1 . 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: After reading the passage below, fill in each blank with a proper word given in the box. Each word can be used only once. Note that there is one more word than you need.

A. cause     B. regulated   C. complex   D. exposing   E. deliberately   F. recorded G. locating   H. particularly   I. different   J. efficiency   K. caution

Noise Pollution Rules Should Be Tightened

Road traffic, aircraft, ships, factories and oil drilling are all human activities that produce noise. The noise should be better     1     to protect wildlife, say the authors of a study     2     how sound pollution affects creatures from fish to birds.

Studies have found noise pollution to be linked to poorer human health. But experts say it can also affect wildlife, from preventing their communication to affecting the     3     with which they search for food. “For example, if bats     4     their prey through sound clues can’t hear clearly,” said Dr Hansjoerg Kunc, the co-author of the research, “they have to fly longer and invest more time and energy to find food.”

The studies were based on experiments in which     5     aspects of the animals’ behaviour or other measures, such as changes in hormone (荷尔蒙) levels, were     6     before and after exposure to noise. The results reveal that human-produced noise affects a wide range of species. “Thus, the response to noise can be explained by most species responding to noise rather than a few species being     7     sensitive to noise,” the authors wrote.

The team continued to     8     that their research did not examine whether the effects were beneficial or harmful to species. That was because such considerations were     9    . For example, noise that affects hunting could benefit prey while creating difficulties for predators (食肉动物).

“Even if some animals benefitted, it did not mean noise should not be dealt with, since the majority would still experience negative effects”, said Kunc. But there was     10     for optimism. “Unlike chemical pollution, if a noise source moves away, then nothing stays in the environment any more,” he said.

5 . 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.

Mentally and Intellectually Harmful

Last month, the Indian Medical Association declared a public health emergency in New Delhi because of high levels of air pollution. Schools were shut and emergency traffic restrictions put in place.

New Delhi is far from alone. Our research into the    1     of air pollution in China shows that, in addition to the more obvious physical price, air pollution can also have serious negative effects on mental health and cognition (认知),    2     reducing a person’s happiness and their scores in verbal and mathematical tests.

Such harmful mental effects have serious negative consequences for livelihoods and human capital development, suggesting that development    3     should go beyond the traditional focus of boosting GDP in the developing world.

India's recent pollution emergency is the most    4     incidence(发生率)of dangerous air pollution, but smoggy skies have been a cause of growing    5     in most developing countries.

Major cities across the developing world---from Thailand to Brazil, to Nigeria---    6     experience pollution at several times the WHO safe limits. In fact, 98% of cities with more than 100.000    7     in low and middle-income countries fail to meet the WHO’s air quality guidelines.

India’s extreme levels of air pollution are well recognized, and examining the effects provides clear warnings for other countries seeking fast growth through rapid industrialization.

We used nationally     8     longitudinal (纵向)surveys on mental health and cognition, matched with daily air quality data for the time and place of interviews, to see what pollution does in a given time to individual happiness and cognitive performance. Because each person in our survey was     9    multiple times, we can control for the effect of individual characteristics on the outcome variables.

We found that worsening air quality led to a decrease in happiness that day    10    to about 10 percent of the reduced happiness one would experience form a negative major life event such as divorce.

6 . 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. infections     B. factors                 C. particularly          D. separate          E. seriously        F. passive G. mixtures          H. significantly   I. present                       J. negative            K. exposed

Air pollution triggers (引发)more heart attacks than using cocaine and poses as high a risk of sparking a heart attack as alcohol, coffee and physical exertion, scientists said on Thursday. Anger, marijuana (大麻)use and chest or respiratory (与呼吸有关的)     1     can also trigger heart attacks to different extents, the researchers said, but air pollution,       2     in heavy traffic, is the major cause.

The findings, published in The Lancet journal, suggest population-wide       3     like polluted air should be taken more       4     when looking at heart risks, and should be put into context besides higher but relatively rarer risks like drug use. Tim Nawrot of Hasselt University in Belgium, who led the study, said he hoped his findings would also encourage doctors to think more often about population level risks.

Nawrot’s team combined data from thirty-six       5     studies and calculated the relative risk posed by a series of heart attack triggers and their population-attributable fraction (PAF)—in other words the proportion of total heart attacks estimated to have been caused by each trigger. “Of the triggers for heart attack studied, cocaine is the most likely to trigger an event in an individual, but traffic has the greatest population effect as more people are       6     to it,” the researchers wrote. “PAFs give a measure of how much disease would be avoided if the risk was no longer       7    . ”

A report published late last year found that air pollution in many major cities in Asia exceeds the WHO’s air quality guidelines and that poisonous       8     of pollutants result in more than 530,000 earlier deaths a year. While       9     smoking was not included in this study, Nawrot said the effects of secondhand smoke were likely to be similar to that of outdoor air pollution, and noted previous research found that bans on smoking in public places have       10     reduced heart attack rates.