to     8     other cellulosics and cotton, and that can be recycled more times.

Although there are abundant technical challenges, the main barrier     9     widespread textile recycling could be economic, says materials engineer Lijiang Jiang at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Atlanta. “Most of the materials are not that invaluable,” Jiang says. So cheap it is to produce polyester, cotton and other fabrics     10     there’s little profit margin unless the recycling processes themselves are very inexpensive.

5 . Directions: Complete the following passage by using the words in the box. Each word can only be used once. Note that there is one word more than you need.

A. categorise B. creation C. good D. innovative E. maximum F. packed G. pedestrianise H. processing I. shape J. short-lived K. transformation

All Change in Curitiba!

Like many other major world cities, Curitiba in southern Brazil has had to deal with issues such as pollution, poverty, and limited public funding. However, the architect and three-times mayor of the city, Jaime Lerner, has introduced some     1     solutions.

As part of his ‘Master Plan’, Lerner hoped to make the city more environmentally friendly. He initiated a recycling scheme. In return for delivering recyclable rubbish to specified     2     points, residents receive a bag of vegetables or bus tickets. As a result, Curitiba now has one of the highest recycling rates in the world. Lerner also ordered the     3     of 26 urban parks. As well as preventing pollution, these control flooding.

Lerner did not win over all the city’s residents immediately, however. When his plans to     4     part of the centre were passed, local businesses were up in arms, fearing a reduction in profits. Realising he needed to act quickly, Lerner had the     5     of six blocks completed within three days. When a group of motorists attempted to drive through the new pedestrian area, Lerner arranged for local primary schools to hold a painting workshop on the streets. The drivers were forced to turn back. Luckily for Lerner, this rebellion was     6    . The increase in profit rapidly persuaded shop owners to change their minds.

Lerner’s determination helped     7     the Curitiba of today. The average income per capita has risen from a level that was below the Brazilian average in the 1970s to 66% above the average, and surveys indicate high levels of resident satisfaction.

So, is it all just one big success story? In some respects, Curitiba may have been too successful for its own    8    . People and businesses have come to the city, which now has more than 1.8 million residents. This has put the city under enormous stress. Forty years ago, buses transported 54,000 passengers a day. Now the number is 2.3 million. According to some experts, the transport system has reached its     9     efficiency capacity. Following a rise in complaints about the noisy and     10     buses, the service is in decline.

6 . There is a kind of climate pollution that we can’t see clearly. It isn’t in our rivers, lands or skies, it is in our minds. When climate disinformation goes unchecked, it spreads like wildfire, undermining the existence of climate change and the need for urgent action.

Like the biosphere that sustains us, the health of our information ecosystems is vital to our survival. As an artist, I feel a responsibility to create new ways of seeing the disinformation that has come to define the age of fake news.

Social media sites are honed to grab our attention. Using sophisticated algorithms, the corporations behind them decide what billions of people see around the world, dictated by what keeps you hooked, but also by what the companies paying social media sites choose to put in front of you.

Powerful corporate actors deploy clever influence campaigns via ads targeted at specific users based on what social media firms know about those people. Major oil and gas companies have spent billions of dollars over the years persuading consumers about their green proofs, when only 1 per cent of their expenditure in 2019 was on renewable energy. This is known as corporate greenwashing. Still, fossil fuel firms maintain that their climate policies are “responsible” and “in line with the science”.

To expose the scale of corporate greenwashing online, I was part of a team that recently launched Eco-Bot.Net. Co-created with artist Rob “3D” Del Naja of the band Massive Attack and Dale Vince, a green entrepreneur, Eco-Bot. Net’s AI-powered website ran throughout the COP26 climate summit, exposing climate change misinformation by releasing a series of data drops for heavily polluting sectors, including energy, agribusiness and aviation.

Academic definitions of climate disinformation and greenwashing were used to unearth posts across Facebook, Instagram and Twitter and visualize them on our website. Eco-Bot.Net then flagged greenwashing ads and posts on the original social media site with a public health warning.

By digging into our data, journalists have already revealed that companies are targeting specific demographics in order to influence public perceptions about climate change – and even alter government policy.

One data drop focused on the 100 biggest fossil fuel producers, companies that have been the source of 71 per cent of global carbon emissions. It found that 16 of these companies ran 1705 greenwashing and climate misinformation ads globally on Facebook and Instagram this year. In total, they spent more than £4 million creating influence campaigns that generated up to 155 million impressions.

Social media companies could end most of the harms from climate disinformation on their platforms if they wanted to. Flagging systems were swiftly introduced to warn users of posts containing disinformation about covid-19. The scientific consensus on human-caused global warming has been resolute for decades, so why can’t a similar flagging system be implemented for related disinformation?

It is true that Twitter and Facebook have both introduced climate science information hubs, but these are little more than PR exercises that fail to directly tackle climate disinformation on any kind of scale.

This epidemic of climate change disinformation on social media is eroding collective ideas of truth. In this post-truth age of disinformation, we hope that the public, the press and policy-makers will be able to use our data findings to see what is hidden by what we see online.

For the first time, we can witness the regional scale of corporate greenwashing. The era of climate denial and delay is largely over — except, as Eco-Bot.Net has revealed, on social media.

1. What does the word “undermine” in the first paragraph mean in the passage?

A．Dig holes in the ground.	B．Make sth weaker at the base.
C．Increase or further improve.	D．Put a stop to sth.

2. The author used the case of major oil and gas companies in Paragraph Four in order to ________.

A．give the readers a precise definition of corporate greenwashing

B．show the dishonest claim by fossil fuel companies on their responsible climate policies

C．demonstrate the huge investment the corporations made to exert powerful influence on the targeted social media users based on algorithm

D．emphasize the tens of millions of dollars spent on renewable energy

3. Which of the following industry contributes most to climate change?

A．energy

B．agribusiness

C．aviation

D．social media

4. What is the author’s opinion of social media?

A．They are willing to help but feel powerless to do so.

B．They have the ability to make a change but refuse to do so as there are controversies over climate changes.

C．They have the ability to make a change and have made some sincere but fruitless efforts on it.

D．They lose their integrity in face of the money from the big corporations.

7 . Peter and Minke van Wingerden have created something wild: a herd of cows floating on the sea. The Dutch husband-and-wife team’s experiment on sustainable agriculture, called Floating Farm, can be found in the port of Rotterdam. The modernist structure houses 40 cows, who collectively produce some 200 gallons of milk a day. In addition to helping nourish (滋养) the local community, the waterborne farm is playing a part in the global conversation about how the climate crisis is pushing farmers to reconsider how—and where—they produce food.

Floods, extreme heating, droughts and even rising night temperatures have sent the food system off balance. The race to outsmart the constant attack of extreme weather has made the world of farming unrecognizable from what it was only decades ago. A team of scientists in Mexico is developing wheat types that can adapt themselves to different climates, while Jack’s Solar Garden in Longmont, Colorado, is a testbed for the emerging method of solar farming.

Rotterdam has already established itself as one of the most climate-adaptive places in the world. Everything from office buildings to entire neighborhoods are built on water in the city, which is 90% below sea level. The Wingerdens’ Floating Farm was a new but necessary attempt. Should a weather crisis arise, a waterborne farm isn’t necessarily stuck in place. A former property developer with a background in engineering, Peter found his inspiration for the Floating Farm in a climate disaster in New York City, where Hurricane Sandy prevented the delivery of fresh food to millions.

The Wingerdens’ model is ripe for reproduction—which is exactly what the Floating Farm’s team of 14 are working on now. Plans are under way for a floating vegetable farm to move into the space next to the current Floating Farm. Permit applications are also out for similar structures in Dubai, Singapore and the Dutch cities of Haarlem and Arnhem.

The new projects will apply lessons learned from Floating Farm. “You need to build a house in order to know how to build a house,” Peter says. The biggest obstacles he sees ahead, however, are not financial or physical, but rather political and administrative. “One of the biggest challenges we come across worldwide is regulations. Cities need to have disruptive thinking, cities need to have disruptive departments, and cities need to have areas where you can say: OK, this is the experimental zone.” Because what Peter and his team are pulling off is of a different order than the typical sustainability measures. “We are not innovative,” he says. “We are disruptive.”

1. Which of the following is TRUE about the Floating Farm?

A．It is the first modern farming attempt to fight climate change.

B．It is a model of new agriculture in the age of climate crisis.

C．It has outsmarted other forms of farming like solar farming.

D．It copies a similar structure in Dubai ready for reproduction.

2. It can be inferred from the passage that ___________.

A．90% of the population in Rotterdam live below the sea level

B．The New York City is working hard to fight climate change

C．The local community will not be fed without new farming

D．Waterborne facilities are necessary to the future of Rotterdam

3. The phrase “disruptive thinking” in the last paragraph means “thinking __________”.

A．in a daring and unusual way	B．in a focused and logical way
C．in a careful and detailed way	D．in a rude and unpleasant way

4. Which of the following might be the best title of the passage?

A．Is Rotterdam Built on Water?

B．Can Floating Farming Survive?

C．Are Cows at Sea the Future of Farming?

D．Is Extreme Weather Affecting Agriculture?

8 . It’s 2076 and the skies are looking decidedly milky. On windy plains and in parts of the seas that have been turned over to wind farms, a different kind of tower has been built alongside the turbines (涡轮). They take in CO₂ out of the atmosphere. Vast parcels of land have been given over to forest. Trees are grown, harvested and burned for energy in power plants that don’t let CO₂ escape to the atmosphere. Instead, emissions are captured and driven underground. Powdered minerals are put into the water to absorb CO₂ and reduce ocean acidification.

All these technologies are a desperate action to reverse more than two centuries of greenhouse gas emissions. But they are not entirely up to the task and, anyway, we are still releasing greenhouse gases. “I think it’s very likely that in 60 years we’ll be using both technologies,” says John Shepherd of the University of Southampton, UK. He is referring to the two flavors of geoengineering: absorbing CO₂ out of the air and using a sunshade to reflect some of the sun’s rays back out into space.

There is no denying that climate talks are going too slowly and not so smoothly. Even if industrial emissions were to drop rapidly — a big if — some sections pose an intractable problem. We have no real replacement for aeroplane fuel and feeding people demands intensive agriculture, which accounts for a quarter of global emissions.

Computer models suggest there will be winners and losers. While a sunshade could lower global average temperatures to pre-industrial levels, there would be regional differences. Northern Europe, Canada, Siberia and the poles would remain warmer than they were, and temperatures over the oceans would be cooler. Global warming is predicted to make wet regions wetter and dry ones drier. Models suggest a sunshade would correct this, but, again, not in a uniform way.

Shepherd fears all this will feed into international arguments. He imagines some kind of global council where governments seek a climate that meets their needs. Some might prefer a slightly warmer temperature, for tourism or agriculture. But nations whose coral reefs (珊瑚礁) draw in visitors will probably want more CO₂ absorbing technologies.

In spite of all these concerns, most scientists hold that revolutionary technology and people’s awakening can shine a light on solutions in ways that are impossible now. There is undoubtedly a long way to go when we address problems facing mankind, but we can always anticipate something.

1. What is described in the first paragraph?

A．Future scenery and farming methods.

B．The development of transport technology.

C．The serious pollution problem in the very near future.

D．Future technologies to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

2. The word “intractable” in paragraph 4 most probably means “______”.

A．solvable	B．untypical
C．tricky	D．existing

3. It can be inferred from the passage that ______.

A．climate talks haven’t achieved the expected results

B．industrial emissions will decrease greatly in 60 years

C．technologies to reduce CO2 emission aren’t used properly for now

D．sunshades outshine intensive agriculture at capturing CO2 emissions

4. What is the main idea of the passage?

A．Effective CO2 absorbing technologies have come into wide use.

B．With greenhouse gas reduced, global warming can be addressed.

C．Future climate will improve with human efforts but threats still remain.

D．Future climate will restore to a normal state with advanced technology.

10 . 听下面一段独白，回答以下小题。1.

A．Plant ecology.	B．The study of insects.
C．Marine biology.	D．The food chain.

2.

A．The threat of scientific progress.	B．The danger of chemicals pesticides(杀虫剂).
C．The possible causes of cancer.	D．The natural history of the sea.

3.

A．It led to a nationwide ban on the use of pesticides in US.

B．It received positive feedback as soon as it was published.

C．It accused chemical industry of spreading disinformation.

D．It laid the foundation for modern agricultural ecosystem.