1 . The first time ever I realized that plastic was a serious matter for our planet was during a road trip in Western Australia, almost 12 years ago.
We
This was just one of the many experiences I’ve lived that made me more
Our trip to Borneo was another life-changing
Besides, we were also
Facing this global issue
| A．stayed | B．visited | C．worked | D．stopped |
| A．land | B．ocean | C．district | D．supermarket |
| A．threw | B．picked | C．dropped | D．carried |
| A．sure | B．proud | C．concerned | D．comfortable |
| A．travel | B．deliver | C．remove | D．play |
| A．story | B．growth | C．experience | D．suffering |
| A．free | B．cheap | C．valuable | D．safe |
| A．failed | B．managed | C．hesitated | D．happened |
| A．firmly | B．violently | C．deeply | D．dramatically |
| A．action | B．project | C．schedule | D．protection |
| A．dry up | B．tie up | C．clean up | D．take up |
| A．washed | B．proved | C．rushed | D．injured |
| A．on purpose | B．for sure | C．by mistake | D．in person |
| A．confusion | B．determination | C．frustration | D．satisfaction |
| A．make | B．do | C．achieve | D．find |
2 . Pollution of the world’s rivers from medicines and pharmaceutical (制药的) products poses a “threat to environmental and global health”, a report says.
Various drugs were widely detected in a University of York study. The research is among the most extensive conducted on a global scale. Rivers in Pakistan, Bolivia and Ethiopia were among the most polluted. Rivers in Iceland, Norway and Amazon Rainforest were the least polluted.
The impact of many of the most common pharmaceutical substances in rivers is still largely unknown. But it is already well established that dissolved human contraceptives (避孕药) can impact the development and reproduction of fish, and scientists fear the increased presence of antibiotics (抗生素) in rivers could limit their effectiveness as medicines.
The study took samples from more than 1,000 test sites in more than 100 countries. Overall, more than a quarter of the 258 rivers sampled had what are known as “active pharmaceutical ingredients” present at a level considered unsafe for life in water.
“Typically, what happens is, we take these chemicals, they have some desired effects on us and then they leave our bodies,” Dr. John Wilkinson, who led the research, said. “What we know now is that even the most modern efficient wastewater treatment plants aren’t completely capable of removing these substances before they end up in rivers or lakes.”
The report said the increased presence of antibiotics in rivers could also lead to the development of resistant bacteria, damaging the effectiveness of medicines and finally posing “a global threat to environmental and global health”.
The most polluted sites were largely in low-income to middle-income countries, and in areas where there was poor wastewater management and pharmaceutical production. “This is most concerning because you have the weakest populations with the least access to healthcare exposed to this,” said Dr. Mohamed Abdallah from the UK’s Birmingham University.
On the question of what can be done, Dr. Wilkinson suggested, “One of the few things that could have an effect right now is the proper use of medicines.” That would mean making it harder to get hold of medicines like antibiotics, and tougher restrictions on doses (剂量).
1. In which county were rivers the least polluted?| A．Pakistan. | B．Bolivia. | C．Ethiopia. | D．Iceland. |
| A．By listing figures. | B．By giving examples. |
| C．By comparing different facts. | D．By debating and concluding. |
| A．Positive. | B．Hateful. | C．Worried. | D．Unconcerned. |
| A．How to Deal with the Pollution in the Rivers |
| B．The Proper Use of Medicines such as Antibiotics |
| C．Most Rivers in the World Have Been Polluted Seriously |
| D．Pharmaceutical Products Left in Rivers Threaten Creatures and People’s Health |
3 . A new analysis of photographs from the International Space Station has identified a shift in the kind of lighting technologies that European countries are using at night to brighten streets and buildings. Researchers have found that the old warm high-pressure street lights are rapidly being replaced by cooler LED lights. The University of Exeter study, published in Science Advances, claimed that “this phenomenon is widely increasing the risk of harmful effects to ecosystems”.
LED lighting was promoted as being intended to reduce emissions, but its usage has raised energy consumption. One explanation of this is that the increase in power efficiency and the associated decrease in economic cost have driven increased demand for lighting, therefore, any efficiency gains have been counteracted by increased consumption of light.
The study also claimed that previous research into the effects of light pollution have underestimated the impacts of blue light radiation. Chief among the health consequences of blue light is its ability to reduce the production of melatonin(褪黑素)that regulates sleep patterns in humans and other organisms. Scientific studies have warned that increased exposure to artificial blue light can worsen people’s sleeping habits.
The increase in blue light radiation in Europe has also reduced the visibility of stars in the night sky, which may have impacts on people’s sense of nature. Blue light can also alter the behavioral patterns of animals including bats and moths, as it can change their movements towards or away from light sources.
David Smith, of the conservation charity Buglife, said, “Light pollution can dramatically impact animals. We should consider light from a wider biological perspective than that of just humans and focus on better quality lighting that is harmonious with our natural world. Better quality and lower levels of lighting would help save energy, and lower financial costs, while also making our environment safer for living beings. Authorities can dim the lights during night hours, and change the bandwidths(带宽值)of their LED bulbs to produce less harmful blue light.”
1. What is the phenomenon described in paragraph 1?| A．The rising demand for public lighting. |
| B．The increasing use of LED lights. |
| C．Old street lights producing lots of emissions. |
| D．Artificial lights at night wasting much energy. |
| A．Judged. | B．Maintained. |
| C．Balanced. | D．Strengthened. |
| A．Sleep patterns. | B．Eyesight. |
| C．Learning ability. | D．Social behaviors. |
| A．To stress the importance of saving energy. |
| B．To persuade authorities to avoid using LED lights. |
| C．To show ways of improving the quality of LED bulbs. |
| D．To provide suggestions on reducing light pollution. |
4 . The amount of plastic pollution in the oceans is rapidly increasing. This is problematic, as at least 700 kinds of ocean animals — including sharks, whales, seabirds and turtles — can become caught in the stuff or mistake it for a tasty snack.
While we know that some ocean animals seem to catch plastic because it looks like jellyfish or some other food sources, less research has been carried out into what plastic smells like to ocean animals. But now, a study from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill has found the coating (涂层) that naturally builds up on ocean plastics causes the rubbish to give off the smell of food.
The researchers took 15 turtles, each around five months old, and placed them in a lab aquarium. They then piped in smells of clean water, clean plastic, turtle food, and plastic that had been soaking in the ocean environment for five weeks. The turtles showed no reaction to the smells of clean water or clean plastic. But when facing ocean soaked plastic or turtle food, they stuck their noses out of the water and showed increased activity.
“This finding is important because it’s the first proof that the smell of ocean plastics causes animals to eat them,” said Dr Kenneth J Lohmann, who took part in the study. “It’s common to find a turtle with its stomach full of plastic materials. There are also increasing reports of sea turtles that have become ill and stuck on the beach due to their taking in plastic.”
According to the researchers, areas of the ocean with much plastic may trick turtles and other animals into thinking that there are plenty of food sources, when the opposite is true. “Once these plastics are in the ocean, we don’t have a good way to remove them or prevent them from smelling like food,” said Lohmann. “The best thing we can do is to keep plastic from getting into the ocean at all.”
1. Why is plastic pollution posing a threat to ocean animals?| A．It may mislead them as food. | B．It may eat up all jellyfish. |
| C．It may kill them with its smell. | D．It may trap 700 species of sea animals. |
| A．Sea water. | B．Clean water. |
| C．Glean plastic. | D．Ocean-soaked plastic. |
| A．Turtles seem to eat plastic because it looks like food. |
| B．Turtles have died out due to their taking in plastic. |
| C．Turtles eat plastic because it gives off the smell of food. |
| D．Turtles with their stomachs full of plastic were studied. |
| A．Keep away from the polluted ocean. | B．Maintain a plastic-free ocean. |
| C．Remove plastic from the ocean. | D．Stop people feeding turtles plastic. |
| A．Entertainment | B．Literature |
| C．Health | D．Science |
5 . For more than 60 years, the soft drink Sprite has come packaged in iconic (标志性的) green bottles. Now, that time has come to an end. Starting Aug. 1, the Coca-Cola Co., which produces Sprite, will package the lemon-lime drink in clear plastic bottles in North America, the company announced Wednesday.
By bottling Sprite in clear plastic, Coca-Cola says, the bottles will be able to be recycled more times. One goal, the company says, is to increase the supply of recycled plastic that the company can then use to make future bottles. “Taking colours out of bottles improves the quality of the recycled material,” said Julian Ochoa, the CEO of a plastic recycling company working with Coca-Cola.
Sprite’s green plastic bottles were already recyclable. But coloured plastic bottles are typically separated from clear plastic bottles during the recycling process in order to keep the recycled plastic from becoming discoloured, Coca-Cola said. The green Sprite bottles were more often recycled into things like clothes and carpeting, which are more difficult to recycle again.
Environmental organizations say the problem with Sprite bottles is not only the colour, but the material: single-use plastic. “Coca-Cola’s recent announcement is another greenwashing attempt from one of the world’s worst plastic polluters,” said Kate Melges, who leads the Plastics Project at Greenpeace, “We are in the midst of a massive (巨大的) plastic pollution crisis. This is not a useful practice.”
Coca-Cola produces more than 100 billion plastic bottles every year, according to data it provided in 2019, making it one of the world’s largest producers of single-use plastic waste.
Soft drink bottles are usually made of a type of plastic called polyethyleneglycol terephthalate (PET). PET is lightweight, food-safe and recyclable — but like other plastics, PET can take hundreds of years to decompose. “Bottles with recycled content will still be thrown away, sent to landfills, or littered,” said Matt Littlejohn of Oceana, an ocean conservation (保护) organization.
1. Why does the Coca-Cola Co. decide to use the new package?| A．To increase its production. |
| B．To cut jobs in its factories. |
| C．To make its operation greener. |
| D．To suit the needs of customers. |
| A．Worried. | B．Uncaring. | C．Positive. | D．Doubtful. |
| A．Grow up. | B．Take off. | C．Throw away. | D．Break down. |
| A．Sprite to Be Packaged in Clear Bottles |
| B．Coca-Cola Loses Its Wide Popularity |
| C．Sprite Reduces Its Product Supply |
| D．Coca-Cola Is the Largest Polluter |
6 . Even chess experts perform worse when air quality is lower, suggesting a negative effect on cognition(认知). Here’s something else chess players need to keep in check: air pollution.
That’s the bottom line of a newly published study co-authored by a researcher, showing that chess players perform objectively worse and make more suboptimal(次优的) moves, as measured by a computerized analysis of their games, when there is more fine particulate matter(颗粒物) in the air, notated as PM 2.5.
More specifically, given a modest increase in fine particulate matter, the probability that chess players will make an error increases by 2.1 percentage points, and the spectrum of those errors increases by 10.8 percent. In this setting, at least, cleaner air leads to clearer heads and sharper thinking.
“We find that when individuals are exposed to higher levels of air pollution, they make more mistakes, and they make larger mistakes,” says Juan Palacios, an economist in Sustainable Urbanization Lab.
“It’s pure random exposure to air pollution that is driving these people’s performance,” Palacios says. “Against comparable opponents in the same tournament round, being exposed to different levels of air quality makes a difference for move quality and decision quality.”
The researchers also found that when air pollution was worse, the chess players performed even more poorly when under time limitation. “We find it interesting that those mistakes especially occur in the phase of the game where players are facing time pressure,” Palacios says.
“There are more and more papers showing that there is a cost with air pollution, and there is a cost for more and more people,” Palacios says. “And this is just one example showing that even for these very excellent chess players, who think they can beat everything, it seems that with air pollution, they have an enemy who harms them.”
1. What effect does air pollution have on chess players?| A．They make fewer good choices. | B．They perform subjectively worse. |
| C．They suffer body discomfort. | D．They lose all games with computers. |
| A．Magic. | B．Process. | C．Range. | D．Balance. |
| A．His appeal for attention to chess players. |
| B．His concern about air pollution. |
| C．An example of chess players’ performance. |
| D．Approaches to dealing with air pollution. |
| A．Air pollution is a tough enemy chess players face. |
| B．Chess players make more and more mistakes. |
| C．There is a cost with air pollution for more people. |
| D．Chess players perform poorly under time limitation. |
Thousands of years ago, it was common to see many stars in the sky. However, this changed with the
Today, people
But is all this light
8 . Plastic waste is choking our planet. People are trying to help fix it by recycling, but their efforts aren’t going far enough. Even when plastic producers are held responsible and attempt to solve the problem, it doesn’t always go smoothly. Such has been the case for the company Torus Pak, which produces novel packaging for frozen meals on a large scale.
Like many other black plastic products, the Torus Pak packages used a carbon-based pigment (颜料). This pigment troubles the sorting technology which is used by many recycling facilities, so black plastic usually ends up being thrown away because the machines can’t identify it. Now the company is midway through the complex process of phasing out that pigment and switching that pigment to one that doesn’t use carbon.
But that doesn’t mean the problem is solved, for the recycling rate at the waste facility itself is not encouraging. Your discarded plastic may end up in a landfill even if you send it to be recycled. Worldwide, only about nine percent of all the plastic waste has been recycled, which amounts to less than 600 million tons out of over 6 billion. While one might assume the proportion of plastic being recycled is on the increase due to improved tech and increased public awareness of environmental protection, it’s actually become even lower in many places in recent years.
“The world wasn’t always flooded with single-use plastic products,” said Lisa Ramsden, senior plastic campaigner for Greenpeace USA. “We know how to live without them. We’ve just got used to a convenience culture that relies so heavily on them.”
The solution is obvious. To get out of this habit, we should stop using so much plastic, starting with many of the items we use just once for a few minutes. Companies need to shift toward using more refillable and reusable containers, and packaging made from materials that are less harmful to the environment. Governments must mandate (强制执行) such changes — a goal we’re now finally inching closer to every day.
1. What is the problem with the Torus Pak packages?| A．They are expensive for customers. |
| B．Their pigment is hardly appealing. |
| C．They are hard to define as “recyclable”. |
| D．Their production process is very complex. |
| A．The reason for recycling plastic waste. |
| B．The outcome of recycling plastic waste. |
| C．The potential of recycling plastic waste. |
| D．The objective of recycling plastic waste. |
| A．Making some stricter laws. |
| B．Reducing the use of plastic products. |
| C．Advancing the technology of recycling. |
| D．Setting some higher environmental goals. |
| A．Recycling fails to solve plastic pollution |
| B．A company contributes a lot to recycling |
| C．Great changes happen in recycling plastic |
| D．Plastic pollution is increasingly worsening |
9 . A new study suggests classic paintings by well-known Impressionists Joseph Turner and Claude Monet may have been influenced by air pollution during the Industrial Revolution.
The study, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences by authors from Harvard and Sorbonne universities, analyzed 60 oil paintings by Turner from 1796 to 1850 and 38 paintings by Monet from 1864 to 1901.
Scientists don’t know exactly how polluted the cities were during that time for lack of data. However, researchers say examining the works of Turner and Monet can give a picture of long-term environmental change with the air pollution.
In particular, researchers said changes in local sulfur dioxide emissions from burning coal may explain changes in the colour contrast and intensity of Tuner, Monet, and others’ works, even after taking into account the artistic trends and subject matter of the time.
Scientists successfully measured painters’ representation of nature, focusing on differences in local weather patterns which influenced colour in works painted in different parts of Europe. Paintings’ done in Britain generally feature a paler blue sky than other works in other parts of the continent. Generally, artists can historically accurately represent their environment, so Turner and Monet were chosen because they are famous for their landscape and cityscape paintings and also because they were active during the Industrial Revolution, when air pollution grew at a rate never seen before.
Additionally, researchers say that as the air in London and Paris became more polluted, the cities would appear hazier to the eyes as well as in photographs. By comparing the paintings of Turner and Monet to pictures from the era, they were able to determine the artists were at least partly influenced by the change in emissions.
1. What did the researchers find in the works of Turner and Monet?| A．Change in subject matter. | B．Air pollution at that time. |
| C．Social trends of the period. | D．Development of photography. |
| A．referring to relevant historical records |
| B．comparing the paintings of Turner and Monet |
| C．relating the paintings to the air conditions then |
| D．analyzing the data during the Industrial Revolution |
| A．European artists preferred landscape paintings. |
| B．Scientists focused on studying weather patterns. |
| C．Turner and Monet intended to present pollution. |
| D．Britain suffered from air pollution most in Europe. |
| A．To inform people of a new discovery. |
| B．To instruct people to appreciate paintings. |
| C．To introduce the Industrial Revolution. |
| D．To call on people to protect the environment. |
10 . Plastic is everywhere. A lot of it ends up in the ocean. Most plastics in the ocean break up into very small particles called “micro-plastics”—less than five millimeters in length or about the size of a sesame (芝麻) seed. It is the most common type of marine debris (垃圾) found in the ocean. Plastic debris can come in all shapes and sizes and be harmful to our ocean and water life.
Micro-plastics come from various sources, including larger plastic debris that degrades into smaller pieces. In addition, micro-beads, a type of smaller micro-plastic, are very tiny pieces of manufactured polyethylene (聚乙烯) plastic added as exfoliants (去角质剂) to health and beauty products,like toothpastes. These tiny particles easily pass through water systems and end up in the ocean, posing a potential threat to water life. What is worse, these micro-beads or plastic particles in the marine environment are eaten by plankton (浮游生物)，which are then eaten by fish. They continue to work their way up the food chain until they reach our dinner plates.
New research has shown that household dust is a more likely source of micro-plastics. According to researchers,114 pieces of micro-plastic settle on a dinner plate during the 20-minute duration of a meal. adding up to anywhere between 13,000 and 68,000pieces per year. And when you breathe in air, you could be breathing in the microscopic plastic particles as well.
How about drinking water? The non-profit journalism organization Orb Media tested 259 bottles of water bought from 9 different countries. The tests found that there was an average of 10. 4 plastic particles (0. 1 millimeters or larger) per liter of water. That level of micro-plastics in bottled water was double the level found in tap water. The findings suggest if you drink one liter of bottled water per day, you could be consuming tens of thousands of micro-plastic particles each year.
It is apparent that the problem of micro-plastics is still a huge one.
1. Where is the text probably taken from?| A．A science lecture. | B．A tourism brochure. |
| C．A wildlife website. | D．A water advertisement. |
| A．To state micro-plastics are eatable. | B．To show micro-plastics are common. |
| C．To prove micro-plastics are small. | D．To explain micro-plastics are light. |
| A．Plastic debris→ health products →plankton →micro-beads →fish →humans’ body |
| B．Plastic debris →health products →plankton →fish →micro-beads →humans’ body |
| C．Plastic debris →micro -beads →health products →plankton →fish →humans’ body |
| D．Plastic debris →micro-beads →health products →fish →plankton →humans’ body |
| A．The Harmful Effects of Micro-plastics | B．The Development of Plastics |
| C．The Polluted Drinking Water | D．The Measures to Protect the Oceans |
