1 . A handful of healthy soil could contain great numbers of living organisms. However, poisonous pesticides (杀虫剂) are causing harm and destruction to them, according to a recent analysis.

For the analysis, researchers looked through nearly 400 published studies including over 2,800 experiments on how pesticides affect soil organisms. They found that pesticides harmed organisms critical to maintaining healthy soils, but these harms have never been considered in the safety reviews of the EPA (Environmental Protection Agency).Poisonous pesticides are driving factors in the sharp decline of many soil organisms, such as ground beetles. They have been identified as the most significant driver of soil biodiversity loss in the last ten years.

However, that research has always been ignored. The EPA, which is responsible for pesticide supervision(监管)in the country, openly acknowledges that somewhere between 50 and 100 percent of all agriculturally applied pesticides end up on the soil. Yet, to assess pesticides’ harms to soil species, the agency just uses a single test species, the European honeybee, to estimate risk to all soil organisms. It spends its entire life above ground in artificial boxes.

Worse still, as soil health gain popularity globally, pesticide companies have jumped up to green wash and promote their products. Every major company is now advertising its role in improving soil health, such as advocating planting cover crops. As general beliefs, these practices are indeed good for soil health and, if adopted responsibly, are a great step to take. But companies know that these practices are often accompanied by increased pesticide use. Chemicals and pesticides have to be applied more frequently to kill weeds before crops are planted.

The long-term environmental cost can no longer be overlooked. Soils are some of the most complex ecosystems on Earth, containing nearly a quarter of the planet’s biodiversity. Protecting them should be a priority, not an afterthought.

1. What does the underlined word “They” refer to in Paragraph 2?

A．Soil organisms.	B．Ground beetles.
C．Artificial boxes.	D．Poisonous pesticides.

2. What can we learn from Paragraph 3?

A．The honeybee is a typical species living in nature.

B．The assessment of pesticides’ harms is one-sided.

C．Less than half of applied pesticide go to the soil eventually.

D．The EPA attaches great importance to pesticide inspection.

3. Why do pesticide companies advocate planting cover crops?

A．To obey the EPA’s rules.

B．To increase their product sales.

C．To protect the environment.

D．To shoulder their social responsibility.

4. Which of the following is a suitable title for the text?

A．Soil: essential to agriculture.

B．Pesticides: harmful to soil health.

C．Organisms: significant to harvest.

D．Pollution: destructive to biodiversity.

2 . 假如你叫李华，是校学生会主席。为了提高同学们的英语水平，加强他们的环保意识，你校将要举办一场主题为“Green campus, low-carbon life”的英语演讲比赛，请你以校学生会的名义写一个通知。内容如下：
1.比赛时间：7月12日下午2:30 比赛地点：学校大礼堂
2.演讲内容：陈述低碳生活的重要性；列举校园浪费现象；提出践行节约的建议。
要求：1.每班派一名选手参加比赛：2.全体老师和同学按时参加
注意：1.词数100左右：
2.可以适当增加细节，以使行文连贯。
________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

3 . From airplanes to apartments, most spaces are now designed with sound-absorbing materials that help decrease various sounds of everyday life. But most of the sound-absorbing materials that can cancel out human voices, traffic noise and music are made from plastic foams (泡沫) that aren’t easily recycled or degraded. Now, researchers reporting in ACS Sustainable Chemistry & Engineering have created a biodegradable film (薄膜) obtained from seaweed, which effectively absorbs sounds in this range.

Controlling and optimizing the way sound moves throughout a room is the key to creating functional spaces. Foam sound-absorbing panels are a common solution, and they come in a variety of materials and thicknesses tailored to specific sound requirements. Most of these foams, however, are made from a type of plastic material and other chemical substances that are obtained from natural oil or petrol. To avoid petrochemicals, researchers have explored more renewable sources and biodegradable sound-absorbing alternatives. But many current options are made from plant fibers that don’t effectively decrease noises in the most useful range of sound frequencies, or they are too thick or difficult to produce. So, Chindam’s team wanted to develop a biodegradable material from a plant, which would be simple to produce and could absorb a range of sounds.

The team created films of agar (琼脂), a material that comes from seaweed, along with other additives developed from plants and varied the thickness of the films. After running the materials through a battery of tests, the researchers measured how well the films reduced sound across a range of frequencies. To do this, the team created a sound tube in which a speaker is placed at one end, and the test film is fitted over the other end. Microphones in the middle of the tube measured the amount of sound sent by the speaker and the amount of sound reflected off the film. These experiments showed that the films with many small holes made with the highest concentrations of agar had the greatest sound-absorbing qualities and performed similarly to traditional sound-absorbing foams. The researchers plan to explore ways to change the agar films to give them other desirable properties, such as flame resistance, and will explore other biologically obtained film materials.

1. What is the disadvantage of plastic foams?

A．They take up, too much space.	B．They cannot absorb sounds effectively.
C．They cannot meet specific sound requirements.	D．They have difficulty achieving sustainable use.

2. What kind of sound-absorbing material would Chindam’s team develop?

A．One obtained easily and effectively.	B．One produced toughly and tiredly.
C．One developed from petrochemicals.	D．One made from plant fibers.

3. What is the last paragraph mainly about?

A．The purpose of film research.	B．A series of tests on the new material.
C．A tool of measuring the film thickness.	D．The difficulty of searching the new material.

4. What can be the best title for the text?

A．An Eco-friendly Sound-absorbing Material from Seaweed

B．Plastic Foams: the Worst Choice of Absorbing Sounds

C．A Tube for Measuring the Amount of Underwater Sounds

D．Seaweed: a Better Sound-absorbing Underwater Plant

5 . Last fall my class and I went through an exercise to help the students understand how the world might address the climate crisis. Several things surprised the students. One was that nuclear power doesn’t help.

But many people think nuclear energy is going to be the climate solution. President Obama included federal loan guarantees for nuclear power in his energy plan, in the hopes of jump-starting construction and gain Republican support. (It did neither.) If I post something even faintly skeptical about nuclear power on Twitter, its advocates come out in force, accusing me of being a conservative, or worse.

What is it about nuclear energy that makes its advocates so determined in the face of what should be discouraging facts? After all, unlike futuristic, untried technologies, we have plenty of facts about this one, and most of them are discouraging. The first American civilian nuclear power plant broke ground in Pennsylvania in 1954, around the same time that physicist John von Neumann predicted that, within a few decades, nuclear power would be so efficient as to make energy “free—just like the unmetered air.” That didn’t happen. Today nuclear power remains the most expensive form of electricity generation in the U.S. -typically costing twice as much as a fossil-fuel-based plant.

Why then do so many people keep coming back to it? I think it’s the same reason people turn to geoengineering(气候工程) and nuclear fusion(聚变) (which has been “just around the corner” since 1943): the promise of technological progress. For the past century or more, humans have been accustomed to technological breakthroughs that made life easier, more comfortable and more entertaining. But climate change throws future advancement into doubt. It breaks the promise of progress. No matter what we do, we are going to be paying for the costs of our historical and current use of fossil fuels.

So we turn to technofideism- the faith that technology will save us. Perhaps it will. But perhaps it won’t, and our long-standing patterns of behavior will have to change along with our technology. And that’s a hard pill to swallow.

1. What is paragraph two mainly about?

A．Nuclear energy has lots of advocates.

B．The supporters of nuclear energy are unwise.

C．President Obama failed to conduct his energy plan.

D．Doubtful remarks about nuclear power will attract criticism.

2. What is the purpose of mentioning the first American civilian nuclear power plant ?

A．To show it was a groundbreaking project.

B．To compare nuclear power and fossil-fuel energy.

C．To prove nuclear power didn’t live up to people’s expectations.

D．To indicate we need futuristic, untried technologies rather than nuclear.

3. Why do people turn to technofideism?

A．Because it can cut down the current use of fossil fuels.

B．Because we tend to trust technological breakthroughs.

C．Because people are skeptical about the promise of technology.

D．Because geoengineering and nuclear fusion have set a good example.

4. Which one is the writer’s attitude to nuclear energy?

A．Optimistic.

B．Hesitant.

C．Aggressive.

D．Negative.

6 . 假定你是高三学生李华，学校环保社社长。近期，你打算在学校开展一次“减塑”(Less Plastic) 社团活动。请你给王校长写一封申请信，内容包括：1. 社团活动的时间和地点；2. 社会活动的内容。
Dear Mr. Wang,

I am Li Hua, the leader of the Environment Protection Club.

_______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Yours sincerely,

Li Hua

7 . Despite years of drought and water-saving policies, Californians continue to put a lot of clean, drinkable water into yards to keep the greenery alive. Now, however, Southern California officials have carried out very strict limits on outdoor water use in response to a water shortage emergency. So you may need to find other ways to keep your plants from drying in the summer sun.

How about watering them with grey water instead of clean water? Grey water is the water from showers, bathtubs, washing machines — anything that’s not filled with human waste, food or poisonous chemicals. With the right measures, grey water can be fine for most plant life.

If you’re a typical Southern Californian, you’re throwing a lot of grey water into the sewer system. Every load of clothes you wash leads to roughly 15 to 40 gallons of it, depending on your washer’s design and efficiency. Over the course of a year, thousands of gallons of soapy water ran away. That’s enough to keep a number of trees and other plants happy. And if you’re really ambitious, you can build a system that carries all of your horned grey water to the roots of your grassland, thus making your non-native grass in your yard watered regularly.

Some critics, the Los Angeles Sanitation and Environment Bureau, see grey water recycling as environmentally risky, damaging public wastewater recycling efforts and uneconomic. However, other local agencies across the state, including the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, actively endorse grey water projects as a way to reduce water use. Supporters admit that the projects carry some risk and require great efforts, but insist that they can save clean water and help your plants.

1. What can be inferred from paragraph 1?

A．California is very rich in clean and drinkable water.

B．There is a lack of water-saving policies in California.

C．Outdoor water use in California will be strictly controlled.

D．Different ways to save water have been adopted in California.

2. What’s the purpose of paragraph 3?

A．To summarize the benefits of using grey water.

B．To provide reasons why grey water should be used.

C．To make a prediction about the future of grey water.

D．To introduce some new ways to save drinkable water.

3. What’s the attitude towards the use of grey water according to the last paragraph?

A．Negative.

B．Indifferent.

C．Positive.

D．Objective.

4. What does the underlined word “endorse” mean in paragraph 4?

A．Oppose.

B．Promote.

C．Abandon.

D．Recover.

8 . According to the American Chemistry Council, in 2018 in the United States, 27million tons of plastic ended up in landfills compared lo just 3.1 million tons that were recycled. Worldwide the numbers are similarly bad, with just 9% of plastic being recycled according to a recent OFCD (Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development)report. The statistics are even worse for certain types of pastie. For example, out of 80,000 lens of polystyrene containers generated in the United States, a negligible amount(less than 5,000 tons) was recycled.

Now, researchers at the University of Queensland have found that a species of worm with an appetite for polystyrene could be the key to plastic recycling on a mass scale. They discovered that the Zophobas morio also called “super-worm” can eat through polystyrene, thanks to a bacterial enzyme (酶) in its “Stomach”. Dr. Chris Rilke and his team from UQ’s School of Chemistry and Molecular Bioscience fed super-worms different diets over a three-week period, with some given polystyrene, some outer skin of grain separated from the flour, and others pul on a fasling diet.

“We found the super-worms fed a dict of just polystyrene not only survived, but even had slight weight gains,” Dr. Rilke said. “This suggests the worms can get energy from the polypropylene,most likely with the help of their internal micro-organisms. They are like mini recycling plants, tearing up the polystyrene with their mouths and then feeding it to the bacteria in their ‘stomach’. ”

Co-author of the research, PhD candidate Jiarui Sun, said they aimed to grow the bacteria in the lab and further test their ability to break down polystyrene. “We can then look into how we can upgrade this process lo a level required for an entire recycling plant,” Ms. Sun said.

1. Which of the following best describe the current plastic recycling?

A．Inefficient.	B．Unpredictable.
C．Inconsistent.	D．Unconventional.

2. What is the Zophobas morio capable of according to the research?

A．Turning polystyrene into energy.

B．Feeding the bacteria in the mouth.

C．Eating through any type of plastic.

D．Gaining weight on a fasting dict.

3. How will those researchers continue the research?

A．By testing different abilities of the bacteria.

B．By experimenting with large-scale production.

C．By establishing a modern recycling factory.

D．By growing and breaking down the worm.

4. What is the text mainly about?

A．The severity of plastic pollution.

B．The future of recycling industry.

C．Super-worm’s commercial success.

D．Super-worm’s ability to digest plastic.

9 . Have you heard of the save soil movement? It was _________ by Sadhguru, and he started a 100-day motorcycle journey starting from London and passing through 27 nations, including Europe, Central Asia, and the Middle East.

The efforts of Sadhguru have _________ the worldwide recognition of this movement. Sadhguru traveled to various international _________ on his bike as part of his save soil movement. The world acknowledges his _________ to save soil for the upcoming generation.

The movement aims to _________ the soil crisis in every part of the earth. The world has finally realized, and attention is being paid to the horrible statistics of the land quality and soil. This movement was started to stop the soil from further damage and is now receiving encouraging _________ in every corner of our planet.

The main motive of the campaign was to bring together people from all around the world to protect the soil’s health. Sadhguru has become _________ in just a period of 3 months as his movement Save Soil has become a global phenomenon and is now under the spotlight. Sadhguru’s efforts have created _________ not only in one region but in every part of the world. The _________ recognized movement is __________ all individuals from all states to save the deterioration (恶化) of soil health for the future generation. Without healthy soil, human life is impossible, and with the __________ climate changes, spending life on planet earth can become challenging for future generations. __________, an initiative like saving soil was needed to __________ the health of our upcoming generation.

Sadhguru is also the author of the New York Times bestseller Inner Engineering: A Yogi’s Guide to Joy. He has been a(n) __________ voice and is now using his fame for a better cause. The success of the event will lay out several benefits to the world. From providing a more stable livelihood (生计) to the farmers to offering our upcoming generations healthier food and a safer and cleaner environment, healthy __________ can do it all.

1.

A．launched

B．sponsored

C．experienced

D．commanded

2.

A．resulted in

B．originated from

C．paid back

D．reacted to

3.

A．airports

B．companies

C．conferences

D．locations

4.

A．abilities

B．struggles

C．characters

D．requests

5.

A．transform

B．address

C．drag

D．confirm

6.

A．messages

B．responses

C．proposals

D．positions

7.

A．exhausted

B．ambitious

C．successful

D．confident

8.

A．improvement

B．awareness

C．imagination

D．standard

9.

A．locally

B．individually

C．nationally

D．globally

10.

A．urging

B．requiring

C．cheering

D．permitting

11.

A．stable

B．ongoing

C．favorable

D．temporary

12.

A．However

B．Besides

C．Therefore

D．Meanwhile

13.

A．ensure

B．bring

C．affect

D．define

14.

A．strong

B．pleasant

C．determined

D．influential

15.

A．circumstance

B．lifestyle

C．atmosphere

D．soil

10 . 阅读下面短文，在空白处填入1个适当的单词或括号内单词的正确形式。

Preserving more habitats for China’s giant pandas is providing a giant payoff.    1    (save) the giant panda from dying out isn’t just good for the panda, but it’s also good for economy, a new analysis by an international team of scientists shows.

The results,    2    (publish) in the magazine Current Biology, stress the economic bene-fits that go hand in hand with environmental protection. Giant pandas are one of the    3    (rare) species around the world. But pandas fell on hard times in recent decades, thanks largely    4    human encroachment (侵入). In 1980 alone,many habitats    5    (destroy) artificially, and in 1990, their habitats covered only 12,340 square kilometers,     6    is a major threat to the pandas in large part because bamboo, their main food source, is so low in nutrients that they must wander a lot of land in order to find and eat enough of it.

Because of this, Chinese officials began making significant efforts to save the panda from     7    (extinct), establishing more reserves and increasing the reserve area three times. Panda numbers    8    (gradual) began to recover, hitting 1,596 in 2000 and 1,864 in 2010.

“    9    is clear that society’s investment (投资)    10    (start) to pay off so far in terms of panda population recovery,” the study authors wrote.