At first sight, you would think the collection of hundreds of colored shards（碎片）could be a work of abstract art. But the objects are the contents of the stomach of a sea turtle that lost its battle with plastic pollution.
Environmentalists examined the stomach of the turtle found off the coast of Argentina. What they found is the symptom of the increasing threat to sea turtles from a human addiction to plastic.
Sea turtles often mistake plastic items for jellyfish or other food. Ingesting（摄取）ocean pollution can cause a digestive blockage and internal cuts. The result can be dangerous, followed by death.
Humans produce 260 million tons of plastic a year. When those products are pulled into the sea’s currents, the plastics are just broken into smaller pieces which are consumed by marine life at the bottom of the food chain. An examination of a green turtle found off Florida discovered that, over the course of a month, the animal’s faeces（粪便）had contained 74 foreign objects, including “four types of balloons, different types of hard plastic, a piece of carpet--like material and two 2--4 mm tar balls.”
“The oceans have become a giant refuse bin for all manner of plastics. All sea turtle species may be seriously harmed, “according to the biologists Colette Wabnitz, from the University of British Columbia. ”The symptom of this growing crisis can be seen inside and on sea turtles as well as their oceanic and terrestrial habitats. It is urgently necessary to directly confront the source of plastic pollution, redesign packaging and rethink the very idea of ‘throwaway culture’.”
Almost all marine species, from plankton to whales, have ingested plastic. But, even in small quantities, plastic can kill sea turtles, the biologists said.
Fifty out of 92 turtles found dead, stranded on the shorelines of Rio Grande do Sul state in Brazil, had ingested a “considerable amount of man-made debris”.What’s tile passage mainly about?
| A．How to prevent the sea turtle from plastic. |
| B．Why plastic is dangerous to the sea turtle. |
| C．Protecting the sea turtle from being polluted. |
| D．Sea turtles suffering from plastic pollution. |
The author mentions the “throwaway culture” probably in a（n） _________ tone.
| A．praising | B．positive | C．ironic | D．comedic |
The underlined word in the last paragraph probably means _________.
| A．a kind of food | B．a kind of fish |
| C．pieces of cloth | D．pieces of rubbish |
The paragraph following the last one will probably talk about ________.
| A．the way the biologists examined the sea turtle |
| B．some tips on how to make sea turtles avoid plastic |
| C．how to prevent plastic pollution |
| D．the reason why we should protect the sea turtle |
No budget for your vacation? Try home exchanges ---- swapping houses with strangers. Agree to use each other’s cars, and you can save dollars on car rentals (租赁费), too.
Home exchanges are not new. At least one group, Intervac, has been facilitating such an arrangement since 1953. But trading online is gaining popularity these days, with several sites in operation, including Home Exchanges. Founded in 1992, with some 28,000 listings, this company bills itself as the world’s largest home exchange club, reporting that membership has increased 30% this year.
The annual fee is usually less than US$100. Members can access thousands of listings for apartments, villas, suburban homes and farms around the world. Initial contact is made via e-mail, with subsequent communication usually by phone. Before a match is made, potential swappers tend to discuss a lot.
However, the concept may sound risky to some people. What about theft? Damage? These are reasonable causes for concern, but equally unlikely. As one swapper puts it, “Nobody is going to fly across the ocean or drive 600 miles to come steal your TV. Besides, at the same time they’re staying in your home, you are staying in their home.”
Exchange sites recommend that swappers discuss such matters ahead of time. They may fill out an agreement spelling out who shoulders which responsibilities if a problem arises. It does not matter if the agreement would hold up in court, but it does give the exchangers a little satisfaction.
Generally, the biggest complaint among home exchangers has to do with different standards of cleanliness. Swappers are supposed to make sure their home is in order before they depart, but one person’s idea of “clean” may be more forgiving than another’s. Some owners say if they come back to a less-than-sparkling kitchen, it may be inconvenient but would not sour them on future exchanges.What is the second paragraph mainly about?
| A．How to exchange homes. |
| B．The biggest home exchange agency Intervac. |
| C．The fact that home exchanges are not new. |
| D．A contrast between Intervac and Home Exchanges. |
How do home exchangers normally begin their communication?
| A．By phone. | B．Via a matchmaker. |
| C．By e-mail. | D．Via a face-to-face meeting. |
What is recommended in the passage to deal with the concerns about theft and damage?
| A．One can file a lawsuit in court. |
| B．Both parties can trade online. |
| C．One can damage the home of the other party in return. |
| D．Both parties can sign an agreement beforehand. |
A sixth of undergraduates in Beijing this year have registered at driving school. The students, mostly from majors such as business management or international trade, will finish their driving courses within 20 days or so.
Training costs have dropped to 2, 600 yuan for students, according to the Haidian Driving School in Beijing. The price is not really low, but students will accept it, seeing it as an investment （投资）in their future. Familiarity with the operation of computers and fluent English are the basic skills graduating students need to find a job. But a driver’s permit has become another factor.
“In the job market, owning a driver’s permit sometimes strengthens a graduating student’s competitiveness for a good position, ”says Zhou Yang, an undergraduate at the China University of Political Science and Law.
Cars will become a necessary part of many people’s lives in the coming years, and it is difficult to get a permit out of campus because of the pressures on working people’s time. “Having a fulltime job after graduation offers limited time to learn to drive. We senior students have plenty of spare time, plenty of opportunity to learn. ”Zhou says.
Xu Jian, an official at the driving school, said undergraduates were very able and serious, and could grasp in an hour what ordinary people took four hours to learn. In this driving school, middle-aged people, young women and college students are the main customers.
To get a driver’s permit, a beginner is now required to have at least 86 hours’ practice before the final road test.The undergraduates are learning to drive because ________.
| A．they like to drive cars |
| B．they need this skill to find a good job |
| C．they will not have any time to learn to drive after they have found a full-time job |
| D．most of them will be able to buy cars in the future |
Which of the following is likely to be Xu Jian’s opinion of students learning to drive?
| A．It is better to learn it at college than at work. |
| B．Young people have an advantage in learning to drive. |
| C．It is a waste of money and time to learn to drive. |
| D．They will spend three times more time to learn to drive than usual. |
Which of the following can be the best headline for the passage?
| A．Students Learn to Drive. |
| B．Students Pay Less to Learn to Drive Now. |
| C．It is Better to Learn to Drive at Colleges. |
| D．Welcome to the Driving School. |
The Queen’s English is now sounding less upper-class, a scientific study of the Queen’s Christmas broadcasts has found. Researchers have studied each of her messages to the Commonwealth countries since 1952 to find out the change in her pronunciation from the noble Upper Received to the Standard Received.
Jonathan Harrington, a professor at Germany’s University of Munich, wanted to discover whether accent changes recorded over the past half century would take place within one person. “As far as I know, there just is nobody else for whom there is this sort of broadcast records,” he said.
He said the noble way of pronouncing vowels(元音) had gradually lost ground as the noble upper-class accent over the past years. “Her accent sounds slightly less noble than it did 50 years ago. But these are very, very small and slow changes that we don’t notice from year to year.”
“We may be able to relate it to changes in the social classes,” he told The Daily Telegraph, a British newspaper. “In 1952 she would have been heard saying ‘thet men in the bleck het’. Now it would be ‘that man in the black hat’. Similarly, she would have spoken of ‘the citay’ and’dutay’, rather than ‘citee’ and ‘dutee’, and ‘hame’ rather than ‘home’. In the 1950s she would have been ‘lorst’, but by the 1970s ‘lost’.”
The Queen’s broadcast is a personal message to the Commonwealth countries. Each Christmas, the 10-minute broadcast is put on TV at 3 pm in Britain as many families are recovering from their traditional turkey lunch(传统火鸡午餐).
The results were published(发表) in the Journal of Phonetics.The Queen’s broadcasts were chosen for the study mainly because .
| A．she has been Queen for many years |
| B．she has a less upper-class accent now |
| C．her speeches have been recorded for 50 years |
| D．her speeches are familiar to many people |
Which of the following is an example of a less noble accent in English?
| A．“Dutay”. | B． “Hame”. | C．“Citee”. | D．“Lorst”. |
We may infer from the text that the Journal of Phonetics is a magazine on .
| A．Christmas customs | B．speech sounds |
| C．TV broadcasting | D．personal messages |
What is the text mainly about?
| A．The changes in a person’s accent. |
| B．The Queen’s Christmas speeches on TV. |
| C．The relationship between accents and social classes. |
| D．The recent development of the English language. |
Black Box
You never see them, but they're with you every time you fly. They record where you're going,how fast you're traveling and whether everything on your airplane is functioning normally. Their ability to resist almost any disaster makes them seem like something out of a comic (漫画) book.They're known as the black box.
When planes fall from the sky, as a Yemeni airliner did on its way to the Comoros Islands in the Indian Ocean on June 30, 2009, the black box is the best method for identifying what went wrong. So when a French submarine(潜水艇) discovered its homing signal five days later, it marked a huge step toward determining the cause of the disaster in which 152 passengers were killed.
In 1958. Australian scientist David Warren developed a flight-memory recorder that would track basic information like altitude and direction. That was the first model for a black box, which became a requirement on all US commercial flights by 1960. Early models often failed to resist crashes, however, so in 1965 it was completely redesigned. That same year, the Federal Aviation Authority required that the boxes, which were never actually black, be painted orange or yellow to be easier to see.
Modem airplanes have two black boxes: a voice recorder, which tracks pilots' conversations, and a flight-data recorder, which monitors fuel levels, engine noises and other operating functions that help experts reconstruct the aircraft's final moments. The boxes can resist powerful force and temperatures up t0 2,OOOoF. They're also able to send out signals from depths of 20,000 ft. Experts believe the boxes from Air France Flight 447 , which crashed near Brazil on June 1 , 2009 , are in water nearly that deep, but statistics say they're still likely to turn up. In the approximately 20 deep-sea crashes over the past 30 years, only one plane's black boxes were never recovered.What can we leam about the black box from the passage?
| A．It helps an airplane function normally. |
| B．Its ability to avoid disasters is amazing. |
| C．It is necessary equipment on an airplane. |
| D．The idea for its design comes from a comic book. |
From the black box on the Yemeni airliner we can get information about _____.
| A．the scene of the crash and the damage |
| B．data for analyzing the cause of the crash |
| C．the total number of passengers on board |
| D．homing signals sent by the pilot before the crash |
The Federal Aviation Authority required the black boxes be painted orange or yellow to
| A．make them easily identified |
| B．meet the international standards |
| C．caution people to handle them with care |
| D．distinguish them from the color of the plane |
What do we know about the black boxes from Air France Flight 447?
| A．They have stopped sending homing signals. |
| B．They were destroyed somewhere near Brazil. |
| C．There is an urgent need for them to be restructured. |
| D．There is still a good chance of their being recovered. |
Baekeland and Hartmann report that the " short sleepers" had been more or less average in their sleep needs until the men were in their teens. But at about age 15 0r so, the men voluntarily began cutting down their nightly sleep time because of pressures from school, work, and other activities. These men tended to regard their nightly periods of unconsciousness as bothersome interruptions in their daily routines.
In general, these "short sleepers" appeared ambitious, active, energetic and cheerful. They stuck to their opinions, and were very sure about their job choices..They often held several jobs at once, or worked full-or part-time while going to school. And many of them had a strong urge to appear "normal" or " acceptable" to their friends and colleagues.
When asked to remember their dreams, the " short sleepers" did poorly. More than this, they seemed to prefer not remembering. Similarly, their usual way of dealing with psychological problems was not to admit that the problem existed, and then to keep busy in the hope that the trouble would go away.
The sleep patterns of the " short sleepers" were similar to, but less extreme than, sleep patterns shown by many mental patients categorized as manic (躁狂者).
The "long sleepers" were quite different indeed. Baekeland and Hanmann report that these young men have been lengthy sleepers since childhood. They seemed to enjoy their sleep, protected it, and were quite concemed when sometimes they didn't have their desired 9 hours of nightly bed rest. They tended to remember their dreams much better than the " short sleepers". Many of the "long sleepers" were shy, anxious, quiet, nervous, passive, mildly depressed, and unsure of themselves ( particularly in social situations) . Several openly stated that sleep was an escape from their daily problems.From the passage, we can leam that .
| A．"short sleepers" need less sleep by nature |
| B．"long sleepers" sleep a longer period of time during the day |
| C．many "long sleepers" preserve their sleeping habit formed during their childhood |
| D．many " short sleepers" have to reduce their nightly sleep time because of busy work |
Many "short sleepers" are likely to hold the view that _____.
| A．sleep is a good way to escape from the reality |
| B．sleep is not so important as their daily activities |
| C．sleep affects their judgment on some important things |
| D．sleep is the best way to deal with psychological troubles |
It can be learned from the passage that the"short sleepers" _____.
| A．do not know how to relax properly |
| B．are more unlikely to run into mental problems |
| C．are full of energy even under the pressures of life |
| D．often pay little attention to the consequences of inadequate sleep |
When sometimes they cannot enjoy adequate sleep, the "long sleepers" might ______.
| A．appear disturbed | B．become energetic |
| C．feel dissatisfied | D．be extremely unhappy |