1 . Ask someone what they have done to help the environment recently and they will almost certainly mention recycling. Recycling in the home is very important of course. However, being forced to recycle often means we already have more material than we need. We are dealing with the results of that over-consumption in the greenest way possible, but it would be far better if we did not bring so much material home in the first place.
The total amount of packaging increased by 12% between 1999 and 2005. It now makes up a third of a typical household’s waste in the UK. In many supermarkets nowadays food items are packaged twice with plastic and cardboard.
Too much packaging is doing serious damage to the environment. The UK, for example, is running out of it for carrying this unnecessary waste. If such packaging is burnt, it gives off greenhouse gases which go on to cause the greenhouse effect. Recycling helps, but the process itself uses energy. The solution is not to produce such items in the first place. Food waste is a serious problem, too. Too many supermarkets encourage customers to buy more than they need. However, a few of them are coming round to the idea that this cannot continue, encouraging customers to reuse their plastic bags, for example.
But this is not just about supermarkets. It is about all of us. We have learned to associate packaging with quality. We have learned to think that something unpackaged is of poor quality. This is especially true of food. But it also applies to a wide range of consumer products, which often have far more packaging than necessary.
There are signs of hope. As more of us recycle, we are beginning to realize just how much unnecessary material we are collecting. We need to face the wastefulness of our consumer culture, but we have a mountain to climb.
1. What can we learn from the last paragraph?| A．Fighting wastefulness is difficult. |
| B．Needless material is mostly recycled. |
| C．People like collecting recyclable waste. |
| D．The author is proud of his consumer culture. |
| A．Using too much packaging. |
| B．Recycling too much waste. |
| C．Making more products than necessary. |
| D．Having more material than needed. |
| A．the tendency of cutting household waste |
| B．the increase of packaging recycling |
| C．the rapid growth of supermarkets |
| D．the fact of packaging overuse |
| A．Unpackaged products are of bad quality. |
| B．Supermarkets care more about packaging. |
| C．It is improper to judge quality by packaging. |
| D．Other products are better packaged than food. |
2 . In Singapore, most of us love windowshopping while some others enjoy having a picnic at East Coast Park or Changi Beach on sunny days. Singaporeans are never bothered by the occasional (偶尔的) thunderstorms. However, we know that if it rains for long continuous periods, there will be more serious effects. Just recently the main shopping street of Orchard Road was flooded and some parts of Bukit Timah was impossible to traffic. People reacted by writing in to the newspaper to complain about this! We forget that other countries suffer much worse effects.
Elsewhere, heavy tropical (热带的) storms often result in floods that ruin crops especially in Thailand and Malaysia. This in turn usually means that the price of rice and vegetables here in Singapore will rise because we import these products from them. If there is a typhoon or tsunami, thousands of lives are lost too. This happened in Indonesia and Phuket in Thailand in 2004 and it serves to remind us of how Mother Nature can cause great damage.
Weather patterns in general have changed dramatically in recent years. Scientists believe that global warming and the resulting melting of the polar icecap has caused the level of the ocean to rise. This in turn causes flooding of lowlying areas in countries where the land is rather flat and some parts of which is below sea level. It is believed that human activities have caused Mother Nature to show her extreme anger, so it is now important that we really work together to cut down on harmful activities, for example, illegal logging (伐木) or irresponsible forestburning to clear land for farming.
1. From Paragraph 1, we can see that most Singaporeans love ________.| A．making complaints |
| B．going out for picnics |
| C．doing windowshopping |
| D．travelling along the coast |
| A．Heavy tropical storms will follow shortly. |
| B．The price of rice and vegetables will go up. |
| C．Many people will write in to the newspaper. |
| D．More rice and vegetables will be imported. |
| A．the arrival of heavy tropical storms |
| B．the import of rice and vegetables |
| C．the rising price of rice and vegetables |
| D．the loss of lives in natural disasters |
| A．Clear more land for farming. |
| B．Reduce harmful human activities. |
| C．Bring down the price of food. |
| D．Improve the quality of weather. |
3 . Cowboy or spaceman? A dilemma for a children’s party, perhaps. But also a question for economists, argued Kenneth Boulding, a British economist, in an essay published in 1966. We have run our economies, as he warned, like cowboys on the open grassland: taking and using the world’s resources, confident that more lies over the horizon. But the Earth is less a grassland than a spaceship-a closed system, alone in space, carrying limited supplies. We need, according to Boulding, an economics that takes seriously the idea of environmental limits. In the half century since his essay, a new movement has responded to his challenge. “Ecological economists”, as they call themselves, want to revolutionize aims and assumptions of economics. What do they say—and will their ideas achieve lift-off?
To its advocators, ecological economics is neither ecology nor economics, but a mix of both. Their starting point is to recognize that the human economy is part of the natural world. Our environment, they note, is both a source of resources and a sink for wastes. But it is ignored in conventional textbooks, where neat diagrams trace the flows between firms, households and the government as though nature did not exist. That is a mistake, say ecological economists.
There are two ways our economies can grow, as ecological economists point out: through technological change, or through more intensive use of resources. Only the former, they say, is worth having. They are suspicious of GDP, a crude measure which does not take account of resource exhaustion, unpaid work, and countless other factors. In its place they advocate more holistic(全面的) approaches, such as the Genuine Progress Indicator (GPI), a composite index(复合指标) that includes things like the cost of pollution, deforestation and car accidents. While GDP has kept growing, global GPI per person peaked in 1978: by destroying our environment we are making ourselves poorer, not richer. The solution, according to Herman Daly, a former World Bank economist and eco-guru, is a “steady-state” economy, where the use of materials and energy is held constant.
Mainstream economists are unimpressed. The GPI, they point out, is a subjective measure. And talk of limits to growth has had a bad press since the days of Thomas Malthus, a gloomy18th-century cleric who predicted, wrongly, that overpopulation would lead to famine. Humanbeings find solutions to some of the most annoying problems. But ecological economists warn against self-satisfaction. In 2009 a paper in Nature, a scientific journal, argued that human activity is already overstepping safe planetary boundaries on issues such as biodiversity(生物多样性) and climate change. That suggests that ecological economists are at least putting forward some important Questions, even if their answers may turn out to be wrong.
1. Why does Boulding compare the way economy is run with cowboy and spaceship?| A．To advocate the importance of space programmes. |
| B．To applaud the appearance of ecological economists. |
| C．To arouse people’s interest in cowboys’ adventures on grassland. |
| D．To awaken people to the need of sustainable development of economy. |
| A．economies are worth growing through intensive use of resources |
| B．economics should attach importance to the idea of environmental limits |
| C．ecological economics is neither ecology nor economics |
| D．the human economy is part of the natural world |
| A．It keeps growing although the peak appeared in the year 1978. |
| B．Mainstream economists regard it as a holistic and objective approach. |
| C．Ecological economists believe it is a better indicator of economy than GDP. |
| D．It fails to take the factors such as deforestation and car accidents into consideration. |
| A．doubtful | B．sensitive | C．optimistic | D．over-concerned |
4 . With oil prices rising sharply this year, it seems remarkable to argue that water might one day be more expensive than oil. Jean-Louis Chaussade, the chief executive of the French utility company Suez, argues that water scarcity(不足)is now one of the most pressing challenges facing many industries. He told Financial Times last year that he foresaw one day water would be more precious than oil.
It isn’t only a growing world population that places demands on water—industries such as energy and agriculture are also consuming more and more. The 2030 Water Resources Group believes that by 2030 global demand will be 40 percent higher than it is today.
The threat is now so acute that the Office of the Director of National Intelligence in the US warned that disputes over water may lead to armed conflicts, particularly in areas such as Africa and the Middle East. A three-year drought in South Africa caused a water crisis earlier this year, with officials warning they may have to shut off most of Cape Town’s taps.
The most valuable water in the world is what we actually consume. With petrol at roughly￡1.29 a liter in the UK today, a bottle of water from some of big-name branded companies can already be about three times more. And it is not going to get any cheaper. The days of relying on water flowing through our taps are coming to an end. Around the world, 2.1 billion people do not have immediate access to clean drinking water. And this isn’t only a developing-world problem. In almost every country people have water stress.
Over the next ten years, if we do not come together to find answers to our water shortage, we will face major supply-related issues around the globe, not just with drinking water—our industries will be affected as well.
1. What is the second paragraph mainly about?| A．The result of water shortage. |
| B．The causes of water shortage. |
| C．The solutions to water shortage. |
| D．The situation of water shortage. |
| A．Warning. | B．Arguments. | C．Agreements. | D．Pollution. |
| A．Many people can’t have clean water. |
| B．Water is more expensive than oil now. |
| C．Water is ￡1. 29 a liter in the UK today. |
| D．Rich countries don’t have water stress. |
| A．To tell us the pollution of water. |
| B．To tell us the importance of water. |
| C．To tell us the way to protect water. |
| D．To tell us the situation of water stress. |
