1 . Microplastics, as the name implies, are tiny plastic particles found in the environment. Any plastic particle that has a diameter of less than 5 mm is considered to be microplastic. For a long time, a majority of people were unaware of the presence of microplastics and their effects on the environment. However, these particles have become a significant topic of debate in recent times after researchers noted their presence in almost every corner of the globe. from Mount Everest to the Mariana Trench.
There are two categories of microplastics: primary and secondary. Primary microplastics are tiny particles meant for external commercial use such as cosmetics, as well as microfibers to make other textiles, such as fishing nets. Secondary microplastics are particles that result from the breakdown of larger plastic items, such as water bottles.
There are various sources of microplastics. Wastewater treatment plants and sewage treatment plants are the major sources of primary microplastics, most of which are residues (残留物) of cosmetics, paint, household and industrial waste. Single-use plastics plastic items meant to be used just once and then discarded, such as a straw — are the main source of secondary plastics in the environment.
The problem with microplastics is that like plastic items of any size they do not readily break down into harmless molecules. Plastics can take hundreds or thousands of years to decompose (降解). That means once produced, we cannot get rid of them. Microplastics exist on beaches and deeper waters, and have been detected in marine organisms from plankton to whales, in commercial seafood, and even in drinking water. They are mistaken for food by marine animals and some plastics are so tiny that they end up in the animal tissues. They are passed across the food chain, and some find their way to humans.
Scientists are still unsure whether consumed microplastics are harmful to human or animal health and if so, what specific dangers they may pose. Even so, many countries are taking action to reduce microplastics in the environment. The best approaches to controlling microplastics include proper handling of plastics and thorough treatment of wastewater.
1. According to the first two paragraphs, microplastics are_________| A．common in our daily life |
| B．used to make glass bottles |
| C．found in all the uninhabited areas |
| D．tiny plastic particles with a diameter of 5mm |
| A．The use of straws should be forbidden. |
| B．Household waste contains microplastics. |
| C．Industrial waste is a source of secondary plastics |
| D．Wastewater and sewage treatment plants are useless. |
| A．Because they’re consumed as food. |
| B．Because they exist on the beaches. |
| C．Because they easily break down. |
| D．Because they’re left out in the food chain. |
| A．To analyze the sources of microplastics. |
| B．To warn people of the danger of microplastics. |
| C．To give an overall introduction to microplastics. |
| D．To persuade people to give up the use of microplastics. |
2 . Cotton bags have become a means for brands, retailers and supermarkets to convey a planet-friendly mindset — or, at least, to show that the companies are aware of the overuse of plastic in packaging.
Earth-friendly? Not exactly. It turns out the wholehearted embrace of cotton bags may actually have created a new problem. An organic cotton bag needs to be used 20,000 times to make up for its overall impact of production, according to a 2018 study by the Ministry of Environment and Food of Denmark. That is equal to daily use for 54 years — for just one bag. The production of cotton bags is water-intensive, and figuring out how to deal with a bag in an environmentally low-impact way is not nearly as simple as people think, according to Travis Wagner, an environmental science professor at the University of Maine.
In sharp comparison with the frequent use of cotton bags, the disposal (处理) of the bags remains less satisfying. Only 15 percent of the 30 million tons of cotton bags produced every year actually is sent to be recycled. Even when a bag does make it to a treatment facility, most dyes (染料) used to print logos onto them are PVC-based and thus not recyclable; “they’re extremely difficult to disintegrate (分解) chemically,” said Christopher Stanev, the co-founder of Evrnu, a Seattle-based textile recycling firm. Printed patterns have to be cut out of the cloth; Mr. Stanev estimates 10 to 15 percent of the cotton Evrnu receives is wasted this way.
That’s not to say cotton is worse than plastic, or that the two should even be compared. While cotton can use pesticides and has dried up rivers from water consumption, lightweight plastic bags use greenhouse gas-emitting fossil fuels and will fill up the oceans.
Buffy Reid, of the knitwear label & Daughter, stopped production of her cotton bags in April this year. Aesop is converting the composition of its shopping bags to a 60 — 40 blend of recycled and organic cotton. Designer Ally Capellino recently employed a new material, while Hindmarch introduced a new version of her original cotton bag, this time made from recycled water bottles.
In the end, the simplest solution may be the most obvious. “Not every product needs a bag,” Comey says.
1. According to paragraph 2, what can we learn about cotton bags?| A．It is easy to recycle cotton bags. |
| B．Using cotton bags is earth-friendly. |
| C．Producing cotton is water-consuming. |
| D．Producing cotton bags poses no harm to the earth. |
| A．A large amount of water is wasted. |
| B．Printed patterns on cotton bags cannot be recycled. |
| C．Dyes used to print logos are easy to break down. |
| D．Most cotton bags end up being recycled. |
| A．Cotton is worse than plastic. |
| B．Plastic is worse than cotton. |
| C．Both are favorable to the earth. |
| D．Both have disadvantages. |
| A．Cotton bags — a new fashion |
| B．Not every product needs a bag |
| C．Cotton bags — a way to be earth-friendly |
| D．Are cotton bags harmless to the environment? |
3 . In North America, most large wildfires occur in the western states and Canada. But smoke generated (引发) in the West doesn’t stay there. It tends to travel east. Within days, it can dirty the air in the Midwest and even East Coast towns. Today, most asthma-related (哮喘相关) U.S. deaths and emergency-room visits from wildfire smoke occur in Eastern cities.
The big problem comes from tiny aerosols (气溶胶) —bits of ash and tiny water drops in the air. Scientists refer to this mix as particulate matter, or PM. The smaller the PM, the longer it can stay in the air. And the longer it floats, the farther it can travel.
An especially worrisome size is known as PM2.5. These bits are no more than 2.5 micrometers wide, about one-thirtieth the width of a human hair. These aerosols are so small that they can be breathed deeply into the lungs. PM2.5 has been linked with breathing related injury, diabetes and heart disease. These aerosols also can cause asthma and other chronic conditions in otherwise healthy people. And especially in kids, smoke-related aerosols can lead to flare-ups of eczema, a skin disease.
Over the last few decades, U.S. clean-air laws have cut down on emissions (排放) of PM from industrial sources. That’s helped clean the air in many cities. But these rules don’t cover PM from wildfire smoke. Especially worrisome: Recent studies have shown that aerosols from wildfires are more poisonous than industrial sources of these pollutants. What’s more, exposure to wildfire smoke has been growing—in many places, by a lot.
How far and where the smoke travels depends in part on the weather. How high it goes into the sky also matters. The stronger and hotter the fire, the longer the smoke can last and the farther it can fly. Last year, distant wildfires badly polluted the air in the Great Plains. That’s a region stretching from Montana and Minnesota in the north down to New Mexico and Texas. But the smoke didn’t stop there. Some continued to move east, polluting the air from New York City to Washington, D.C.
1. Why can PM2.5 cause so many health problems?| A．PM2.5 can’t stay long in the air. |
| B．PM2.5 has strange smells. |
| C．PM2.5 can’t be dealt with by humans. |
| D．PM2.5 is easier to enter the body. |
| A．It’s more poisonous. |
| B．It’s strictly limited by laws. |
| C．It’s getting bigger in size. |
| D．It is made up of PM2.5. |
| A．The composition of the smoke. |
| B．The height of the smoke. |
| C．The wildfire’s cause. |
| D．The wildfire’s position. |
| A．Health risks from wildfire smoke. |
| B．Large wildfires in North America. |
| C．The ways to deal with wildfires. |
| D．The great harm of PM2.5. |
4 . 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 (霾) 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. According to the passage, human beings ________.| A．prefer to live in the darkness |
| B．are used to living in the day light |
| C．were curious about the midnight world |
| D．had to stay at home with the light of the moon |
| 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 |
5 . Taking in dirty air does great harm to our health. Air pollution lowers the average life spans by a year worldwide and in more polluted parts of Asia and Africa, dirty air shortens lives up to twice that much. Scientists shared their new findings in Environmental Science & Technology Letters. The study used data gathered in 2016 as part of a project known as the Global Burden of Disease and was the first major country-by-country look at the connection between the length of life and what’s known as fine PM.
Air pollution has been linked to many health problems. Most earlier studies had looked at how tiny air pollutants affected rates of illness or death. Joshua Apte is an environmental scientist at the University of Texas at Austin. By looking at life expectancy (预期寿命), his team had hoped to make the threat easier to understand. PM2.5 is what scientists call tiny particles (颗粒) of pollution in the air. Higher levels of PM2.5 can cause health problems and cut months, if not years, from the average length of life. This analysis shows how pollution affects life expectancy in different parts of the world.
The World Health Organization (WHO) recommends limiting PM2.5 to 10 micrograms per cubic meter of air. Apte’s group calculated how holding pollution to this low level would help people. In countries with very dirty air, meeting this standard would lengthen people’s lives. However, in countries whose air already meets this standard, the study shows no gain in life expectancy. In other words, meeting the WHO standard won’t reduce health costs resulting from dirty air because even below 10 micrograms per cubic meter, pollution still causes serious risks. Meanwhile, the scientists compared how other threats including smoking and cancer shorten the length of life across the globe.
1. What is special about the study?| A．It won recognition from a professional journal. |
| B．It discussed health problems caused by air pollution. |
| C．It gathered lots of data for the Global Burden of Disease. |
| D．It analyzed the link between life spans and PM by country. |
| A．Help people better understand air pollution. |
| B．Study life expectancy in different countries. |
| C．Know how small air pollutants affect health. |
| D．Deal with different kinds of health problems. |
| A．People’s life spans will surely increase. |
| B．It will guarantee people clean air. |
| C．People’s health may not be much improved. |
| D．It will be awarded by the WHO. |
| A．How other threats shorten life expectancy. |
| B．How cleaning up the air can lengthen lives. |
| C．How air pollution shortens lives by country. |
| D．How all the countries deal with severe pollution. |
6 . “When I was 16 years old, I was scuba diving (水肺潜水) in Greece, but I was disappointed because I saw more plastic bags than fish.” These are the words of Boyan Slat, 25, an engineer who designed the world’s first ocean plastic cleanup system.
Every year, over 8 million tons of plastic end up in our oceans. These can take up to 500 years to break down. If left alone, sea animals become entangled (缠绕的) in them and can even die if the plastics are taken in. Worse, humans can be affected when these plastics break down. “Smaller pieces enter the food chain, and that’s a food chain that includes us humans,” Slat said.
In 2018, the World Economic Forum predicted that the weight of ocean plastics will match the weight of all the fish in our oceans by 2050. To prevent this depressing reality, Slat created The Ocean Cleanup in 2013 and put his plan for an ocean plastic cleanup device into action.
After years of research and development in the Netherlands, a device called System 001/B successfully started gathering plastic on Oct 2, 2019.
The device uses a 600-meter-long “C” shaped tube to gather all the floating rubbish. Unlike other cleanup methods, the system floats freely according to the direction of the waves, which allows waste to flow into and stay within the device.
A sea anchor is attached to either end. This slows down the system as it floats through the water and allows the faster-moving rubbish, carried by the waves, to flow into its mouth. System 001/B can also collect waste below the surface using a 3-meter-deep skirt (挡板) attached to the end. After being gathered, the rubbish will be dragged back to shore by boat and recycled.
Currently, the system operates in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, an area that is three times the size of France. Once operational, the Ocean Cleanup expects a full fleet to be able to clear 50 percent of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch in five years.
It remains to be seen if this dream will become a reality, but it is undeniable that humanity must work together to reduce our plastic use and repair the damage our waste has caused.
“We are starting to see a young generation that gets that and is excited about a sustainable future, but the question still comes down to: Are we going fast enough, and how much damage will have been done before we get there?” Slat said.
1. Which of the following statements is true according to the first two paragraphs?| A．Slat took up scuba diving at the age of 16. |
| B．Slat showed a great interest in ocean environments. |
| C．Plastics pose a great threat to sea animals and humans. |
| D．It doesn’t take long to break down the plastics in the ocean. |
| A．Many sea creatures take in plastics. |
| B．Humans are influenced by the plastics. |
| C．Ocean plastics are difficult to get rid of. |
| D．The weight of ocean plastics will reach a new peak. |
| A．It floats in a fixed direction. |
| B．It started collecting plastic about two years ago. |
| C．It collects and recycles the rubbish at the same time. |
| D．It aims to clear the Great Pacific Garbage Patch in a decade. |
| A．Concerned. | B．Indifferent. | C．Positive. | D．Tolerant. |
7 . You’ve heard that plastic is polluting the oceans — between 4.8 and 12.7 million tonnes enter ocean ecosystems every year. But does one plastic straw or cup really make a difference? Artist Benjamin Von Wong wants you to know that it does. He builds massive sculptures out of plastic garbage, forcing viewers to re-examine their relationship to single-use plastic products.
At the beginning of the year, the artist built a piece called “Strawpocalypse,” a pair of 10-foot-tall plastic waves, frozen mid-crash. Made of 168,000 plastic straws collected from several volunteer beach cleanups, the sculpture made its first appearance at the Estella Place shopping center in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam.
Just 9% of global plastic waste is recycled. Plastic straws are by no means the biggest source (来源) of plastic pollution, but they’ve recently come under fire because most people don’t need them to drink with and, because of their small size and weight, they cannot be recycled. Every straw that’s part of Von Wong’s artwork likely came from a drink that someone used for only a few minutes. Once the drink is gone, the straw will take centuries to disappear.
In a piece from 2018, Von Wong wanted to illustrate (说明) a specific statistic: Every 60 seconds, a truckload’s worth of plastic enters the ocean. For this work, titled “Truckload of Plastic,” Von Wong and a group of volunteers collected more than 10,000 pieces of plastic, which were then tied together to look like they’d been dumped (倾倒) from a truck all at once.
Von Wong hopes that his work will also help pressure big companies to reduce their plastic footprint.
1. What are Von Wong’s artworks intended for?| A．Beautifying the city he lives in. | B．Introducing eco-friendly products. |
| C．Drawing public attention to plastic waste. | D．Reducing garbage on the beach. |
| A．To show the difficulty of their recycling. |
| B．To explain why they are useful. |
| C．To voice his views on modern art. |
| D．To find a substitute for them. |
| A．Calming. | B．Disturbing. |
| C．Refreshing. | D．Challenging. |
| A．Artists’ Opinions on Plastic Safety |
| B．Media Interest in Contemporary Art |
| C．Responsibility Demanded of Big Companies |
| D．Ocean Plastics Transformed into Sculptures |
8 . 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(白天活动的) creatures, which explains 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—light pollution. Light pollution is largely the result of bad lighting design, which washes out the darkness of night and completely changes the light levels and 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(霾) 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 shadow on Earth—is wholly beyond our experience.
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.
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 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. What is probably the best title of the article?| A．Powerful light. | B．Orange Haze. |
| C．Calls of Nature. | D．Disappearing Night. |
| A．The sky. | B．The planet. | C．The world. | D．The night. |
| A．show how light pollution influences animals |
| B．compare the living habits of both species |
| C．explain why certain species has died out |
| D．provide examples of animal protection |
| A．human beings mustn't explore the night |
| B．light pollution harms the world’s eyesight |
| C．man should rethink its position in the universe |
| D．light pollution has destroyed some world heritages |
增加：在缺词处加一个漏字符号（^），并在其下面写出该加的词
删除：把多余的词用斜线（ \ ）划掉。
修改：在错的词下画一横线，并在该词下面写出修改后的词。
注意：1. 每处错误及其修改均仅限一词；
2.只允许修改10处，多者（从第11处起）不计分。
Two years ago, when I went to the kitchen for a cup of milk, a magazine lay open on the table drew my attention. An article about environmental protection written by an university professor was on this page. That was a popular magazine which was sold well at that time. From the article, I got plenty of informations. I learned about some problems the earth was faced with and got some suggestions on what they could do to save our planet in an effectively way. From then on, I had been applying myself to protect the environment. While the problem of pollution is universal and we are likely to run out some natural resources, it's time that everybody took action.
10 . Three-quarters of a million tourists flock to the primitive, white beaches every year—but this booming industry has come at a price. When foreigners left the government struggling to cope with a stream of rubbish, their answer was to turn one of these islands into a dumping ground. Clouds of sharp, poisonous smoke rising from open fires, piles of rubbish made up of plastic bottles, crisp packets and consumer junk. It’s a far cry from the white sands, crystal-clear waters and gently swaying palm trees that we associate with the Maldives (马尔代夫), the beautiful paradise island holiday destination set in the Indian Ocean.
Of its 200 inhabited islands, which are spread across an area of 35,000 square miles, 99 are dedicated resorts. Three-quarters of a million tourists visit every year — more than double the domestic population. of these, over 100,000 travel from the UK. The capital, Malé, is four times more densely populated than London. Given these facts, it’s hardly surprising that the Maldives on which has a waste disposal problem.
What you are seeing here is a view of the Maldives on which no honeymooners will ever fix eyes. Four miles west of Malé is the country’s dumping ground, Thilafushi — or Rubbish Island as it has simply become known.
The country dumps upwards of 330 tons of rubbish on the island every day. A figure attributed largely to the tourist industry on which the chain of islands relies. Each visitor generates 3.5 kg of waste per day.
Now, the government of the Maldives has banned the dumping of waste on the island, which is too late, due largely to an increase in the number of waste boats “fly-tipping”(非法倾倒) directly into the sea, fed up with waiting seven hours or more to offload their cargo.
1. The government of the Maldives is in troubled faced with ________.| A．how to develop the tourist industry |
| B．where to set up a dumping ground |
| C．how to deal with the rubbish left by tourists. |
| D．where to set up dedicated resorts |
| A．the Maldives are still paradise islands with clear waters. |
| B．the Maldives rely on tourist industry |
| C．the Maldives are called Rubbish Islands |
| D．the country dumps about 330 tons of rubbish on the island every month |
| A．positive | B．satisfied |
| C．forgiving | D．critical |
| A．inform people of the present situation of the Maldives |
| B．expose people’s bad behavior on the islands |
| C．introduce the Maldives to the whole word |
| D．persuade people out of going to the Maldives |
