1 . An impressive invention made by a 17-year-old teenager, called Anna Du, is helping to clean up small pieces of plastic from the ocean.
While walking along her local beaches in Massachusetts, the young student began collecting waste plastic bags and bottles. But what she noticed was a large number of tiny pieces of plastic or microplastics that were impossible to pick up. At just 12 years old, Du set out to solve the problem. After testing a few prototypes(原型)in her backyard, she invented a remotely operated vehicle that uses the infrared camera(红外摄像机)to detect microplastics on the ocean floor. More recently, Du has also created a simulation(模拟)model that uses artificial intelligence to predict where microplastics are located.
Du’s robot invention has earned her awards at top science fairs in the US, and she’s now a nationally recognized advocate for microplastic awareness and pollution prevention. “When I first started doing science fairs, I had no idea that a young girl without lots of money and just a little advanced engineering knowledge could make a difference in the world. I’ve learned that I truly love working on a problem that’s so much larger than me,” Du said.
Du has also released a new book to help spread the word not only about the dangers of microplastics but also about the ways to relieve the problem. Titled Microplastics &Me, the book follows Du’s own story of how she went from worrying about the environment to designing award-winning solutions. Writing for kids her own age, the young girl alerts her readers to the threat of microplastic pollution and urges them to care about the environment. The book hopes to encourage young students to get into science, technology, engineering and math(STEM)subjects and to inspire a new generation of inventors and engineers. What’s more, Du has even raised more than $7,000 to distribute the book free to kids and libraries in high-need communities.
1. What inspired Du to make the invention?| A．There was too much rubbish along the beaches. | B．The plastics were too small to collect by hand. |
| C．The sea was polluted seriously. | D．She was interested in AI. |
| A．She has a spirit of challenge. | B．She is too poor to make a difference. |
| C．She doesn’t study hard in engineering. | D．She wins international recognition. |
| A．Innovation. | B．Voice. | C．Culture. | D．Art. |
| A．To inspire readers to share their stories. |
| B．To raise the awareness of microplastics pollution. |
| C．To encourage high schools to offer STEM subjects. |
| D．To collect money for kids in high-need communities. |
China's online food delivery platform Ele.me has carried out a new service of picking up garbage from its users in Shanghai
The service comes after
The trash taking service requires residents to sort
It's obvious that this service is
However, many netizens on Sina Weibo don't think Ele.me is providing a wonderful service, saying it just wants
3 . When most people think of drones (无人机), they think of technology and fun. Safe to say, few people would think about farming. However, a group of students from York College of Pennsylvania have been building a drone that will not only help local farmers but the environment, as well.
Samantha Gotwalt and Blayde Reich, two senior Mechanical Engineering majors at York College in the group, both found the work to be quite fascinating. According to Samantha, the idea came from a York College professor, who has worked with drones, and wanted to get students involved with a project beneficial to the community. “We really want to help farming and agriculture. It’s super-important to America and our economy,” Blayde says. “We want to help the smaller farmers, and one of the benefits is not having to spend their money on fertilizer and pesticides (杀虫剂).”
The idea is to design and build a drone that will take video imagery of the fields to determine what is needed to produce the best crop, while saving money and sparing the environment by reducing pollutants in the runoff water. Ideally, that data gained will help the farmers better determine what chemicals they need — and what they don’t.
However, finding the right equipment for the project was a challenge, starting with what drone the team would design for this particular usage. Samantha says she researched durability and control of drones to help make the proper determination.
“We are flying over the field and we want to have enough efficiency and go relatively slow enough that our pictures turn out well and fly low enough that it is not using up all of its power,” she says. “The fields are a couple hundred acres, so you need your drone to be able to fly the length of that field.”
Blayde says the team continues to learn a great deal of information that will help the farmers and the environment.
1. Why do students from York College of Pennsylvania build the drone?| A．To enrich students’ amusement activities. |
| B．To help farming and agriculture. |
| C．To confirm the students’ abilities. |
| D．To obtain more information about the drone. |
| A．Measuring the areas of the fields. | B．Assisting to monitor the state of crops. |
| C．Spreading proper quantities of pesticides. | D．Helping to determine the chemicals needed. |
| A．Its camera version. | B．Its durability and control. |
| C．Its flying ability. | D．Its further service. |
| A．Responsible and creative. | B．Experienced and generous. |
| C．Brilliant and grateful. | D．Reliable and realistic. |
4 . Urban gardens are valuable assets (资产) to communities. They provide green spaces to grow sustainable food, build community cohesion (凝聚力), make new friends, connect with the earth, and much more. So, let’s check out our list of 4 inspiring urban gardens in the US.
Gotham Greens
Where: New York & Chicago
What: Gotham Greens first started in Brooklyn and now has four locations in New York City and Chicago. Their flagship farm in Brooklyn produces over 100,000 pounds of greens per year. But it doesn’t just produce healthy local vegetables. It is using high-tech greenhouses with solar panels to make sure the food grown is healthy and sustainable.
Baltimore Urban Gardening with Students
Where: Baltimore, Maryland
What: The Baltimore Urban Gardening with Students (BUGS) program encourages students to get their hands dirty and plant vegetables through their after-school and summer programs. Many of these kids don’t have access to green spaces and have never had the opportunity to grow food.
Revision Urban Farm
Where: Boston, Massachusetts
What: Revision Urban Farm in Boston works in partnership with the Revision Family Home-a shelter for 22 homeless parents and their kids. The farm provides these families within formation on healthy eating, and access to the farm’s fresh vegetables. The organization also provides job training to help families escape the cycle of poverty.
Swale
Where: New York
What: Swale, a floating food forest located on a large boat, is an innovative project meant to inspire citizens to rethink the relationship between our cities and our food. This urban garden serves as both a living art exhibit and an educational farm Food forests are sustainable gardens that include vegetables, fruit, nut trees, bushes, herbs, and vines — each one complementing the other in a symbiotic (共生的) relationship.
1. What is special about Gotham Greens?| A．It offers homeless families information on healthy eating. |
| B．It creates a sustainable garden on a large boat. |
| C．It provides job training for students. |
| D．It uses high-tech greenhouses to grow healthy food. |
| A．Baltimore Urban Gardening with Students. | B．Swale. |
| C．Revision Urban Farm. | D．Gotham Greens. |
| A．They create job opportunities for farmers. |
| B．They are inspirational projects in New York. |
| C．They are beneficial to communities. |
| D．They have educational and entertaining purposes. |
5 . Sugar cane (甘蔗) contains around 10% sugar. But that means it contains around 90% non-sugar — the material known as bagasse (甘蔗渣) which remains once the sugar-bearing juice has been squeezed out of the cane. World production of cane sugar was 185m tonnes in 2017. That results in a lot of bagasse.
At the moment, most of this is burned. Often, it fuels local generators, so it is not wasted. But Zhu Hongli, a mechanical engineer at Northeastern University in Boston thinks it can be put to better use. "With a bit of improvement bagasse makes an excellent replacement for the plastic used for disposable food containers such as coffee cups," says Dr. Zhu.
Dr. Zhu is not the first person to have this idea. But previous attempts tended not to survive contact with liquids. She thought she could overcome that by combining the bagasse pulp (浆状物) with another biodegradable (可生物降解的) material. She discovered that the main reason past efforts failed is that bagasse is composed of short fibres which are unable to give resilience (韧性) to the finished product. She therefore sought to insert a suitably long-fibred substance.
Bamboo seemed to fit the bill. It grows quickly, degrades readily and has appropriately long fibres. When the researchers mixed a small amount of bamboo pulp into bagasse, they found that the short and long fibres combined with each other closely.
To put their new material through its paces, Dr. Zhu and her colleagues fist poured hot oil onto it and found that their invention showed resistance to oil. They also found that when they made a cup out of the stuff and filled it with water heated almost to the boiling point, the cup remained good for more than two hours. Though this is not as long as a plastic cup would last it is long enough for all practical purposes. Moreover, the new material is twice as strong as the plastic used to make cups, and is definitely biodegradable. When Dr. Zhu buried a cup made out of it in the ground, half of it rotted away within two months.
1. What does paragraph l mainly talk about?| A．A big international market for cane sugar. | B．A plant containing a high content of sugar. |
| C．The large amount of world bagasse production. | D．The environmental impact of planting sugar cane. |
| A．They broke easily when wet. | B．They were non-biodegradable. |
| C．They consumed little bagasse. | D．They had too much resilience. |
| A．Avoid the attempts. | B．Meet the requirements. |
| C．Fill the vacancy. | D．Survive the environment. |
| A．It can satisfy basic usage needs. | B．It is hardly as strong as plastic cups. |
| C．It can disappear in two months if buried. | D．It is unlikely to be used as an oil container. |
6 . Cities are diverse ecosystems. In addition to visitors from the wild, such as coyotes (丛林狼) in Los Angeles or boars (野猪) in Berlin, a large number of species share our urban areas. As our cities spread, we need to think about what it is like for other species to have human neighbors.
Because cities are built for humans, they do not always provide suitable habitats for wildlife. For example, most city parks are kept neat and tidy so that humans will find them beautiful. But when we cut grass or plant flowers, we destroy natural habitats.
Our actions sometimes help other species. When a bridge in Austin, Texas was repaired, engineers added small gaps running along the length of its bottom. This made a good home for bats, and soon the bridge was the home of thousands of bats. At first, people were afraid of the bats and tried to get rid of them. Now, they have come to value their winged neighbors. The bats are a tourist attraction, and they eat lots of bugs every night.
There are also structures built with the aim of bringing wildlife into the city. The Beijing Olympic Forest Park is a good example. The park used native plants and created open, natural spaces for wildlife. The result is a zone in Beijing with over 160 species of birds. In many ways, the park is the opposite of a zoo. Instead of being kept in cages, wildlife can move about freely.
Another example is a 2011 proposal for a tall “Birdscraper” building in New York. The building is intended to protect birds and fight pollution at the same time. It would be in the middle of a lake, birds would sit on it, and their droppings would fall into the water. The droppings would help water plants grow well and then create oxygen through photosynthesis (光合作用). If we learn to share our space, we can become better neighbors to the wildlife around us. If we do not, more species will become extinct and our own future will be endangered.
1. What can we infer from the first paragraph?| A．Other species like to have human neighbors. |
| B．There are many kinds of wildlife living in city areas. |
| C．Coyotes or boars always attack cities like Los Angeles or Berlin. |
| D．People should think about their neighbors when having visitors. |
| A．To get rid of the bats. |
| B．To make it an attraction. |
| C．To help other species to live conveniently. |
| D．To make it convenient for bugs to go through. |
| A．The structure of wildlife zoo in Beijing. |
| B．The parks built to grow native plants. |
| C．The wildlife of Beijing Olympic Forest Park, |
| D．The structures built to attract wildlife into city. |
| A．waste | B．voice |
| C．rubbish | D．appearance |
The environment pollution was more and more serious today. We have no clean water to drink it because of water pollution. And when trees cut down, some animals disappear. There is more and more dirty smoke in the air. People’s health has been great affected by air, noise and water pollution. Many people have died of diseases causing by pollution. In order to live the better life, it’s time for us to protect our world.
Firstly, we shouldn’t throw away rubbish everywhere. And we should recycle, reduce and reuse things, that saves money and reduces pollution. Use things so long as possible. Don’t use plastic bag. Besides, we must plant more trees and stop people cutting it down. We hope our world will be more and more beautiful.
8 . 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 |
9 . Several art projects are on show to warn people of the climate change happening around us.
Video on the walls
Photographer Camille Seaman has traveled to both the North Pole and the South Pole, where she has captured the disappearing ice in photographs and video. Camille Seaman made a video with some of her most powerful photos of melting ice for people in four coastal cities to display on their buildings. The video ends with a prediction that sea level will rise by 2050 without relative action.
Mural (壁画)changing color
Temperatures in Austin, Texas, are on the rise, and climate change will put the city at higher risk of extended drought, wildfires, intense rain and flooding. Artist Lope Gutiérrez-Ruiz designed a unique mural that changes color as it gets hotter. This art work calls for people to change the world and change climate change, underlining the importance of individual actions to the collective future.
Public billboard (广告牌)
Artist Christine Sun Kim released a public billboard on the 710 Freeway called The Sound of Temperature Rising. It points to the reality of climate disaster that has become all too clear on the West Coast and the need for significant change now. The illustration features a graph (图表) of music notes that get progressively longer and redder.
Anti-Extinction Library
Globally, species are disappearing at an unheard-of rate. In response, architect Mitchell Joachim created The Anti-Extinction Library in New York. The sculptural piece is not only beautiful but also functional. Their unique egg-shaped library has a special freezer storing test tubes with the frozen cells and DNA of rare animals and plants. It’s important for people to realize we must quickly work to protect the rights of different species in our area.
1. What is the key feature of the mural?| A．It lights up at night. |
| B．It moves with the wind. |
| C．It plays music when it rains. |
| D．It changes color with temperature. |
| A．Camille Seaman’s. | B．Lope Gutiérrez-Ruiz’s. |
| C．Christine Sun Kim's. | D．Mitchel l Joachim’s. |
| A．To praise artists’ participation. |
| B．To call for people to take action. |
| C．To show the severe result of climate change. |
| D．To facilitate the combination of art and climate. |
(1) 垃圾问题的现状；
(2) 垃圾分类的好处(至少2点)；
(3) 呼吁全体同学积极参加垃圾分类。
注意：词数：100 左右；
参考词汇：垃圾分类 rubbish classification 可回收物 recyclable waste
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