1 . A measure in the House’s $ 2 trillion economic bill would require states to cut greenhouse gas emissions (排放) promising rewards for transportation departments that post reductions and “consequences” for those that don’t.
Peter A. DeFazio, chairman of the Transportation Committee, said the proposal is designed to push states to act. “We’re going to give them very large motivation to actually make those meaningful targets and deliver on those targets,” he said. According to the proposal, states that cut emissions could get a $ 1 billion pot of money and potentially receive other bonus funding from the federal government. The bill doesn’t spell out potential consequences for not reducing emissions, leaving the decision to national transportation officials. Experts say they could include barriers to accessing highly prized grant funds (拨款).
Much of the attention on cutting emissions from the transport industry-the nation’s largest emitter of greenhouse gases-has focused on the adoption of electric vehicles by putting money in charging factories and supporting battery-powered cars. The new measure sides with environmental advocates who argue the nation can’t battle a changing climate without changing how Americans move around. Environmentalists say the nation’s changing to electric vehicles probably won’t happen quickly enough to limit temperature rises unless Americans can be convinced to drive less, and that would mean building new networks focused on walking, cycling and transit (运输).
Opposition to the emission measure is deep-seated. The heads of five western state transportation departments wrote a letter to Capitol’s committee last month saying the proposal would harm rural areas because options such as heavy-traffic pricing are not well-suited to places which are populated in few people, and it doesn’t make sense to target those state agencies when there are multiple reasons that influence emissions, including fuel economy standards for cars and local decisions about where to build stores and homes.
Kevin DeGood, a transportation researcher, said basic construction shape how people can get around. “It is funny that the state transportation departments suggest in the letter that they do not deeply influence greenhouse gas emissions from the transportation industry,” he said.
1. How does the government provide motivation?| A．By praising. | B．By punishing. |
| C．By financing. | D．By restricting. |
| A．Greatly changed climate. | B．More convenient stores. |
| C．Stable fuel economy standards. | D．Eco-friendly transport system. |
| A．To oppose the emission measure. | B．To introduce solutions to emission. |
| C．To call for attention to rural areas. | D．To list several reasons for emission. |
| A．Supportive. | B．Disapproving. |
| C．Shocked. | D．Confident. |
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3 . Michael Jackson had Bubbles, a chimpanzee(黑猩猩). Justin Bieber had Og Mally, a capuchin(卷尾猴), until it was seized by German customs officials and put in a zoo. Rihanna has been photographed bottle-feeding a baby monkey on holiday. The stars would find few fans in the British government, which on December 12, 2020 placed new restrictions on keeping primates(灵长目动物)as pets. Somewhere between 1,000 and 5,000 marmoserts, lemurs, tamarins and other little species of primates are kept in private ownership in Britain, the government says, often bored to misery.
One of the benefits of cutting loose from the European continent is that Britain can fully express its passion for animals. Politicians are only too happy to work for it, for pet-friendly policies are cheap and popular. In the previous election, the Tory Party promised to help reunite missing pets with their owners by making it compulsory to put chips into the bodies of cats and dogs, and to deal with animal smuggling(走私). The Labour Party promised to ban the live-boiling of lobsters in restaurants.
Yet, Britain’s animal welfare laws are already among the most comprehensive in the world, according to the Animal Protection Index.
Wild animals in traveling circuses were banned by law last year, but a decreasing public appetite for parades of elephants and tigers balanced on chairs had already put an end to the business. By the time the ban came into force, only two licensed animal circuses were left in Britain. Members of Parliament are moved by the sad loss of pets because of motor accidents. James Daly has proposed Gizmo’s Law, named after a cat, the victim of a hit-and-run accident, which was burned without its owner’s knowledge. The law requires that dead animals be brought back from the roadside to scan them for microchips, so that they can be reunited with their brokenhearted owners rather than being burned without their names being known. A draft bill in 2018 proposed criminalizing drivers who failed to stop after striking a cat. Hit-and-runs on dogs, pigs, goats and humans are already illegal.
1. What does the author want to introduce by mentioning the three stars in Paragraph 1?| A．A recent pet-friendly policy in Britain. |
| B．British people’s passion for animals. |
| C．A trend towards keeping primates as pets. |
| D．The present situation of primates in Britain. |
| A．They’re two-faced about animal welfare. |
| B．They disapprove of European animal welfare. |
| C．They used to blame each other on animal welfare. |
| D．They devoted to making laws on animal welfare. |
| A．To track the hit-and-run driver. |
| B．To help the animals find their way home. |
| C．To inform their owners of the accidents. |
| D．To find out the exact locations of the accidents. |
| A．Animal welfare: all you need to know |
| B．Could Britain be a leader in animal welfare? |
| C．Could animal welfare plans be smart politics? |
| D．Animal welfare: a favorite issue for politicians. |
4 . Students to get more sleep
When your alarm clock rings and you drag yourself out of bed, you probably wonder: Why on Earth does school have to start so early?
A law in California, passed on Oct 13, requires that public middle schools begin classes no earlier than 8:00 am and that high schools start no earlier than 8:30 am. The law will go into effect by July 1, 2022. Starting school at 8:00 or 8:30 in the morning may not sound like too big of a change.
“The effect of that one hour is something they will be feeling as 40-year-old adults,” Sumit Bhargava, a sleep expert at Stanford University, told The New York Times.
Some might say that urging students to go to bed earlier could have been a much easier solution than changing the school timetable across an entire state. But according to the American Academy of Sleep Medicine, teenagers go through biological changes when they enter adolescence.
| A．Students can benefit a lot from more sleep. |
| B．Fortunately, there is a new law to back you up. |
| C．Here are some tips to help you solve this problem. |
| D．But it could mean one more hour of sleep for students. |
| E．Regular sleeping schedule is definitely good for students. |
| F．Not having enough sleep can increase the risk of obesity and diabetes. |
| G．It’s difficult for them to fall asleep before 11:00 pm during that period. |
5 . My generation — people born after 1990 — are accustomed to “all-in-platform” life, where we use mobile apps of different platforms to do almost everything in life.
For instance, I ordered a cup of coffee on Monday using an online delivery app. Then, I called a taxi by tapping on the app of a ride-booking service. Next, I bought some necessities on shopping platform Taobao. That done, I moved on to various other online destinations to get my daily fix of music, reading, social networking and so forth.
Platforms now play an increasingly important role in almost all aspects of day-to-day life, not just in economic and political processes. Consumption and social interaction are closely linked to platforms now.
But, I began to get confused recently. I thought I was being treated differently. My friend and I called a taxi at the same time on a ride-hailing platform (打车平台) and found that for the same destination, the prices were different. The price indicated on my phone was higher. One of the potential reasons could have been that I regularly use the ride-hailing platform and have a higher ranking while my friend doesn’t use it that often. So, the ride-hailing platform offers discounts to newbies like her, to attract and have such customers.
China’s latest efforts in regulating monopolistic or improper market behavior are of great significance in protecting consumers’ lawful rights.
“The essence of platform-based monopoly (垄断) is that a large number of users are gathered on only a select few platform companies, leading to uneven data gathering different platforms. But in China some platforms use their own data and traffic (流量) to expand capital in a disorderly way,” said Wang Yong, deputy director of the Institute of Economics at Tinghua University.
Data monopoly also brought another inconvenience for comumers — platforms block links to each other. For instance, link to WeChat Pay of Tencent is not available on Alibuba’s Taobao while there is no Alipay link on JD app’s payment options.
Last year, Meituan was charged with preventing customers from using Alipay as a payment option on Meituan apps and platforms.
In July, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology launched a six-month special rectification (专项治理) for the internet industry, asking platform operators to stop blocking each other’s link.
“More efforts should also be made to strike a good balance between personal information protection and interconnectivity between platforms Companies are being encouraged to further develop data encryption (加密) technology so that the data are available but not visible.”
1. What is the author’s purpose in writing Para.2?| A．To offer some tips on using apps on mobile phone. |
| B．To share his experience with mobile apps. |
| C．To further explain what is “all-in-platform” life. |
| D．To help readers familiarize themselves with mobile apps. |
| A．The author encountered so called “big data price discrimination”. |
| B．The author and his friend were treated differently by taxi drivers. |
| C．Due to the author's higher ranking, the platform offered him a cheaper price. |
| D．The ride-hailing platform offers discounts to regular customers. |
| A．to gather personal information |
| B．to expand capital |
| C．to protect consumers' rights |
| D．to use their data and traffic wisely |
| A．Sympathetic. | B．Approving. |
| C．Critical. | D．Grateful. |
| A．Data monopolies and the inconvenience they bring to mobile app life. |
| B．Mobile apps have greatly changed our lives. |
| C．How to protect personal information on mobile apps. |
| D．Platforms have impacted every aspect of our daily lives. |
6 . We’ve all been there, trying our best to do our bit to help save the planet, when a really essential item that you had to order online arrives in such an unbelievable amount of packaging that it makes you feel like it’s an unprepared game of passing the parcel.
It’s made even worse by the fact that some of the packaging can’t be recycled. In fact, 10 million tonnes of packaging waste are produced in the UK every year. A lot of this ends up in landfill, two-thirds of which could have instead been recovered.
The good news, however, is that how packaging waste is managed is in for a BIG shake-up in line with the “polluter pays principle”. By placing the main point of duty to pay on brand owners, they will be encouraged to choose more sustainable packaging options which are recyclable and reusable as much as possible. Otherwise, they will have to pay higher fees.
This is a system known as Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) — meaning that those who have control over packaging design decisions will be encouraged to do the right thing for the planet at the beginning and consider what happens at the end of the packaging’s life from the start.
What this means is that instead of local authorities picking up the bill for household waste management, companies will have instead to pay for managing your household packaging waste as well as the form businesses, and they will be met with the associated little costs too.
And, as an added bonus, the new EPR laws on packaging will also mean that producers are required to put clear mandatory (强制性的) labelling on packaging, for example, this could be “RECYCLE” or “DO NOT RECYCLE”. Of course, we hope that the “DO NOT RECYCLE” category labelling is the minority. It is aimed that by 2030, 78% of packaging will be recycled in the UK.
1. What can we know from the first two paragraphs?| A．Two-thirds of packaging waste is recycled. |
| B．Over-packaging is often the case in life. |
| C．The quality of goods cannot be guaranteed. |
| D．Online shopping is getting less popular. |
| A．Designers. | B．Producers. | C．Customers. | D．Local authorities. |
| A．Pay higher taxes and recycle the packaging waste. |
| B．Put clear labelling on packaging and promote sales. |
| C．Cut packaging waste and improve packaging recycling. |
| D．Follow the packaging design trend and to right things. |
| A．Their labelling on packaging will be simple and generous. |
| B．The majority of their packaging needn’t be recycled. |
| C．They will be of high quality and inexpensive. |
| D．They’ll arrive in the right amount of recyclable packaging. |
7 . Known as a “living fossil”, the Chinese sturgeon(中华鲟)is a very precious species. It is believed to have lived alongside the dinosaurs more than 140 million years ago. Although dinosaurs are long since gone, the Chinese sturgeon still exists. However, the species has been listed as ‘‘Critically Endangered’’ on the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s Red List of Threatened Species．
On May 14,Shanghai legislators(立法机构)passed a new law protecting the Chinese sturgeon, emphasizing “regional cooperation”, according to China Daily. “This is the first local legislation in the country to protect one endangered fish,” said Ding Wei, director of the legislative affairs committee of the Shanghai Municipal People’s Congress.
Taken effect on June 6, the regulation urges cooperation in law enforcement(实施), scientific research and rescue of the species between Shanghai and other provinces and regions in the Yangtze River basin, according to People’s Daily．
The need for collaborative efforts is due to the living habitat of the Chinese sturgeon. As an anadromous(溯河产卵的)species, it mainly lives in the Yangtze River and depends on the Vangtze estuary(河口)for migration.
The protection of the Chinese sturgeon is urgent. China began the artificial breeding and release of the fish in 1984. However, very few of the fanned fish have survived in the wild, the number of which is less than 1000, according to a report by the Shanghai Observer.
Whether this species can be preserved depends on the natural population. “If the natural population is not well protected, the Chinese sturgeon is in danger of extinction.” Li Furong, vice chairperson of the Agricultural and Rural Affairs Committee of Shanghai Municipal People’s Congress, said in the report.
Since Jan 1 of this year, a 10-year fishing ban on key areas of the Yangtze River basin has been issued, covering 332 nature reserves, which includes Shanghai’s Chinese sturgeon nature reserve．
1. What is the new law passed on May 14 in Shanghai about?| A．Forbidding fishing in the area. |
| B．Protecting the Chinese sturgeon. |
| C．Increasing the reproduction of the Chinese sturgeon. |
| D．Listing the Chinese sturgeon as an endangered species. |
| A．It mainly lives in the waters of Shanghai. |
| B．Artificial breeding technology costs too much. |
| C．Farmed fish multiplies quickly. |
| D．Saving the species depends on protecting their natural population. |
| A．immediate | B．joint | C．urgent | D．further |
| A．The Chinese Sturgeon: Living Fossil |
| B．Artificial Breeding: Future of the Chinese Sturgeon |
| C．A New Law for a Fish |
| D．Call for Conservation of the Chinese Sturgeon |
8 . Are you the only child in your family? If so, do you enjoy it or do you want more siblings（兄弟姐妹）?
On May 31, a key meeting of the Communist Party of China unveiled a policy that would allow all couples to have up to three children.
The move is expected to maximize the population's role in driving economic and social growth, since this is a critical time for China to transform the world's most populous country into a powerhouse（强国）with a quality workforce, according to the National Health Commission.
The three-child policy is also expected to prevent the decline in the nation's birthrate and address the challenge of a rapidly aging population, China Daily reported.
China's annual number of newborns has fallen for four years in a row. The country's total birthrate—the average number of children born to each woman—stood at 1.3 in 2020. The number is below the rate of 2.1 that would maintain a stable population, according to the National Bureau of Statistics.
The declining birthrate has also brought a sharp increase in the proportion of the population aged 60 or above, rising from 10.3 percent to 18.7 percent in the past decade. An increasingly elderly population will increase the cost of labor and the pressure on the social security net. It also means there will be a lack of young labor force. Therefore, it's not good for economic growth, according to Chen Youhua, a professor at Nanjing University.
In fact, the new birth policy is a step to further relax the family planning policy. The one-child policy was introduced in the 1970s and aimed to control the fast-growing population. Then in 2013, China allowed couples to have a second child if either parent was an only child, and in 2016, all couples were allowed to have two children.
However, not all people have shown their support for this latest policy. Many couples complained about the rising costs of raising a child. A netizen named Qinfeng commented, "High cost of education and both the physical and mental exhaustion stopped me from having more than one child." Also, many women are reluctant（不情愿的）to give birth because that could mean sacrificing their career prospects, according to Mu Guangzong, a professor at Peking University.
In that case, Mu noted that it is better to implement supporting measures with the three-child policy, such as more preferential（优惠的）policies for couples that would ease their parental burden.
1. What might NOT be the main cause for the new policy?| A．To increase the population's role. |
| B．To stop the declining birthrate. |
| C．To improve the child- care service system. |
| D．To address the challenge of the aging population. |
| A．China's annual number of newborns has fallen for decades. |
| B．The government will protect the legal rights of women in employment. |
| C．Measures will be taken to improve the high-quality education. |
| D．The new policy allows couples to have up to three children. |
| A．To carry out. | B．To get along with. |
| C．To make use of. | D．To have a command of. |
| A．To show his love of children healthcare. |
| B．To introduce the new family size policy. |
| C．To share his concerns about birthrate. |
| D．To emphasize the physical and mental exhaustion. |
Some American cities are banning drive-through windows at fast—food restaurants. There are two basic reasons for the bans: concern for the environment and the need
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This week, New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy signed a bill banning the use of elephants, tigers and other wild animals in circus, acts,
“These animals belong in their natural habitats, not in performances
