1 . “When we first rescued Ovi, he was bleeding from a cut on his leg and we realized his flight feathers were gone, as well as him being really dirty,” El Oud told The Dodo. “We later discovered he had a fever.” They brought the pelican(鹈鹕) back to shore, and El Oud researched how to care for the bird. With the help of the wildlife rehabilitation group Lebanese Wildlife, they were able to nurse Ovi back to health.
El Oud trained Ovi through positive reinforcement so he could better care for him and Ovi quickly caught on. “When he acted well, I’d give him a fish, and when he didn't I'd just ignore it,” El Oud said. “In less than a day, he became a very friendly bird toward me. [He’s a] very intelligent animal.”
Unfortunately, without his flight feathers, most likely clipped by wildlife traffickers, Ovi could no longer make it long distances. Luckily, he was already in the perfect place to get his strength back.
El Oud’s father, Ali, is the manager at the seaside restaurant Abou Mounir Fishery in Beirut, Lebanon. Ali knew Ovi would be safe at the marina, where the family is friendly with all the locals and fishermen. Soon, protecting and caring for Ovi became a community effort. El Oud fed Ovi around the marina until the pelican learned where the fish were coming from and became the restaurant’s best customer.
Now, Ovi waddles into the bustling café to get a snack multiple times a day. “Essentially, what he does is hang out down from the restaurant and does whatever he wants,” El Oud said. “But sometimes if he's hungry and wants food, he comes up by himself because he realized that's where the food is coming from.”
Ovi has become something of a mascot for the restaurant, but the family hopes he can also become a symbol of how to properly interact with wildlife. “Everyone here takes care of him. He’s become the symbol of this place,” Ali El Oud told The National. “Hopefully, he won’t become domestic and will migrate again. We want him to have a life that a pelican should have.”
1. Which can be defined as positive reinforcement according to the text?| A．Jack passed the English exam and he didn’t need to help do housework. |
| B．Jack passed the English exam and he was rewarded with a bike. |
| C．Jack failed in the English exam and he had to help do housework. |
| D．Jack failed in the English exam and he wouldn’t get a bike. |
| A．Drug traffickers. | B．Wildlife dealers. |
| C．Wildlife activists. | D．Locals and fishermen. |
| A．Negative. | B．Curious. |
| C．Indifferent. | D．Supportive. |
| A．Ovi may end up in the wild. |
| B．Ovi is afraid of people. |
| C．Ali El wants to keep Ovi as a pet. |
| D．Ovi is always hungry. |
2 . Holding hands, people jumped into the water, and floated around in Boston’s Charles River recently. That is something that would not have been possible years ago because the river was so polluted. In the 1960s, the music group The Standells even sang about the river in their popular song, “Dirty Water.”
The swimmers were getting their once-a-year chance to cool off from the summer heat in the Charles River. It is called “City Splash.” For a few days each year, the state of Massachu-setts allows public swimming on Boston’s part of the nearly 130-kilometer Charles River.
The event is in its fifth year. It is a chance for the nonprofit Charles River Conservancy to show its efforts to build a “swim park.” Their idea is to build floating docks where swimmers can jump safely into the river—without touching the risky bottom. These docks would be in areas where the water quality would be tested repeatedly.
Boston is one of the cities hoping to follow the model of Copenhagen, Denmark. That city opened the first of its three floating harbor baths in the early 2000s. On sunny days, people swim in the harbor baths surrounded by tall buildings and cars on the highways. At night the area is filled with people enjoying music and food.
Just recently Paris opened public swimming in a once-polluted canal. New York London, Berlin and other cities are planning similar features for their waterways.
In Boston, the Charles River Conservancy still needs to raise several million dollars. It also needs to get approvals from city, state and federal agencies. The group’s spokeswoman, S. J. Port, said the biggest problem has already been taken care of: The Charles is now one of the cleanest city rivers in America.
The U. S. Environmental Protection Agency announced this month that the river earned a “B” grade for water quality last year—an “A” being the best grade. It means the Charles River met the requirement for swimming 55 percent of the time.
1. What is the function of floating docks?| A．They are places for swimmers to rest. |
| B．They let swimmers get into the river safely. |
| C．They surround swimmers in a safe area of the river. |
| D．They are used to test the water quality repeatedly. |
| A．Paris. | B．Boston. |
| C．Copenhagen. | D．Berlin. |
| A．The pollution of Charles River. |
| B．Lack of money to treat pollution. |
| C．Getting approvals from governments. |
| D．Meeting the requirement of “A” grade. |
| A．The water in Charles River reaches drinking standard. |
| B．People can swim in Charles River at any time. |
| C．This summer is the hottest in Boston. |
| D．Charles River flows through Boston. |
3 . The national movement to get rid of plastic bags is gaining steam — with more than 240 cities and counties passing laws that ban or tax them since 2007 in the US. But these bans may be hurting the environment more than helping it.
University of Sydney economist Rebecca Taylor and colleagues compared bag use in cities with bans with those without them. For six months, they spent weekends in grocery stores recording the types of bags people carried out.
Taylor found these bag bans did what they were supposed to: People in the cities with the bans used fewer plastic bags, which led to about 40 million fewer pounds of plastic garbage per year. But people who used to reuse their shopping bags for other purposes, like picking up dog waste, still needed bags. "What I found was that sales of garbage bags actually grew sharply after plastic grocery bags were banned," she says.
Garbage bags are thick and use more plastic than typical shopping bags. "So about 30 percent of the plastic that was reduced by the ban comes back in the form of thicker garbage bags," Taylor says. On top of that, cities that banned plastic bags saw a surge in the use of paper bags, which she estimates（估计）resulted in about 80 million pounds of extra paper garbage per year.
A bunch of studies find that paper bags are actually worse for the environment. They require cutting down and processing trees, which involves lots of water, toxic chemicals and fuel. While paper is biodegradable(可生物降解的) and avoids some of the problems of plastic, Taylor says, the huge increase of paper means banning plastic shopping bags increases greenhouse gas emissions(排放).
The Danish government recently did a study that took into account environmental impacts（影响）beyond simply greenhouse gas emissions, including water use, damage to ecosystems and air pollution. These factors make cloth bags even worse. They estimate you would have to use an organic cotton bag 20,000 times more than a plastic grocery bag to make using it better for the environment.
1. What is main idea of the passage?| A．Banning plastic bags is gaining popularity worldwide. |
| B．Banning plastic has great influence on people’s life. |
| C．Banning plastic increases the use of pager and cloth bags. |
| D．Banning plastic may harm rather than help the environment. |
| A．Plastic bags are no longer needed. |
| B．People began to reuse their plastic bags. |
| C．The amount of garbage is even greater. |
| D．Most of the reduced plastic returns in garbage bags. |
| A．They are not as biodegradable as plastic bags. |
| B．It hurts the environment more to make them. |
| C．They can’t be reused as many times as plastic bags. |
| D．They are much thicker than plastic bags. |
| A．Sharp increase. | B．Fast development. |
| C．Tight control. | D．Sharp decrease. |
