1 . A report has warned of a "destructive" decline(减少) in freshwater fish, with nearly a third in danger of extinction(灭绝). Conservation groups said 80 species were known to have gone extinct, 16 in the last year alone.
The report said, for example, populations of migratory fish have fallen by three-quarters in the last 50 years. Over the same time period, populations of larger species, known as "megafish", have crashed by 94%. In UK waters, the sturgeon and the burbot have disappeared, salmon are disappearing and the European eel remains extremely endangered.
According to the WWF(世界自然基金会), much of the freshwater fish decline is driven by the poor state of rivers, mostly as a result of pollution. Besides, dams and waste water are also the factors. It has called on the government to restore freshwater habitats to good health through proper carrying out of existing laws, strengthening protections in the Environment Bill and championing a strong set of global targets for the recovery of nature.
Dave Tickner, from WWF, said freshwater habitats are some of the most full of life on earth, but as this report shows they are in "destructive" decline around the world. "If we are to take this government's environmental promises seriously, it must get its act together, clean up our rivers and restore our freshwater habitats to good health," said the organization's chief adviser on freshwater.
Carmen Revenga of The Nature Conservancy said freshwater fish are a diverse and unique group of species that are not only important for the healthy functioning of our rivers, lakes and wetlands, but millions of people, particularly the poor, also depend on them for their food and income.
"It's now more urgent than ever that we find the collective political will and effective cooperation with private industries, governments, NGOs(Non-Governmental Organizations) and communities, to carry out nature-based solutions that protect freshwater species, while also ensuring human needs are met," she said.
1. How many species went extinct last year?| A．80. | B．16. | C．96. | D．64. |
| A．Overfishing. | B．River pollution. | C．Global warming. | D．Natural disasters. |
| A．megafish. | B．burbot. | C．the European eel | D．migratory fish. |
| A．By examples. | B．By argument. | C．By comparison. | D．By discussion. |
2 . If humans were truly at home under the light of the moon and stars, we would go in darkness happily, the midnight world as visible to us as it is to the vast number of nocturnal (夜间活动的) species on this planet. Instead, we are diurnal creatures, with eyes adapted to living in the sun’s light. This is a basic evolutionary fact, even though most of us don’t think of ourselves as diurnal beings. Yet it’s the only way to explain what we’ve done to the night: We’ve engineered it to receive us by filling it with light.
The benefits of this kind of engineering come with consequences—called light pollution—whose effects scientists are only now beginning to study. Light pollution is largely the result of bad lighting design, which allows artificial light to shine outward and upward into the sky. Ill-designed lighting washes out the darkness of night and completely changes the light levels—and light rhythms—to which many forms of life, including ourselves, have adapted. Wherever human light spills into the natural world, some aspect of life is affected.
In most cities the sky looks as though it has been emptied of stars, leaving behind a vacant haze (霜) that mirrors our fear of the dark. We’ve grown so used to this orange haze that the original glory of an unlit night—dark enough for the planet Venus to throw shadows on Earth-is wholly beyond our experience, beyond memory almost.
We’ve lit up the night as if it were an unoccupied country, when nothing could be further from the truth. Among mammals alone, the number of nocturnal species is astonishing. Light is a powerful biological force, and on many species it acts as a magnet (磁铁). The effect is so powerful that scientists speak of songbirds and seabirds being “captured” by searchlights on land or by the light from gas flares on marine oil platforms. Migrating at night, birds tend to collide with brightly lit tall buildings.
Frogs living near brightly lit highways suffer nocturnal light levels that are as much as a million times brighter than normal, throwing nearly every aspect of their behavior out of joint, including their nighttime breeding choruses. Humans are no less trapped by light pollution than the frogs. Like most other creatures, we do need darkness. Darkness is as essential to our biological welfare, to our internal clockwork, as light itself.
Living in a glare of our own making, we have cut ourselves off from our evolutionary and cultural heritage—the light of the stars and the rhythms of day and night. In a very real sense, light pollution causes us to lose sight of our true place in the universe, to forget the scale of our being, which is best measured against the dimensions of a deep night with the Milky Way—the edge of our galaxy—arching overhead.
1. Which of the followings has the similar meaning to the underlined word “diurnal” in Paragraph 1?| A．Everyday. | B．Routine. |
| C．Daytime | D．Nighttime. |
| A．provide examples of animal protection |
| B．show how light pollution affects animals |
| C．compare the living habits of both species |
| D．explain why the number of certain species has declined |
| A．light pollution does harm to the eyesight of animals |
| B．light pollution has destroyed some of the world heritages |
| C．human beings cannot go to the outer space |
| D．human beings should reflect on their position in the universe |
| A．The Magic Light. | B．The Orange Haze. |
| C．The Disappearing Night. | D．The Rhythms of Nature. |
3 . Cleaning the ocean of plastic
These days, we’re all well aware of the plastic problem the world’s facing. Although we all realize what a serious issue plastic pollution is, it’s different when you actually see the overwhelming results of it for yourself.
A team of researchers recently published a study on the so-called Great Pacific Garbage Patch in the journal Scientific Reports. According to the study, the patch, which is located off the coast of California in the US, is made up of 79,000 tons of plastic waste. At 1.6 million square kilometers, it’s over four times the size of Japan, or almost 100 times the size of Beijing.
“I’ve been doing this research for a while, but it was depressing to see the patch in person,” Laurent Lebreton, lead author of the study, told The Guardian. “There were things you just wondered how they made it into the ocean. There’s clearly an increasing influx of plastic into the garbage patch.”
It’s believed that eight million tons of plastic ends up in the sea each year, and a lot of it ends up collecting near large ocean currents around the world, forming “islands” of plastic. This causes problems not only for sea creatures, but also for humans. The swirling ocean currents eventually break down some of the plastic, with a lot of it ending up in the stomachs of fish and birds. As a result, it’s believed that plastic has worked its way up the food chain directly onto our plates - not to mention the countless creatures that choke on plastic waste, or are poisoned by the chemicals in it.
So what can we do about this? Lebreton is a member of the Ocean Cleanup Foundation, a group that’s developed technology to collect plastic waste from the ocean. This is a huge project. The group claims it will take around five years just to clean up half of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch alone. But rather than discourage people from using plastic altogether, Lebreton believes that we should simply be more careful of how we use it. “In my opinion, plastic is very useful ... But I think we must change the way we use plastic, particularly in terms of single-use plastic and those objects that have a very short service lifespan,” he told the BBC.
1. What is the Great Pacific Garbage Patch made up of?2. Why does plastic also cause problems for humans?
3. Please paraphrase the following sentence.
It’s believed that the eight million tons of plastic ends up in the sea each year, and a lot of it ends up collecting near large ocean currents around world, forming “islands” of plastic.
4. Please decide which part is false in the following statement, then underline it and explain why.
Laurent Lebreton thinks that plastic is very useful, but we have to stop using plastic completely to protect the ocean.
5. Please provide at least two suggestions on what we can do to change the way we use plastic. (about 20 words)
4 . If you’re worried about your receding hairline (后退的发际线) and you live in a city, you might want to consider moving, as scientists have found exposure to high levels of air pollution may be linked to retention.
New research presented at the European Academy of Dermatology and Venereology (EADV) Congress in Madrid found particulate matter (PM) (颗粒物), which is present in polluted air, could impact both hair growth and retention.
The team took cells from the base of hair follicles (毛囊) and then exposed them to the polluted air. They used various concentrations of PM10, and 24 hours later, they tested the samples to detect whether specific hair-growth proteins in the cells had changed at all.
Researchers found that the presence of PM10 decreased levels of the protein responsible for hair growth — beta-catenin — and morphogenesis, the biological process that causes an organism to develop its shape. According to the study, the levels of three other proteins which are responsible for hair growth and hair retention — cyclin D1, cyclin E and CDK2 — were also decreased.
This meant that the greater the level of pollutant, the greater the decrease in proteins was found.
This is one of the first studies to look at the link between pollution and baldness (秃头).
Hyuk Chul Kwon from the Future Science Research Centre in South Korea said: “While the link between air pollution and serious diseases, such as cancer, are well established, there is little to no research on the effect of particulate matter exposure on the human skin, and hair in particular. And our research explains the mode (模式) of action of air pollutants on human hair follicle cells, showing how the most common air pollutants lead to hair loss.”
1. What does the underlined word “retention” in Para 1 refer to?| A．Hair cells. | B．Hair loss. |
| C．Hair growth. | D．Hair-growth proteins. |
| A．Air pollution can increase levels of hair-growth proteins. |
| B．There’s only one protein that is responsible for hair growth. |
| C．Polluted air has no direct impact on hair growth or retention. |
| D．The more serious air pollution, the more likely you’re to lose your hair. |
| A．Meaningful. | B．Negative. |
| C．Unimportant. | D．Objective. |
| A．The solutions to air pollution. |
| B．The growth mechanism of hair. |
| C．The impact of air pollution on health. |
| D．The close link between air pollution and hair loss. |
5 . Darrell Blatchley, a marine biologist and environmentalist based in the Philippine city of Davao, received a call from the Philippines, Bureau of Fisheries and Aquatic Resources (渔业与水产资源局) early Friday morning reporting a death of a young whale.
When the necropsy (尸检) was performed, Blatchley told NPR, he was not prepared for the amount of plastic they found in the whale’s stomach. “It was full of plastic nothing but nonstop plastic.” he said “It was filled to the point that its stomach was as hard as a baseball.” That means that this animal has been suffering not for days or weeks but for months or even a year or more,” Blatchley added.
Blatchley is the founder and owner of the D’Bone Collector Museum, a natural history museum in Davao. In the coming days, the museum will display all the items found in the whale’s system. Blatchley and his team work with the Bureau of Fisheries and Aquatic Resources and other organizations to assist in rescue and recovery of marine animals.
“Within the last 10 years, we have recovered 61 whales and dolphins just within the Davao Gulf,” he said. “Of them, 57 have died due to man whether they took plastic or fishing nets or other waste, or gotten caught in pollution — and four were pregnant.”
Blatchley said he hoped that the latest incident would launch the issue of plastic pollution in the Philippines and across the globe. “If we keep going this way, it will be more uncommon to see an animal die of natural causes than it is to see an animal die of plastic,” he said.
1. What can be inferred from the second paragraph?| A．The whale was starved to death. |
| B．The dead whale must have swallowed a baseball. |
| C．Blatchley was very shocked at what he found. |
| D．Blatchley didn’t make preparations for the necropsy. |
| A．Waste collected from the ocean. |
| B．Things found in the whale’s body. |
| C．The whole system of the whale. |
| D．Many different tools of whaling. |
| A．Worrying. | B．Indifferent. |
| C．Inspiring. | D．Mild. |
| A．A Whale Found Dead of Plastic | B．Stand Up for Protecting Whales |
| C．Plastic Threatening Our Existence | D．Natural Death or Merciless Murder |
