The 1975 film Jaws was a great success,
2 . According to the World Food Program, one third of the food of the world is lost or wasted. It’s up to some 1.3 billion tons every year, worth about $1 trillion. Moreover, a report in 2021 Sugests that 8 to10 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions (排放) are associated with wasting food.
“For our parents and the older generations,‘clearing your plate’ is more about saving some food for a rainy day.”Liu Jichen, founder and CEO of Clear Plate, an anti-food wasting program, told us.
The idea for Clear Plate came to Liu after one dinner at a restaurant in late 2017. The customers who finished all the food they’d ordered would be given a card, and then they could exchange their cards for rewards. “Yet it was limited to one restaurant’s actions, so I thought, why not try it on a larger scale (规模)? And how?” Liu wondered. And then he teamed up with some of his friends,founded a startup and developed the Clear Plate applet.
“The Clear Plate team is trying to deal with the issue (问题) of food waste. After a meal, users of WeChat take photos of their clean plates, post these on WeChat, collect points, and then exchange their points for gifts or charity donations,” Liu explained.
Starting in 2018, Clear Plate has now more than 4.3 million users with about 45 million participations in anti-food wasting actions, reducing food waste by 1,700 tons and carbon emissions by 6,600 tons. Liu’s determination represents a small change of the Chinese lifestyle and more people are turning toward a healthier, greener and more low-carbon lifestyle.
1. How much food of the world is wasted every year according to the World Food Program?| A．About 1 billion tons. | B．About 1.3 billion tons. |
| C．About 8 billion tons. | D．About 10 billion tons. |
| A．A plate. | B．A point. | C．A photo. | D．A card. |
| A．In 2016. | B．In 2017. | C．In 2018. | D．In 2021. |
| A．The program Clear Plate. |
| B．The World Food Program. |
| C．The world food wasting. |
| D．An introduction to WeChat. |
3 . Walking along any beach in the world, you will find plastic of some kind on the shoreline, offering a reminder of the throwaway culture of the present day world. Now, a study has sounded a fresh warning on the damage caused to the marine (海洋的) ecosystem due to plastics, which eventually has an effect on human health due to the seafood we eat
In a paper titled “A Growing Plastic Smog”, researchers called on governments around the world to take firm action to handle the “plastic pollution” of the world's oceans.
The plastics break down over time into minute particles(微小颗粒) that cannot be seen by eyes, but find their way into the ocean ecosystem and into the seafood humans consume. “Microplastics are a problem because they are mistaken for food and eaten by small marine animals.” Charlene Trestrail said. “Once eaten, microplastics can damage an animal’s intestines(肠), and give out potentially harmful chemicals inside animals.”
Charlene Trestrail, a researcher at the University of Technology Sydney, said “the study shows just how big the problem is and that much of the blame was placed on the plastics industry for failing to recycle or design for recyclability.”
Paul Harvey, an environmental scientist, said “Globally, we have reached a point where we can no longer ignore the plastic pollution pandemic(流行病) that is infecting our oceans. This research shows us that beach cleanups and citizen science projects that focus on the environmental problems of plastics have little impact on solving the problem.”
Marcus Eriksen, lead author of the study, said that the findings were a “stark warning that we must act now at a global scale”. “Cleanup is useless if we continue to produce plastic at the current/rate, and we have heard about recycling for too long, while the plastic industry refuses any commitments to buy recycled material or design for recyclability. It is time for policymakers, governments and businesses to wake up and take the issue seriously.”
1. What is the third paragraph mainly about ?| A．The effect of chemicals. | B．The harm of microplastics. |
| C．The food of marine animals. | D．The breakdown of microplastics. |
| A．Plastics industry. | B．Government. | C．Tourists. | D．Cleaners |
| A．Useful. | B．Negative | C．Positive | D．Indifferent |
| A．The tendency of plastic pollution. |
| B．The bad effects of plastic pollution. |
| C．The measures to deal with plastic pollution. |
| D．The reason for plastic pollution in the ocean. |
4 . City air is in a sorry state. It is dirty and hot. Outdoor pollution kills 4.2 million people a year, according to the World Health Organization. Concrete and blacktop, meanwhile, absorb the sun’s rays rather than reflecting them back into space, and also take the place of plants which would otherwise cool things down by transpiration. The never-ending spread of buildings and roads thus turns urban areas into heat islands, discomforting residents and worsening dangerous heatwaves, which are in any case likely to become more frequent as the planet warms.
A possible answer to the twin problems is trees. Their leaves may destroy at least some chemical pollutants and they certainly trap airborne particulate matter, which is then washed to the ground by rain. And trees cool things down. Besides transpiration, they provide shade. Their leaves have, after all, developed to block sunlight.
To cool an area effectively, though, trees must be planted in quantity. In 2009, researchers at the University of Wisconsin found that American cities need 40% tree coverage to cut urban heat back meaningfully. Unfortunately, not all cities — and especially not those now springing up in the world’s poor and middle-income countries — are blessed with parks, private gardens or even decorative street trees in sufficient numbers. And the problem is likely to get worse. At the moment, 55% of people live in cities. By 2050 that share is expected to reach 68%.
Some botanists believe they have at least a partial solution to this lack of urban vegetation. It is to plant very small simulacra of natural forests, ecologically engineered for rapid growth, Over the course of a career that began in the 1950s, Akira Miyawaki, the team leader and a plant ecologist at Yokohama National University in Japan, have developed a way to do this starting with even the most unpromising and in-bad-condition areas.
The method originated in Japan and was later introduced to other Asian countries. As it has become known, the Miyawaki method is finding increasing prevalence around the world. In Europe, Belgium; France and the Netherlands are all home to Miyawaki forests. Dr Miyawaki’s insight was to deconstruct and rebuild the process of ecological succession, by which bare lands develop naturally into mature forests.
1. What are the twin problems in the text?| A．Air pollution and heatwaves. | B．Lack of water and green space. |
| C．Bad weather and road conditions. | D．High-rise buildings and traffic jams. |
| A．Paragraph 2. | B．Paragraph 3. | C．Paragraph 4. | D．Paragraph 5. |
| A．Return. | B．Threat. | C．Trade. | D．Favour. |
| A．What mature forests are. | B．How bare land comes into being. |
| C．How the Miyawaki method works. | D．Why the Miyawaki method is popular. |
5 . Ms Yuting Zhou is an early-career environmental advisor working on industrial wastewater pollution management, In her work, she’s learning about an important type of environmental pollution, and finding ways to help companies manage water resources better.
When we asked Yuting how old she was when she got interested in environmental problems, we were surprised by her response. “I must have been about six years old. I used to watch an American TV series about an environmentalist Superhero named Captain Planet.”
There is one serious pollution event somewhere in the world. The concern about environmental issues deeply influenced Yuting. But how does one prepare to be a “Superwoman”? For Yuting, it came down to a reflection on what she might be good at — in her case, the Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) subjects-and making considered choices in her education.
She began to study environmental engineering, and found a passion for the subject. “During my graduate studies.” I researched different kinds of health effects.
While she developed valuable skills that would help her in her career, she also learnt more about herself and her role in the world. “I learnt that science requires a scientific proof through repeated and sometimes long processes. Although I completed and published my research in a top academic journal, I realized that I’m not fit for laboratory work. I needed more interaction with people, and to solve real-life problems.”
Within three days of graduating, Yuting was on a plane heading to Kenya. She was excited about working for the United Nations because there were people from various industries and backgrounds gathering to improve the environment and create a more sustainable (可持续的) future — a lot like the setting of Caprain Planet which brought light to her in the first place.
1. What first exposed Yuting to environmental problems?| A．An American TV series. | B．A famous environmental expert. |
| C．A famous and popular hero. | D．A serious pollution event. |
| A．How she could make use of her talent. | B．What organization she should join. |
| C．How she could become a superwoman. | D．What she would focus on studying. |
| A．Publishing lots of papers about them. | B．Conducting many researches on them. |
| C．Carrying on many a related experiment. | D．Reaching out to as many people as possible. |
| A．She met with people from all walks of life. | B．She knew the key to success. |
| C．She changed her attitude to life. | D．She learned how to chat with others. |
1. 活动时间和形式；
2. 野生动物面临的严峻形势；
3. 号召同学们保护野生动物。
注意: 1. 词数100左右；
2. 首句已为你写出。
Our club is going to hold a campaign to protect wild animals.
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7 . Microbiologists have designed a sustainable way to remove polluting microplastics from the environment by using bacteria. Initial design as it is, it paves the way for sustainably lowering plastic pollution levels and stop the “plastification”.
Bacteria naturally tend to group together and stick to surfaces, and this creates a sticky material called “biofilm”. Researchers at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University (PolyU) want to use this adhesive bacteria character and capture microplastics in polluted water to form an easily disposable and recyclable blob(团) .
Sylvia Lang Liu, microbiology researcher at PolyU and lead researcher on this project, together with his team, has engineered a bacterial biofilm, which can fix and absorb microplastics floating around in the water, and make them sink to the bottom of the water. Then the researchers can separate the microplastics from the bacteria traps and get them ready to recycle.
Microplastics are the plastic fragments, usually smaller than 5mm, which are accidentally released into the environment during production and breakdown of grocery bags or water bottles, or during everyday activities such as washing synthetic (合成的) clothes or using personal care products with scrubbing microbeads in them. Microplastics are visually tiny, making it challenging to develop effective solutions to trap, collect, and recycle them.
Microplastics are not easily biodegradable (生物降解的), so they stick around for long and absorb and accumulate poisonous chemicals. They spread into wastewater and into the oceans, endangering marine animals and eventually threatening human health, Microplastics had been found in more than 114 species living in the water and also salt, lettuce, apples, and more in 2018 according to the International Maritime Organization.
“This is an innovative application of biofilm engineering l0 address the plastio pollution crisis,” said Dr Joanna Sadler, researcher at University of Edinburgh, who was not involved in this study. “One of the biggest challenges in dealing with microplastics is capturing such small particles. Liu and co-workers have denmonstrated an elegant solution to this problem, which holds great potential to be further developed into a real-world wastewater treatment technology.”
1. Which of the following best explains the underlined word “adhesive” in Paragraph 2?| A．Floating. | B．Sticky. | C．Diverse. | D．Visual. |
| A．They are visually too small. | B．They are hard to biodegrade. |
| C．They continue to exist for long. | D．They are poisonous chemicals. |
| A．Small particles are essential to address water pollution |
| B．Biofilm bas been widely used to settle plastic pollution. |
| C．Sadler thinks little of the biofilm engineering application. |
| D．Biofilm application is promising for wastewater treatment. |
| A．Microplastic removal. | B．Uses of bacteria. |
| C．Wastewater treatment. | D．Plastic pollution. |
8 . I grew up in a remote mountain town in the Philippines. My family led a fairly idyllic life, raising goats and growing vegetables and fruits. My brothers and I would play in the nearby river and mountains, reading and doing all the fun things in the nature without worries.
Later I went to college abroad, and I would go back about once a year to visit. That’s when I started to notice changes in my hometown. I watched the river turn from clear to brown to black. Houses and farms replaced the trees. There was smog, and plastic garbage piled up. Seeing my childhood home go from a clean mountain town to a deforested, polluted, and overcrowded place really impacted me. Over time, I began to see my hometown as a place of unsustainable development.
While I worked on addressing deforestation with the United Nations in Indonesia, I vividly remembered seeing forests burned into black landscapes as far as the eye could see. Experiences like that have both terrified me and lit a fire within me to work harder. Thankfully, I began to see that there is another path. I saw success stories in places I worked-Indonesia, Costa Rica, Ecuador-places that are investing in nature and changing the culture and the mindset of what development looks like. I saw places realizing not only economic benefits-from, say, tourism—but also more benefits of ecosystem services.
The work of WWF and other organizations is critical in promoting success stories according to their local context. Each community, region, and country is different, so solutions must meet their different needs. Coming from a rural community in a developing country gave me a clear outlook on addressing ecology and sustainability issues and is something I carry with me in my work.
1. What does the underlined word “idyllic” in paragraph I mean?| A．Simple and peaceful. | B．Busy and noisy. |
| C．Quiet and boring. | D．Tough and tiring. |
| A．Smog and garbage in the city. |
| B．Beautiful rivers in different colors. |
| C．Houses and farms in foreign countries. |
| D．Damaged environment in his hometown. |
| A．Success stories he learned. | B．Economic benefits from tourism. |
| C．Some disasters he witnessed. | D．Slow development of his hometown. |
| A．Communities are faced with common challenges. |
| B．People have different outlooks on rural development. |
| C．Ecology issues should be addressed locally and differently. |
| D．Organizations play the most important role in sustainability. |
| A．Air pollution. | B．Garbage sorting. | C．Endangered species. |
10 . In an area that’s surrounded by Scotland’s coal mining past and its industrial present, there’s a transformation happening beneath our feet. Just three years ago this area was re-engineered to bring the coastal wetland back to its natural state.
Allison Leonard, Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, “We tear down the coastal defenses and let the water back in. But within a year or two we were seeing saltmarsh plants reappear. And we’re now three years down the line and you know, it’s all saltmarsh. And at that point we kind of just stepped back and let nature do its thing, and we’re really seeing the wildlife respond. So birds are using it at high tide and we see lots of deer, hares in the spring.”
As well as a diverse wetland habitat, this marsh has become a natural tool in our fight to reduce emissions of greenhouse gas into the atmosphere. Marshland plants absorb one of those key planet-warming gases, carbon dioxide, which then becomes buried in the mud. Lucy Miller, Research technician, University of St Andrews, said “This is some of the most organic-rich soils we find in the UK, compared to agricultural land, forest, forestry land. So we’ll wrap this up in cling film and then just to keep it, hold its shape and then we take it back to the University of St Andrews. We have a laboratory there. We will just perform a couple of experiments using a couple of different machines to measure the different layers, different levels of carbon within the layers of the core here.”
Allowing the sea to reclaim this stretch of land has provided a glimpse of how we can help nature to help us deal with the climate crisis.
1. What do the underlined words “a transformation” refer to?| A．The reappearance of saltmarsh. | B．The recovery of the coastal wetland. |
| C．The bigger emissions of greenhouse gas. | D．The fiercer climate crisis. |
| A．Marshland plants take in harmful gases. | B．Researchers have handled water pollution. |
| C．The air quality will be improved. | D．The marsh makes a pollution-free environment. |
| A．To measure levels of carbon in each layer. | B．To get the data of different levels of soils. |
| C．To check the quality of different soils. | D．To compare different soils. |
| A．The industrial transformation. | B．The solution to the climate crisis. |
| C．The coastal wetland back to its natural state. | D．The fight to reduce emissions of greenhouse gas. |
