1 . Directions: Read the passage carefully. Fill in each blank with a proper sentence given in the box. Each sentence can be used only once. Note that there are two more sentences than you need.

Acid rain is now a familiar problem in the industrialized countries in Europe. Harmful gases like Sulphur dioxide and nitrogen oxide are produced by power stations and cars.     1    

Acid rain is also capable of dissolving some rocks and buildings made of soft rock, such as limestone, are particularly badly affected. The acid rain attacks the rock, and so carvings and statues are worn away more quickly.

    2    According to a report in the Scientist, acid rain is being blamed for the rapid decay of ancient ruins Mexico. The old limestone buildings in places like Chichen Itza, Tulum and Palenque are wearing away very quickly indeed. These sites are the remains of the buildings built by the Mayas between 250 BC and AD900, and the spectacular ruins of civilization are visited by thousands of tourists every year.

The acid rain is said to be caused by pollution from oil wells in the Gulf of Mexico. Car exhaust gases are also a problem. Local volcanic eruption make the problem even worse. Nevertheless, with enough money and effort, researchers say that many of the problems could be solved and the rate of dissolving reduced.     3    
Mexico’s current lack of funds is also partly due to oil. The country has rich oil field and a few years ago, when oil was expensive, Mexico was selling large quantities of oil to the USA and earning a lot of money. The government was therefore able to borrow huge sums of money from banks around the world, thinking they would have no problem repaying their debts. However, the price of oil then dropped, and Mexico has been left owing enormous sums of money and with not enough income from oil sales to pay back the loans.     4    

A．However, the Mexican government does not have enough money to do the work, and needs to spend what money it has on the Mexican people.

B．That is enough to have caused some of the ancient carvings to become seriously damaged already.

C．So unless the price of rises, it is unlikely that Mexican will be able to afford to clean up the pollution and save its Mayan ruins from destruction.

D．These measures would reduce the pollution, but would not stop it completely.

E．The problem, however, is not a European one.

F．They dissolve in rainwater and this makes acid rain, which damages trees, rivers and streams.

2 . Directions: Read the following passage. Fill in each blank with a proper sentence given in the box. Each sentence can be used only once. Note that there are two more sentences than you need.

Where is the Beef

Most people like to eat meat. As they grow richer they eat more of it. For individuals, that is good. Meat is nutritious. In particular, it packs much more protein per kilogram than plants do. However, animals have to eat plants to put on weight - so much so that feeding them accounts for about a third of harvested grain. Farm animals consume 8 per cent of the world’s water supply, and they produce around 15 per cent of unnatural greenhouse-gas emissions. More farm animals then, could mean more environmental trouble.

    1     That as created a business opportunity. Though unwilling to adopt a vegetarian approach to diet, these people are keen on food that looks and tastes as if it came from farm animals, but didn’t.

The simplest way to satisfy this demand is to concentrate on substitutes for familiar products. “Meat” made directly from plants, rather than indirectly, via an animal’s metabolism, is already on sale for the table and barbecue. Impossible Foods, a Californian firm, has deconstructed hamburgers, to work out what gives them their texture (质感) and flavour, and then either found or grown botanical equivalents to these.     2    

For those who really want to eat steak while saving the planet, a second approach maybe more promising. That is “clean” meat made by taking animal cells and growing them in a factory to form strips of muscle. Steak is not yet on the menu, but burgers and meatballs may soon be. The field leader is Mosa Meat, a Dutch firm staffed by scientists.     3    By 2020, it hopes, the price of making them will have come down to about $US 11 each.

There is one more novel source of meaty protein that does not involve farm animals -at least, farm animals of the conventional sort. This is insects. Locusts (蝗虫), for example, are about 70 per cent protein. Insects do have to be fed, but being cold-blooded, they convert more food into body mass than warm-blooded mammals do and, being boneless, more of that body-mass is edible.     4     About 2 billion people eat insects already, but it seems few of us are willing to try. Changing that could be a hard sell. Grind (碾碎) the bugs up and use them as ingredients, though, and your customers might find them more acceptable. Hargol FoodTech, an Israeli startup, plans to do just that. Locustburgers, anybody?

A．The first burger it made, in 2013, cost around $300,000.

B．It launched its plant-based burger in a number of restaurants in America last year.

C．Per edible gram, insects need only a twelfth of the food that cattle require.

D．The problem is marketing.

E．Plant-based "meat" products have made it onto menus and supermarket shelves.

F．Some consumers, particularly in the rich West, get this.

3 . In the 1990s, when an area of Brazilian rainforest the size of Belgium was cut down every year, Brazil was the world’s environmental villain (反派角色) and the Amazonian jungles the image of everything that was going wrong in green places. Now, the Amazon ought to be the image of what is going right. Government figures show that deforestation fell by 70% in the Brazilian Amazon region during the past decade. If clearances had continued at their rate in 2005, an extra 3.2 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide would have been put into the atmosphere. That is an amount equal to a year’s emissions from the European Union. Arguably, then, Brazil is now the world leader in addressing climate change.

But how did it break the vicious cycle (恶性循环)? The answer, according to a paper is that there was no silver bullet but instead a three-stage process in which bans, better governance in frontier areas and consumer pressure on companies worked.

The first stage ran from the mid-1990s to 2004. This was when the government put its efforts into bans and restrictions. The Brazilian Forest Code said that, on every farm in the Amazon, 80% of the land had to be set aside as a forest reserve. As the study observes, this share was so high that the code could not be followed --- or enforced. This was the period of the worst deforestation. Soybean prices were high and there were a vast expansion of soybean farming on the south-eastern border of the rainforest.

During the second stage, which ran from 2005 to 2009, the government tried to boost its ability to police the Amazon. Brazil’s president made stopping deforestation a priority, which resulted in better co-operation between different bits of the government. The area in which farming was banned was increased from a sixth to nearly half of the forest.

The third stage, which began in 2009, was a test of whether a system of restrictions could survive as soybean expansion continued. The government shifted its focus from farms to counties (each state has scores of these). Farmers in the 36 counties with the worst deforestation rates were banned from getting cheap credit until those rates fell.

By any standards, Brazil’s Amazon policy has been a success, made the more remarkable because it relied on restrictions rather than rewards, which might have been expected to have worked better. Over the period of the study, Brazil also turned itself into a farming superpower, so the country has shown it is possible to get a huge increase in food output without destroying the forest. Moreover, the policies so far have been successful among commercial farms who care about the law and respond to market pressures. Most remaining deforestation is by small holders who care rather less about these things, so the government faces the problem of persuading them to change their ways, too. Deforestation has been slowed, but not yet stopped.

1. Brazil is considered to play a leading role in dealing with climate change because ________.

A．it has rainforest as large as Belgium.

B．it has cut down too much rainforest.

C．it has taken action to reduce deforestation.

D．it sent 3.2 billion tons of carbon dioxide into the air.

2. The underlined phrase “silver bullet” in Paragraph 2 most probably refers to _______.

A．a powerful weapon.	B．an effective solution.
C．an intelligent device.	D．a golden opportunity.

3. What can we infer from the last paragraph?

A．Brazil has successfully eliminated deforestation.

B．All the farmers care much about forest protection.

C．Small farm holders are a headache for the Brazilian government.

D．Both the food output and the forest in Brazil have greatly increased.

4. What can be the best title of the passage?

A．Cutting Down on Cutting Down.	B．Brazil, the World Leader in Farming.
C．Restrictions Outperforming Rewards.	D．Former Awareness Working Wonders.