Every time you go to the supermarket you come away with your purchases packed in plastic bags. But wouldn’t it be kinder to the environment if you asked for paper bags instead?
The answer is not as easy as it might seem. Environmentalists say there are drawbacks to using both plastic bags and paper bags.
80 percent of groceries in the US are packed in plastic bags and the numbers are becoming huge. Consumers use between 500 billion and 1 trillion plastic bags per year worldwide.
Some experts believe that all these bags harm the environment. Plastic takes hundreds of years to break down and, as it does so, poisonous materials are released into the water and soil.
Further damage is caused if plastic bags enter the sea. For example, endangered sea turtles cannot tell the bags from jellyfish, their main source of food, and often choke on them.
However, this kind of bag does have its advantages.
Paper bags use more energy and create more waste than plastic bags. Plastic bags require 40 percent less energy to produce and cause 70 percent less air pollution. They also release as much as 94 percent less waste into the water than paper ones do.
But paper bags do break down more quickly than plastic bags. They don’t endanger wildlife, either.
So what should we do? One possible solution would be to use biodegradable plastic bags. “Biodegradable” means that the bags break down naturally just like a piece of banana peel when it is left outside.
But until biodegradable technology improves, it might be easier to pack things you buy in reusable cloth bags.
1.Compared to paper bags, plastic bags ______.
A. produce 6 percent more waste
B. can be made biodegradable more easily
C. can be used as a source of food
D. save 40 percent of the energy
2.By saying “The answer is not as easy as it might seem,” (in paragraph 2) the writer means _____.
A. biodegradable plastic bags can compete with paper
B. paper bags seem to be kind to environment
C. it’s difficult to say whether plastic or paper bags are better for the environment
3.What does the author suggest people use at the present time?
A. Paper bags
B. Plastic bags
C. Biodegradable plastic bags.
D. Cloth bags.
Without proper planning, tourism can cause problems. For example, too many tourists can crowd public places that are also enjoyed by the inhabitants of a country. If tourists create too much traffic, the inhabitants become annoyed and unhappy. They begin to dislike tourists and to treat them impolitely. They forget how much tourism can help the country and how tourism affects them. Tourism should help a country keep the customs and beauty that attract tourists. Tourism should also advance the well-being (health and happiness) of local inhabitants.
Too much tourism can be a problem. If tourism grows too quickly, people must leave other jobs to work in the tourism industry. This means that other parts of the country’s economy can suffer.
On the other hand, if there is not enough tourism, people can lose jobs. Businesses can also lose money. It costs a great deal of money to build large hotels, airports, air terminals, first-class roads, and other support facilities needed by tourist attractions. For example, a major international-class tourism hotel can cost as much as 50 thousand dollars per room to build. If this room is not used most of the time, the owners of the hotel lose money.
Building a hotel is just a beginning. There must be many support facilities as well, including roads to get to the hotel, electricity, sewers（阴沟） to handle waste, arid water. All of these support facilities cost money. If they are not used because there are not enough tourists, jobs and money are lost.
1.Which of the following has most probably been discussed in the paragraph that goes before the passage?
A. It is extremely important to develop tourism.
B. Building roads and hotels is essential.
C. Support facilities are highly necessary.
D. Planning is of great importance to tourism.
2.Too much tourism can cause all these problems EXCEPT ______.
A. a bad impact on other industries
B. A change of tourists’ customs
C. overcrowdedness of places of interest
3.It is good for local people to be well aware that tourism will _____.
A. use up a large amount of water
B. weaken their economy
C. help establish their traditions
D. help improve their life
What I like to advise people is to find out what it is that makes them happy. What do you love to do? If you truly love what you do just go ahead and try to make a living by doing it. People will throw money at you to do it. But you will always have to work hard at it. I have to draw every single day of my life. I have to draw about 20 ideas. My advice is to put aside a certain amount of time every day and make you draw or whatever, especially when you don’t feel like it. Only in this way will you be able to perfect your talent.
The first step you take is to go to your local library and ask for the publications issued in the current years. When you get these publications, try to find the names of the top people concerned and their presidents. After you find these, write down their names and addresses. Keep this list and update it every year. Next thing you want to do is to create at least 40 cartoons. Get a grid（格子） from one of the strips in the newspapers, enlarge it to whatever size you wish and draw inside this grid. Now take the best 20 of your ideas and make them into finished pieces. To do this, you would want to copy them in ink because if you were a professional cartoonist, that was what you should do. Now you can reduce the size of the finished cartoons to fit onto a regular comic’s page. By comparing yours with the others already in print, it gives you a good idea of clarity to your cartoon.
The next step is to write letters to presidents of the publication. In the letters, explain who you think would read your work, or in other words, what group do you think you would target. After you complete these, send all of your information enclosed with letters in the appropriate envelope.
Now as soon as you send out these letters, start to create a brand new strip with all new characters. Don’t get married to one idea because if your idea gets turned down then you will give up. And always remember. If you receive a rejection from any of them, keep in mind that you are working on something better. You will be working on something new and more exciting and the rejection letter will not have any impact. With this in mind…
1.What is the advice from the writer in the first paragraph when you want to succeed in your life?
A. Stop doing anything until you find something quite suitable for your future career.
B. Put aside a certain amount of time every day to consider how to make a living.
C. Make a living by something that you truly like to do as your profession and work hard at it.
D. Perfect your talent only by drawing some cartoons.
2.The purpose of writing a letter to the president was to ____.
A. get some money to support the later career
B. enclose the information on how to become cartoonists with the letter
C. focus his attention on the work
D. explain who would be the readers of the work
3.The underlined phrase “get married to one idea” in the last paragraph probably refers to ______.
A. having a strong desire to get married
B. fixing all attention on one idea
C. marrying someone is a good ideas
D. refusing one idea to get married
We all laugh. We all hurt. We all make mistakes. We all dream, that’s life. It’s a journey. Please follow these rules to make the journey of your life a journey of joy!
positive through the cold season could be your best against getting ill, new study findings suggest.
In an experiment that healthy volunteers to a cold or flu virus, researchers found that people with a sunny characteristic were less likely to ill. The findings, published in the journal Psychosomatic Medicine, build on evidence that a “positive emotional style” can help the common cold and other illnesses.
Researchers believe the reasons may be both objective as in happiness increasing immune(免疫的) function and subjective as in happy people being less by a scratchy throat or runny nose. “People with a positive emotional style may have different immune to the virus,” explained the lead study author Dr Sheldon Cohen of Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. “And when they do get a cold, they may their illness as being less severe.”
Cohen and his colleagues had found in a study that happier people seemed less likely to catch a cold, but some questions remained as to whether the emotional tendency itself had the effect.
For the new study, the researchers had 193 healthy adults with complete standard measures of personality tendency, health-consciousness and emotional “style”. Those who be happy, energetic and easy-going were judged as having a positive emotional style, those who were often unhappy, tense and unfriendly had a negative style. The researchers gave them drops through their noses either a cold virus or a particular flu virus. Over the next six days, the reported on any aches, pains, sneezing they had, while the researchers collected data, like daily mucus(黏液) production. Cohen and his colleagues found that based on objective measures of nasal woes(鼻部的不适), happy people were less likely to develop a cold.
【小题】A. Living B. Staying C. Pulling D. Surviving
【小题】A. safeguard B. opportunity C. caution D. defense
【小题】A. excluded B. explored C. exposed D. escaped
【小题】A. generally B. commonly C. frequently D. perfectly
【小题】A. change B. fall C. turn D. remain
【小题】A. keep B. avoid C. deny D. remove
【小题】A. suffered B. troubled C. disturbed D. hinted
【小题】A. function B. ability C. response D. action
【小题】A. think B. relate C. interpret D. translate
【小题】A. formal B. current C. previous D. precious
【小题】A. tended to B. opposed to C. used to D. stuck to
【小题】A. while B. however C. what’s more D. therefore
【小题】A. implying B. matching C. containing D. occupying
【小题】A. patients B. adults C. volunteers D. researchers
【小题】A. objective B. impressive C. positive D. effective
She is not going to buy the sofa because it _____ too much room in the living room.
A. takes away B. takes on
C. takes down D. takes up
The businessperson wanted to sell his goods fast: ______, he chose his partner with great care.
A. and B. otherwise
C. however D. therefore
