1 . The Last Straw?

Every second, the world uses 160,000 plastic bags — that is a total of over five trillion per year. Up to 99 percent of these plastic bags hang around for at least 1,000 years and pollute Earth. And yet, plastic bags are hardly a necessity in our lives. Of all the changes we could make to create a more sustainable lifestyle, a total ban on plastic bags should be simple.

At the beginning of 2021, Shanghai put in effect a ban on all plastic bags in shopping malls and supermarkets, as well as a ban on non-degradable plastics in many other areas. Over the years, individuals and companies have worked to replace plastic items, such as cups and straws, with paper ones.     1    .

Customers complain that paper straws often become soft and break before they can finish their hot drinks. Experts, however, have repeatedly stressed plastic substitutes (替代品) are not the ultimate solution, and that our consumption habits need a bigger change.

In college, one of my environmental science professors promoted a type of waste-free living. She carried around a small glass jar with her, and in it was all her trash she collected for the entire year. She was able to do this by bringing her own cup to Starbucks, her own bags to the shops, and never buying anything that came wrapped in plastic. Her food waste also became compost.     2    .

Plastic bags are incredibly easy to forget about when they become increasingly common.     3    . Once they are in the trash, we take it for granted that they are someone else’s problem. The sad fact is that plastic bags break down into microplastics which then get mixed into the air, soil and water, and eventually end up in plants, animals, and our very own human bodies. So what are you going to do about them?

A．Clearly she demonstrated our ability to live a completely healthy life without creating a great deal of plastic waste.

B．Plastic bag litter has even caused great problems in some areas.

C．If they’re free to use and easily disposed of, they’re a mere tool that we don’t have to think about.

D．Some of these decisions have been met with criticism.

E．Unfortunately, such a high level of pollution doesn’t come without consequences.

2 . Directions: Read the following passage. Summarize the main idea and the main point(s) of the passage in no more than 60 words. Use your own words as far as possible.

The problem of electronic waste

We have gradually come to realise that in two ways in particular, modern hi-tech can be bad for the planet. The first is its energy use; the worldwide scale of information technology is so enormous that electronics now produce fully two percent of global carbon emissions, which is about the same as the highly controversial emissions of aeroplanes. The other is the hardware, when it comes to the end of its natural life. This, increasingly, is pretty short. We have hardly noticed this important stream of waste, so much so that a Greenpeace report on the untraced and unreported e-waste two years ago referred to it as “the hidden flow”. We need to be aware of it.

The latest United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) report estimates that worldwide, electronic waste is mounting by about 40 million tons a year. So what can we do about it?

The European Union has recognised the problem by adopting a key principle: producer responsibility. In other words, making it the duty of manufacturers of electronic goods to ensure their safe disposal at the end of their lives. In practice, an EU regulation now means that electronics dealers must either take back the equipment they sold you, or help to finance a network of drop-off points, such as public recycling sites. Its main feature is quite ambitious: it aims to deal with “everything with a plug”.

The new UN report suggests that all countries could do something about the problem with a change in design. Groups such as Greenpeace have led the way in putting pressure on major manufacturing companies to find substitutes for the toxic chemicals inside their products. Encouragingly, they have had some success in forcing them to develop non-poisonous alternatives to these. This may be the real way forward.

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4 . Directions: Fill in each blank with a proper word chosen from the box. Each word can only be used once. Note that there is one word more than you need.

A. directly	B. conventional	C. sorted	D. sustainable	E. landfilling	F. supply
G. dating	H. undoubtedly	I. viewed	J. packaging	K. cardboard

Recycling can be defined as the process of converting waste materials into new materials and objects. It can save material and help lower greenhouse gas emissions. The aim of recycling is to avoid     1     waste disposal. It contributes to the prevention of the waste of potentially useful materials and reduces the consumption of fresh raw materials, thereby reducing: energy usage, air pollution, and water pollution from     2    . This practice has been around throughout the history of mankind,     3     from the fourth century BC.

Recyclable materials include many kinds of glass, paper, and     4     metal, plastic, tires, and electronics. The composting(堆肥) or other reuse of biodegradable waste- such as food or garden waste- is also     5     as recycling.

Materials to be recycled are either brought to a collection center or picked up from the roadside, then     6     cleaned, and reprocessed into new materials for manufacturing.

In the strictest sense, recycling of a material would produce a fresh     7     of the same material- -for example, used office paper would be changed into new office paper. However, this is often     8     difficult or too expensive (compared with producing the same product from raw materials or other sources), so “recycling” of many products or materials involves their reuse in producing different materials instead. Another form of recycling is the rescue of certain materials from complex products, either due to their intrinsic（内在的） value or due to their dangerous nature.

Much of the difficulty in recycling comes from the fact that most products are not designed with recycling in mind. The concept of     9     design aims to solve this problem. Now scientists suggest that every product and all     10     they require should have a complete “closed-loop” cycle mapped out for each component- a way in which every component will either return to the natural ecosystem through biodegradation or be recycled indefinitely.