2 . Directions: Fill in each blank with a proper word chosen from the box. Each word can be used only once. Note that there is one word more than you need.

A. heading     B. incredibly     C. adaptable     D. alternative     E. pursuit     F. dumped G. recycled     H. global     I. calculated     J. precisely     K. generated

Planet Plastic

Here’s a shocking statistic. Scientists have calculated the total amount of plastic ever made: 8.3 billion tonnes. Looked at another way, that’s as heavy as 25,000 Empire State Buildings or one billion elephants. And     1    , almost all of it has been made in the last 65 years.

So what’s the problem? Much plastic is in the form of packaging which is used just once and then thrown away. According to a major new study from the University of California, 9% of this is     2    , 12% is burned and 79% goes to landfill. And because most plastic doesn’t biodegrade (生物降解), once it’s in the ground, it stays there.

It’s a situation that has led the paper’s lead author, ecologist Dr. Roland Geyer, to say that we are “rapidly     3     towards ‘Planet Plastic’”. He believes that there’s already enough waste out there to cover the whole of Argentina.

The team behind this report also estimate that eight million tonnes of plastic waste are     4     into the sea every year. This has     5     concern that plastic is entering the food chain through fish and other sea life which consume the smaller pieces.

Of course, the reason why there’s so much plastic around is that it’s an amazingly useful material. We can’t get enough of it. It’s durable and     6    , and is used for everything from yoghurt pots to spaceships. But it’s    7     this quality that makes it a problem. The only way to destroy plastic is to heat or burn it — although this has the side effect of harmful emissions.

So what’s the     8     other than using less plastic? Oceanographer (海洋学家) Dr. Erik van Sebille from Utrecht University says we’re facing a flood of plastic waste, and that the     9     waste industry needs to “get its act together”.

Professor Richard Thompson, a marine biologist from Plymouth University, says it’s poor design that is at fault. He says that if products are currently designed “with recyclability in mind”, they could be recycled around 20 times over.

Dr. Geyer agrees: “The     10     of recycling is to keep material in use and in the cycle forever if you can. But it turns out in our study that actually 90% of that material that did get recycled — which I think we calculated was 600 million tonnes — only got recycled once.”

4 . Directions: Complete the following passage by using the words in the box. Each word can only be used once. Note that there is one word more than you need.

A. constituents 　　　B. ultimately 　　　C. exhausts 　　　D. economical 　　　AB. conventional AC. electricity 　　　AD. approximately 　　　BC. contributes 　　　BD. extent 　　　CD. substances ABC. generates

Driving an electric car     1     to the protection of environment, or so the marketing departments of their makers would have you believe. Yet a report which analyzes car emissions presents a rather different picture. A battery-powered car recharged with     2     generated by coal-fired power stations, it found, is likely to be more harmful. It could cause more than three times as many deaths from pollution as a     3     petrol-driven vehicle.

The study was carried out by the University of Minnesota. The researchers estimated how levels of fine particulate matter (细颗粒物) and ground-level ozone — two important     4     of air pollution — would change when a car is powered by different ways.

It was no surprise that electric cars whose batteries were recharged with power from wind, solar or hydro-electric sources came out to be virtually free from harmful     5    . They were estimated to cause 231 deaths over the course of a year, compared with 878 for petrol cars. Electric cars recharged with power from natural gas-fired stations were also a lot less harmful than petrol-driven ones, with 439 deaths. But if those same electric cars were recharged     6     by coal, they would be responsible for over 3,000 deaths.

Biofuels also caused more health problems than petrol. But diesel, which often     7     concern about pollution, is slightly cleaner than petrol. This is because the study assumes for all cars that emission-control technologies will be more widely used, especially particulate filters which have a remarkable effect on cleaning diesel     8    . Diesel cars are also more     9     of fuel than petrol-driven ones.

Overall, the study shows that electric cars are cleaner than those traditional vehicles only if the power used to charge then is also clean. That is hardly a surprise, but the     10     of the difference is. How green electric cars really are, then, will depend mainly on where they are driven. In France, which obtains more than half of its power from nuclear station, electric cars look like a good bet. In China and some other developing countries, where a large amount of electricity is produced from coal, they may not be so environment- friendly as they are marketed.