1 . Microplastics, those lasting relics of modern times, have occupied seemingly every part of the planet today, including the most distant reaches.
The Arctic is far from clean, though it's remote and rarely stepped in by visitors. Melanie Bergmann, a marine ecologist with the Alfred Wegener Institute, and her colleagues had been studying plastics on the Arctic seafloor since 2002. Large amounts turned up everywhere they looked. In deep sea, they found about 6,000 particles（颗粒）in every 2.2 pounds of mud. Sea ice was even more loaded—as much as 12,000 pieces per 34 ounces of melted ice.
Scientists measured microplastics in snow from this distant location and found levels they conclude could only have caught rides on the wind. The study raises concerns about how much microplastics pollute the atmosphere, bringing a potential health risk to people and animals that breathe them in. But they are less worried about the threat that breathed-in pollutants have to wildlife than about polluted snow leaving its load into water. “From an ecosystem angle, our biggest concern is what happens when that snow melts as the climate warms up,” Bergmann says.
The science on the health effects of microplastics is still going on. “For human health, we currently know very little,” says microplastics researcher Chelsea Rochman. "There is a lot of concern because we know we are exposed…. For wildlife, we know that microplastics may go into every level of the food chain.” Laboratory studies find some physical and chemical effects from microplastics exposure, but the findings vary by the plastic type, shape and size. “There's much more we need to do to clearly understand the effects," he says. "And further experiments will be carried out soon with application for equipment and financial support approved.”
Even worse is the threat from airborne nanoplastics in the area—too small to be noticed and may actually enter cells. Research on that also has been conducted and it could be a bigger problem, according to Rochman.
1. What is the data in paragraph 2 used to show?| A．Visitors rarely step into the Arctic. | B．Sea ice is more polluted than deep sea. |
| C．Microplastics are everywhere in the world. | D．The Arctic suffers serious microplastics pollution. |
| A．Microplastics' entering the water ecosystem. | B．Human beings' breathing microplastics in. |
| C．Wildlife's being threatened by micropollutants. | D．Microplastics pollution's worsening global warming. |
| A．Their experiments lack financial support. | B．Effects of microplastics exposure are unknown. |
| C．Animals are in a more risky situation than man. | D．Microplastics' effects on health require more study. |
| A．Damage of microplastics to health. | B．Appeals for environmental protection. |
| C．Findings about nanoplastics in the Arctic. | D．Measures to solve microplastics pollution. |
2 . An invention to tackle canal plastics pollution was one of the highlights of the recent Amsterdam International Water Week.
The instrument, named"the great Bubble barrier" is a bubble screen that will remove plastic trash from the canals and therefore prevent it from flowing through to the river IJ and the North Sea.
“This is a very important step in reducing the amount of plastic in the oceans,”co-inventor Philip Ehrhorn said “It is a lot easier to stop it at an earlier stage instead of in the ocean.”
The tool works as follows. By pumping air through a tube with holes in it, which is located on the bottom of a waterway, a bubble barrier appears. This creates an upward thrust, which brings waste to the surface of the water.
By placing it diagonally in the waterway, the barrier uses the natural current to guide the plastic to the catchment system at the riverside. Both ships and fish can pass through the Bubble Barrier, but plastic will be stopped.
The invention's origins go back around four years, when Dutch students Saskia Studer, Anne Marieke Eveleens and Francis Zoet looked at the bubbles of a beer glass in a bar and thought they should do something similar. Ehrhorn, a German student, had the same idea. After he found out about the plans of the three Dutch women, they decided to join forces in Amsterdam.
“It is the first step of many”, Ehrhorn continued on the project. “First, the different rivers and canals in the Netherlands-cities, industrial areas, ports. In the following years ,we will go to the rest of Europe, Asia and elsewhere.”
“We have learned to live with water and have built a thriving society.”Nijhof said.
1. What's a bubble barrier?| A．A dam made of concrete. | B．An invention to trap plastic. |
| C．A canal to deal with waste. | D．A container to hold beer. |
| A．The barrier is effective in a way. |
| B．It's easy to deal with plastic. |
| C．This instrument can deal with all waste. |
| D．We can do nothing with sea waste. |
| A．Paragraph 1&2. | B．Paragraph 2&3. |
| C．Paragraph 3&4. | D．Paragraph 4&5. |
| A．Plastic becomes easier to remove. |
| B．An action to remove the plastic. |
| C．An instrument will be invented. |
| D．A new invention to fight plastic pollution. |
3 . Have you ever wondered how many cigarettes you're passively smoking while walking through the streets of a polluted, smog-infused((烟雾笼罩的)city?No?Well, a pair of digital developers just invented an app that will definitely and accurately answer that question.
Shit, I Smoke! was created by Brazilian-born designer Marcelo Coelho and Paris-born app developer Amaury Martiny in just a week, after they read a study that analyzed air pollution and its equivalent(等量)to cigarette smoking. The article, co-written by Richard Mueller, a MacArthur fellow and physics professor at the University of California, Berkeley, explains a mathematical model that compares smoking and tobacco-related deaths to levels of PM2.5, a microscopic particle(微粒)that is a dangerous, cancerous pollutant after burning.
The app shows that Parisians can effectively inhale(吸入) between three and six cigarettes per day, while a person in Delhi could be smoking up to 20 cigarettes-without even touching one--on a bad day. Other cities have worrying numbers, too (6. 5 cigarettes daily in Mexico City ).
“I was surprised to see that Buenos Aires and Sao Paulo have the best air quality in all Latin America,despite the fact that these are heavily populated cities,”said Coelho, who's originally from the latter, Brazil's largest city.
For both Coelho and Martiny, the app isn't only a useful tool to inform users about their city's air quality;it also makes this information more accessible and easier to understand. “These air-quality monitoring stations are just numbers, numbers that are very specific to professionals who work in environmental issues,” Martiny said. “So when you make this conversion(转换)to cigarettes, it makes it easier to understand what people are dealing with and the consequences air quality has in the daily lives.”
The developers' plan now is to keep working on and enriching the app's features. This will most likely include monthly average cigarette rates, and enabling users to get data from cities other than the one they're in.
1. What does the underlined part “that question” mean?| A．How severely a city's air is polluted. |
| B．How harmful it is to smoke in urban areas. |
| C．How many cigarettes one usually smokes daily. |
| D．How much harmful air you're taking in in urban areas. |
| A．Paris | B．Delhi. |
| C．Mexico City. | D．Sao Paulo. |
| A．Brazil might have good air |
| B．his hometown was a badly polluted city. |
| C．air pollution wasn't a problem in Latin America. |
| D．Buenos Aires had the best air quality in Latin America |
| A．Encouraging people to abandon the habit of smoking. |
| B．Recommending some best places for people to live in. |
| C．Helping people better know their everyday air quality. |
| D．Reminding people to do something good for the environment. |
Electronic trash, or e-waste, is piling up faster than ever in American homes and businesses. People do not know what to do with old televisions or computers so they throw them in the trash.
National Solid Waste Management Association (NSWMA) state programs director Chaz Miller says the large amount of electronic waste Americans product is not unexpected.
The US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) estimates more than 400 million consumer electronic items are dumped each year, and there is a push by more states to ban the waste from landfills (垃圾填埋场) and create recycling programs. They can be torn apart and sorted for useable parts. Mike Fannon who runs the plant in Baltimore says, “There are lots of valuable metals that can be recovered and reused instead of just putting them in the landfill, and in certain components there are some materials that should not really be in the landfill.”
Fannon says nearly 20 percent of electronic waste is recycled nationwide. Thirteen years ago, it was only about 6 percent. Recycling rates continue to rise as more communities have banned electronics from landfills in order to keep e-waste poisons like lead (铅) and mercury (汞) out of garbage dumps.
This year several states like Vermont imposed a ban on electronic waste in landfills. More than 25 other states have also adopted bans on e-waste in landfills. Chaz Miller says more can be done to boost electronic waste recycling.
“We can do much better,” noted Miller. “I think clearly our goal should be to do as well as we do recycling newspapers.”
1. Which of the following does NOT belong to e-waste?
| A．Old televisions. | B．Old computers. |
| C．Old cell phones. | D．Old newspapers. |
| A．Because it can not be recycled. |
| B．Because the landfills are already full. |
| C．Because it might damage the environment. |
| D．Because it can be shipped to other countries. |
| A．Recycling it. | B．Selling it. |
| C．Burying it. | D．Breaking it. |
| A．Chaz Miller works for EPA. |
| B．Miller is optimistic about the future of e-waste. |
| C．At present, less than 10 percent of e-waste is recycled. |
| D．All states in the US have banned e-waste from landfills. |
5 . Eating too much fatty food, exercising too little and smoking can raise your future risk of heart disease. But there is another factor that can cause your heart problems more immediately：the air you breathe.
Previous studies have linked high exposure (暴露) to environmental pollution to an increased risk of heart problems，but two analyses now show that poor air quality can lead to heart attack or stroke (中风) within as little as a few hours after exposure. In one review of the research, scientists found that people exposed to high levels of pollutants (污染物) were up to 5% more likely to suffer a heart attack within days of exposure than those with lower exposure. A separate study of stroke patients showed that even air that the U. S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)considers to be of “moderate” (良好) quality and relatively safe for our health can raise the risk of stroke as much as 34% within 12 to 14 hours of exposure.
The authors of both studies stress that these risks are relatively small for healthy people and certainly modest compared with other risk factors such as smoking and high blood pressure. However, it is important to be aware of these dangers because everyone is exposed to air pollution regardless of lifestyle choices. So stricter regulation by the EPA of pollutants may not only improve environmental air quality but could also become necessary to protect public health.
1. The text mainly discusses the relationship between ________.| A．heart problems and air quality |
| B．heart problems and exercising |
| C．heart problems and smoking |
| D．heart problems and fatty food |
| A．relatively high | B．extremely low |
| C．relatively low | D．extremely high |
| A．Eating fatty food has immediate effects on your heart. |
| B．The EPA conducted many studies on air quality. |
| C．Moderate air quality is more harmful than smoking. |
| D．Stricter regulations on pollutants should be made. |
| A．inform | B．persuade |
| C．describe | D．entertain |
