1 . For many young Canadians, planting trees is more than just a job. It’s a way of
Planting trees is not easy work, according to Leslie. Not only is it
So far, Leslie has planted a total of 372,290 trees in the past few years.
“I think every parent in Canada should
| A．appointment | B．impression | C．recreation | D．life |
| A．investment | B．liberation | C．video | D．story |
| A．negative | B．speedy | C．respective | D．influential |
| A．rewarding | B．massive | C．original | D．diverse |
| A．barely | B．permanently | C．gradually | D．physically |
| A．heavy | B．sunny | C．severe | D．obvious |
| A．expect | B．organize | C．prefer | D．recover |
| A．scream | B．action | C．push | D．wave |
| A．potential | B．sudden | C．tough | D．flexible |
| A．Moreover | B．However | C．Besides | D．Therefore |
| A．turns to | B．relates to | C．belongs to | D．subscribes to |
| A．admit | B．warn | C．whisper | D．recommend |
| A．send | B．celebrate | C．understand | D．decide |
| A．imagined | B．argued | C．explained | D．responded |
| A．version | B．concept | C．responsibility | D．qualification |
2 . Conversation around sustainability (可持续发展) has been growing in recent years, with a whole wave of new words entering the dictionary to describe its influence across many topics. To honour Earth Day, we’re exploring the developing language of sustainability in our day-to-day lives.
The climate emergency took on new meanings in 2018 thanks to climate activist Greta Thunberg. Her speeches and strikes lighted a global conversation and since then, we’ve seen many climate-related words entering the Collins Word of the Year shortlists including “rewilding” and “climate anxiety”. We also saw two climate words win CollinsWOTY: single use (2018) and climate strike (2019).
This increased everyday conversation around our planet also means we’re seeing new words enter the dictionary on an ongoing basis. Recent entries include climate justice (正义), the formulation of policies (政策的制定) to fight climate change that do not place an unfair pressure on poorer and local communities, and zero waste, a situation in which people’s activities produce nothing that cannot be reused, re-purposed, or recycled.
The more we talk about the climate crisis, the more forced we are to find solutions. This means we’re seeing new language around energy production. One example is solar park, which is an area of land that has been set aside for the generation of solar energy. Solar parks are a renewable energy source that can reduce carbon emissions (碳排放). Other energy-related words include blue hydrogen (氢) and green hydrogen, new entries to the Collins Dictionary, both described as a commercially produced hydrogen that creates little to no emissions of CO2.
Fighting the climate crisis depends on big businesses and governments using greener practices. But there are lots of ways we can protect our planet as individuals and these little changes have led to developing words around nature, diet, and lifestyle.
1. Which of the following win CollinsWOTY?| A．Rewilding and climate anxiety. | B．Single use and climate strike. |
| C．Climate justice and zero waste. | D．Blue hydrogen and green hydrogen. |
| A．To warn the climate danger. | B．To explain the carbon emissions. |
| C．To suggest the park’s new use. | D．To show new energy-related words. |
| A．The climate emergency. | B．The Collins Dictionary. |
| C．The developing climate language. | D．The celebration of Earth Day. |
| A．Examples of new words about nature, diet and lifestyle. | B．Individual protection of our planet. |
| C．Discussion about sustainability. | D．Solutions to the climate change. |
The Hangzhou Asian Games,
Sustainability (持续性) has been
4 . The rainforests are alive with the sound of animals. Besides the pleasure of the din (喧嚣), it is also useful to ecologists. If you want to measure the biodiversity of a piece of land, listening out for animal calls is much easier than looking for tracks in the undergrowth. But such “bioacoustic (生物声音的) analysis” is still time-consuming, and it requires an expert pair of ears.
In a paper published on October 17th in Nature Communications, a group of researchers led by Jörg Müller, an ecologist at the University of Würzburg, describe a better way: have a computer do the job. Smartphone apps already exist that will identify birds, bats or mammals simply by listening to the sounds they make. Their idea was to apply the principle to conservation work.
The researchers took recordings from across 43 sites in the Ecuadorean rainforest. Some sites were relatively uncultivated, old-growth forests. Others were areas that had recently been cleared for grazing or cacao planting. And some had been cleared but then abandoned, allowing the forest to regrow. Sound recordings were taken four times every hour, over two weeks. The various calls were identified manually by an expert, and then used to construct a list of the species present. As expected, the longer the land had been free from agricultural activity, the greater the biodiversity it hosted.
Then it was the computer’s turn. The researchers fed their recordings to artificial-intelligence models that had been trained, using sound samples from elsewhere in Ecuador, to identify 75 bird species from their calls. “We found that the AI tools could identify the sounds as well as the experts,” says Dr Müller.
Of course, not everything in a rainforest makes a noise. Dr Müller and his colleagues used light-traps to catch night-flying insects, and DNA analysis to identify them. To their relief, they found that the diversity of noisy animals was a reliable proxy for the diversity of the quieter ones.
The results may have application outside ecology departments, too. Under pressure from their customers, firms such as L’Oreal, a make-up company, and Shell, an oil firm, have been spending money on forest restoration projects around the world. Dr Müller hopes that an automated approach to checking on the results could help monitor such efforts, and give a standardised way to measure whether they are working as well as their sponsors say.
1. What can we learn about Bioacoustic analysis?| A．It makes animal calls attractive. | B．It requires special skill and time. |
| C．It measures biodiversity easily. | D．It applies to many research fields. |
| A．Researchers trained AI models to imitate animal calls. |
| B．AI tools can identify bird species as well as the experts. |
| C．Agricultural activities led to a decrease in biodiversity. |
| D．Researchers used AI tools to conserve rainforests well. |
| A．Accelerator. | B．Assumption. | C．Formation. | D．sign. |
| A．Identifying the sponsors. | B．Evaluating the biodiversity. |
| C．Monitoring the effectiveness. | D．Establishing ecology departments. |
5 . In 2014, Xu Yitang, a student at the National Academy of Chinese Theatre Arts, saw corals at an aquarium for the first time.
Little did he know the chance
“The coral organism is quite
As he became better
Fast-forward to today, he
Each day, he spends several hours diving deep under the waves to observe and
His story has been
| A．incident | B．witness | C．encounter | D．appointment |
| A．passion | B．vision | C．friendship | D．career |
| A．study | B．frequent | C．examine | D．discover |
| A．treating | B．preserving | C．selecting | D．growing |
| A．tough | B．smooth | C．delicate | D．impressive |
| A．benefits | B．requirements | C．expenses | D．responses |
| A．reminded | B．informed | C．warned | D．convinced |
| A．shelters | B．partners | C．opportunities | D．services |
| A．Somehow | B．Nevertheless | C．Therefore | D．Unfortunately |
| A．extinction | B．variation | C．decline | D．expansion |
| A．responsibility | B．relief | C．achievement | D．belonging |
| A．consults with | B．applies for | C．seeks out | D．acts as |
| A．find out | B．note down | C．show off | D．speed up |
| A．revised | B．contributed | C．announced | D．featured |
| A．assess | B．follow | C．relate | D．invent |
6 . Fishing cats are a kind of cats that love water and love to fish. They are like tigers and lions, only much smaller, around twice the size of an average pet cats. They live in wetlands of south Asia and mangrove forests (红树林) of south and southeast Asia. Like many other endangered species, fishing cats are in danger of dying out more than twenty years ago, mainly because of the great international need for food fish and people’s cutting of mangroves at an extremely fast speed.
Mangroves of southeast Asia are home to a great many fantastic species like fishing cats, turtles, shorebirds and others. Mangroves can protect soil and they can be the first line of protection between storms, tsunamis and millions of people who live next to them. The fact is that mangroves can store almost five to ten times more Carbon dioxide than other forests. So protecting mangroves may well be like protecting five and ten times more of other forests.
Ten years ago, in south India, many people came together to change the future of their home. In less than ten years, with international support, the state forest departments and the local people work together to restore over 20,000 acres of unproductive fish and shrimp farms back into mangroves. Now experts are working with them in helping study protect the mangroves as well as species living in them. Fish and shrimp farmers are now willing to work with the experts to test the harvest of nature protection like fishes, turtles and other species in mangroves. The local farmers are encouraged to protect the plant mangroves where they have been lost. A win-win-win situation for fishing cats, local people and the global ecosystem is being built.
1. What made the fishing cats endangered?| A．Natural enemies and environmental pollution. |
| B．Cutting off mangroves and lack of water. |
| C．Less fish and overcutting of mangroves. |
| D．Being too large and need for good fish. |
| A．the shelter. | B．the jungle. |
| C．the gathering. | D．the habitat. |
| A．Ways of turning farms into forests. | B．Changes of South India in ten years. |
| C．Efforts to protect the mangroves. | D．Work in protecting shrimps. |
| A．Fishing Cats and Mangroves Protection | B．The importance of mangroves |
| C．Approaches to Protecting Fishing Cats | D．Man and Nature |
7 . In 2019, the world generated 54.6 million tons of e-waste. However, just 17.4 percent of it was formally collected and recycled. Since 2014, the amount of e-waste recycled has grown by 1.8 million tons—a relatively small amount, considering that the amount of e-waste generated increased by 9.2 million tons in the same period.
Global reserves of some elements, such as platinum (铂), are supposed to be fully used up within15 years if the proportion of recycled stocks entering production doesn’t increase. E-waste and EV batteries are currently recycled through processes called pyrometallurgy and hydrometallurgy. However, they involve burning temperatures with a high energy demand and deep carbon footprint, and poisonous chemicals which are harmful to the environment. Alternatives are therefore being sought.
A team of scientists from the University of Coventry are extending one such alternative. They have been using non-poisonous bacteria to oxidize (使氧化) and recover the precious metals—a process known as ”bioleaching“. They have shown that copper is widely recoverable from e-waste, and that all metals present in EV batteries can be recovered by using microbes (微生物). If extended, bioleaching facilities would mean that manufacturers of EV batteries and other electronic goods would be able to recover metals locally, relying less on costly exports to recycling centers abroad.
”At present, a key limitation for e-waste recycling is the lack of certification detailing the types and amounts of metals contained in electronic goods. But with an efficient recycling process appearing, manufacturers have the motivation to use more recycled material in their products, which will change the very design of electronics goods. It’s about closing the loop of a product’s life cycle,“ said the leader of the Bioleaching Research Group, Sebastien Farnaud.
Ultimately, bioleaching technology is born out of the idea of creating a truly circular process for the things that we consume. We need to shift from a mindset and economy where we see waste as an end product, to one where there isn’t even a start or an end at all.
1. What do the statistics in paragraph 1 indicate?| A．The recycling rate of e-waste is comparatively low. |
| B．People pay little attention to e-waste recycling. |
| C．E-waste has caused serious environmental problems. |
| D．The amount of e-waste is sharply increasing every year. |
| A．They only apply to certain e-waste. |
| B．They generate metals with a complex process. |
| C．They are not environmentally friendly. |
| D．They cause a sharp rise in local temperatures. |
| A．It recovers metals by microbes. | B．It produces non-poisonous bacteria. |
| C．It has been applied abroad. | D．It promotes the local export trade. |
| A．A news report. | B．A scientific journal. |
| C．A health magazine. | D．A fiction novel. |
8 . It’s late evening in the middle of the winter. The snow is deep, but off I go into the wild. Suddenly, I hear it: the howl (嚎叫) of wolves. Excitedly, I walk faster in the direction of the howling.
I’ve been working as a volunteer wolf tracker in Yellowstone National Park for over a year. It’s my job to follow wolves to record information about them. Like wolves, however, I don’t work alone. I’m one of a team of people who have been in a project to help reintroduce wolves to the park.
Humans have always feared wolves. From fairy tales to movies, the wolf is always the bad guy —a danger to humans and other animals. In the 1920s, the organizers of the park shared this view about wolves and made the decision to drive them away from the park. As a result, the number of elk (麋鹿) in the park increased. The elk started looking for food near river banks since they didn’t have to worry about wolves. This, in turn, stopped trees from growing along the rivers, doing great harm to the environment there.
The return of wolves has already made a big difference. To begin with, the elk soon learned to stay away from the rivers, so new trees have been able to grow there. The trees become home to new wildlife, such as birds, and provide food for more animals.
The park is now becoming more and more popular with those who want to see wolves in their natural environment. It has also helped the local people make more money. Tourists visit the area, stay in the local hotels, and eat in the local restaurants.
Looking at the wild animals and the beautiful sceneries around me, I am amazed at the changes the wolf has made to Yellowstone. And happily, it is playing a good guy in this story.
1. According to the passage, one of a wolf tracker’s jobs is to ________.| A．catch wolves in the park | B．feed wolves in the wild |
| C．stop wolves from killing elk | D．collect information about wolves |
| A．The wolves were always howling at night. |
| B．The elk in the park were in danger of dying out. |
| C．The wolves had done great harm to the environment. |
| D．The park was thought to be unsafe with wolves around. |
| A．risks | B．troubles | C．changes | D．competitions |
| A．Wolves are important to Yellowstone. |
| B．Yellowstone has been home to wolves. |
| C．The wolf and the elk live in peace now. |
| D．The number of wolves is growing fast. |
9 . Western Australia may soon be home to the world’s tallest wooden building, after authorities plans for a 191.2-meter-tall tower constructed using mass wood. Perth’s Metro Inner-South Joint Development Assessment Panel (JDAP) approved the developer Grange Development’s proposal for the tall building.
The tall building, currently named the C6 building, would stand nearly twice as high as the current record holder. The developers say 42% of the building will be constructed from wood, with the columns and core made of concrete (混凝土). If completed, the high-rise will go beyond the current world’s tallest wooden building, the Ascent tower in Wisconsin, America, which stands at 25 stories or 86 meters. The structure, located in South Perth, Australia, will also be taller than the coming wood Atlassian Headquarters in Sydney, which is expected to claim the record from Ascent but is yet to be completed.
Like Atlassian Headquarters, the C6 building will combine wood beams (横梁) with a steel supporting structure to support the whole structure. According to Grange Development, the 50-story building will contain more than 200 apartments.
It will be Western Australia’s first carbon-negative residential building. Grange Development’s director, James Dibble, said, “Our desire with the building is to shift the focus towards a more climate-conscious approach.” The building will use 7,400 cubic meters of wood harvested from 600 trees. “We can’t grow concrete,” Dibble said, calling the plan “a new open sourced blueprint that uses construction methods to balance out the CO2 within our built environment, which is the single biggest trigger to climate issues”. “This is our opportunity to show that we genuinely care about the climate crisis we are doing very little about as an industry,” he added.
Philip Oldfield, head of the University of New South Wales’ School of Built Environment, said, “Typically we build tall buildings out of steel and concrete, Concrete is responsible for 8% of all CO release. So by replacing concrete and steel with a biological material such as wood, it is going to reduce the environmental impact of the building quite significantly.”
1. Where will the second tallest wooden building appear?| A．In South Perth, Australia. | B．In Sydney, Australia. |
| C．In New South Wales, Australia. | D．In Wisconsin, America. |
| A．Relief. | B．Limit. | C．Improvement. | D．Contributor. |
| A．Low-carbon. | B．High-risk. | C．Material-saving. | D．Energy-wasting. |
| A．The tallest wooden building has been all done in Australia |
| B．The tallest wooden building causes environmental worries |
| C．The tallest wooden building highlights more than its height |
| D．The tallest wooden building fits well the climate in Australia |
From green sporting venues (场馆)
Through the Games, Hangzhou’s green and high-tech development concepts served as models for other cities in China, which also showed the country’s
The 65 venues and related facilities of the Games realized 100 percent green electricity supply. At the Hangzhou Olympic Sports Centre Aquatic Sports Arena, the intelligent light guide system can save 100,000 kilowatt-hours of electricity per year by introducing outdoor
As Hangzhou
