It"s time to be water efficient! As populations increase across Australia and t
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It"s time to be water efficient!
As populations increase across Australia and the rest of the world, demand for water will also increase. If we don’t reduce each individual’s demand for water (both directly and through embodied water) the water situation will become dire.
It is obvious that we cannot increase demands for water much more without detrimental(有害的) effects to the environment, society and the economy.
It’s all too easy to blame someone else for the water situation –“if 70% of water is used for agriculture then that’s what we should target” – but it’s not that easy. We all depend on the food and resources that agriculture provides, and while there are definitely opportunities to increase water efficiency on the farm, the solution will take more than that.
We each share responsibility for the sustainable management of our water resources, which means using less water at home, in the workplace, at school, on holidays, on the farm, … everyone, everywhere, every time.
It"s time to become water efficient! This involves reassessing our relationship with water, and learning to use it more sparingly. On the most basic level, it requires a behavioural（行动的） change, and assigning a value to water that truly reflects its worth.
We can also unlock economic benefits of being water efficient. There are many real world examples given in the case studies on this site.
Everybody has a responsibility to save water, if future generations are to enjoy a similar standard of living to the one we enjoy now. In fact, many of the impacts associated with water use are likely to have an effect on our own lives!
www.savewater.com.au has been designed to help you respond to the challenge to become water efficient. It acts as a central repository for relevant information and further advice, so that you can actually achieve significant savings. It also showcases those companies with products that will assist you in your goal.
小题1:Can you infer where this passage is from? | A．newspaper | B．TV programme | C．Radio broadcast | D．Internet |
小题2:What can we do to save water? | A．find more water resources | | B．use less water everywhere, every time | | C．realize the importance of saving water | | D．unlock economic benefits of being water efficient |
小题3:What is not the reason to save water?| A．There are more and more people in the world. | | B．The water resources are limited. | | C．Agriculture needs more water. | | D．The water is very important for us. |
小题4:What is the main idea of this passage? | A．Water is very important for the human. | | B．Everybody has a responsibility to save water. | | C．It"s time to be water efficient. | | D．Let’s save water for our future generations. |
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答案
小题1:D
小题2:B
小题3:C
小题4:C |
解析
小题1:文章后数第三段提到“在这个网站上有许多真实的世界研究案例”。
小题2:文章中间说到我们每个人都有责任节约用水，无论何时何地，要减少用水。
小题3:文章说到农业用水量大，没有办法减少，我们的食物要靠农业来提供；但并没有说农业用水在不断增加。
小题4:文章中两次提到 “It"s time to be water efficient”也分析了节水的原因和重要性，又提供了可供参考的有价值的网站。 |
举一反三
Dogs may help save the day in the Philippines, as they use their noses to smell out survivors buried by Friday’s mudslide(泥石流). The team of dogs arrived in the Philippines from Spain, and this Tuesday they were just beginning their work. Search officials told CNN they hope the recent rain will wash away the smell of rescue teams so the dogs can do their job more accurately.
The dogs were brought in after sound equipment found sounds coming from deep inside the ruins, at a place where a school stood before the mudslide covered it. The sounds could mean people are still alive under all the mud or it could just be the earth resettling.
On Monday, rescue workers worked at the school site until three in the morning, trying to locate survivors, and they will begin digging again as soon as the dogs think they find someone.
Human teams from the US, Malaysia, and Australia are all trying to help, too. But so far they have yet to locate any survivors. Rescue workers told CNN that an earlier report that 50 survivors had been found was false.
How did all that mud bury the village in the first place? On Friday, 2,400-foot Mt Kanabag turned into a mudslide after two weeks of constant rain weakened it. The mountain crumbled and the mud fell onto the village Guinsaugon, burying the 1,800 people who lived there . Out of the 300 houses in the village, only 3 were not covered by the mud . The village is on a southern Philippine Island called Levte. Rescue efforts have been difficult because the village takes six hours to reach from the nearest airport. Hopefully, the dogs can help their human friends find survivors.
小题1:According to the search officials’ words in the first paragraph, we can learn that_________| A．the smell of rescue teams can disturb the dogs | | B．the dogs can follow the smell of rescue teams | | C．the gods can’t smell the rescue teams | | D．the dogs can tell the differences between people and rescue teams |
小题2: The main purpose of this passage is probably_______.| A．to show the way to rescue the victims in the ruins | | B．to introduce the instruments to save victims in a disaster | | C．to tell readers that dogs can smell out victims buried in the ruins | | D．to show how to train dogs to save victims in a mudslide |
小题3:How many survivors were found by the dogs?| A．50. | B．Only a few. | C．1,800. | D．None. |
小题4:The reason why the rescue work wasn’t going smoothly was probably that_______.| A．the rain was heavy | | B．so many people were buried | | C．it was difficult to reach the village | | D．these is little chance to save the survivors |
小题5:The underlined word “crumbled” in the last paragraph can be replaced by______.| A．broke | B．shook | C．fell | D．moved |
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Why did humans evolve to walk upright? Perhaps because it’s just plain easier. Make that “energetically less costly”, scientifically speaking.
Bipedalism—walking on two feet, is one of the defining characteristics of being humans, and scientists have debated for years how it came about. In the latest attempt to find an explanation, researchers trained five chimps(黑猩猩)to walk on a treadmill(跑步机)while wearing masks that allowed measurement of their oxygen consumption. The chimps were measured both while walking upright and while moving on their legs and knuckles(膝关节).That measurement of the energy needed to move around was compared with similar tests on humans and the results are published in this week’s online edition of “Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences”.
It turns out that humans walking on two legs use only one-quarter of the energy that chimps use while knucklewalking on four limbs(肢).And the chimps, on average, use as much energy using two legs as they did when they used all four limbs.
However, there were differences among chimps in how much energy they used, and this difference corresponded to their different manner of walking and anatomy(解剖构造).One of the chimps used less energy on two legs, one used about the same and the others used more, said David Raichlen, assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Arizona.
“What we were surprised at was the variation(变异) ”, he said in a telephone interview. Interview. “That was pretty exciting, because when you talk about how evolution works, variation is the bottom line, without variation there is no evolution.”
Walking on two legs freed our arms, opening the door to drive the world, said Raichlen. “We think about the evolution of bipedalism as one of first events that led hominids(原始人)down the path to being humans.”
The research was supported by the National Science Foundation and the L.S.B.Leakey Foundation.
小题1: The underlined word “Bipedalism” in Paragraph 2 probably means____.| A．moving sideways | B．walking upright | | C．walking on four legs | D．running fast |
小题2:We can infer from the passage that____.| A．scientists have no idea on how humans’ walking on two legs came about | | B．scientists have had different views on why chimps walk on four legs | | C．scientists have had different views on how humans’ walking on two legs vame about | | D．scientists have had similar views on how humans’ walking on two legs came about |
小题3:What is Paragraph 4 mainly about?| A．How chimps saved energy. | | B．Why chimps didn"t walk on two legs. | | C．David Raichlen studied chimps. | | D．Different chimps consumed different energy. |
小题4: According to the passage, humans walk upright in order to____.| A．conserve energy | B．differ from other animals | | C．free their brains | D．strengthen their legs |
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Jurassic Park could become a reality with dinosaurs making a comeback after a discovery last week. Scientists found remains of a dinosaur’s blood vessels（血管）and cells .In theory, DNA from these cells could be used to clone the longdead dinosaur.
A team from North Carolina State University found the remains in a fossil(化石)of the leg bone of a Tyrannosaurus rex（暴龙）in Montana, US.
The last dinosaurs on Earth died some 65 million years ago, but they left bits of themselves behind wherever they lived. Around the world ,dug-up bones and fossils have given scientists many ideas about what the animals were like.
Preserved by minerals, the newly discovered leg bone was hard. So the scientists used a liquid to dissolve（溶解）the minerals. A week later, the remaining material was soft and stretchy（有弹性的）,which surprised the researchers.
Some of the materials appeared to be a network of blood vessels. Out of these, the researchers were able to squeeze(挤出)tiny , round, dark-red and deep-brown structures that seemed to be ancient blood cells.
Scientists are overjoyed by this discovery because most fossils come from hard body parts, like bones and shells, which last a long time. Soft tissues, like skin, muscle, and organs are very hard to find because they tend to break down more quickly.
Scientists think that the new discovery will help them to better understand how fossils form. Future finds should also help flesh out how the dinosaurs lived.
They were also very excited by the possibility of having some dinosaur DNA.From that scientists could create a real life “Jurassic Park”.
In the Hollywood movie, scientists reproduced dinosaurs from the DNA they found in a mosquito fossil and disaster soon followed.
小题1:Scientists are excited _________________________ .| A．because they have got dinosaur DNA | | B．about making a movie called “Jurassic Park” | | C．because they found the liquid to dissolve fossils | | D．because it,s very hard to find soft tissues in fossils |
小题2: The latest discovery can tell us .| A．what the animals were like | B．how fossils form | | C．how the dinosaur lived | D．how to get dinosaur DNA |
小题3:What does the underlined phrase“flesh out”mean in the article?| A．add more details or information to | B．take more photos of | | C．make the public know more about | D．find the answer to |
小题4:Why is the latest discovery very important?| A．It could make it possible to make dinosaurs return to the former position. | | B．It could throw light on how dinosaurs lived many years ago. | | C．It could prove what dinosaurs were like. | | D．It could explain why dinosaurs died some 65 million years ago. |
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It"s not a new phenomenon, but have you noticed how many nouns are being used as verbs? We all use them, often without noticing what we"re doing.
I was arranging to meet someone for dinner last week, and I said “I’ll pencil it in my diary”, and my friend said “You can ink it in”, meaning that it was a firm arrangement not a tentative one!
Many of these new verbs are linked to new technology. An obvious example is the word fax, which is a shortening of facsimile originally, an exact copy of a book or document. We all got used to sending and receiving faxes, and then soon started talking about faxing something and promising we"d fax it immediately. So, nouns turn into verbs in two easy stages. Then along came email, and we were soon all emailing each other madly. How did we do without it? I can hardly imagine life without my daily emails.
Email reminds me, of course， of my computer and its software, which has produced another couple of new verbs. On my computer I can bookmark those pages from the World Wide Web that I think I"ll want to look at again, thus saving all the effort of remembering their addresses and calling them up from scratch. I can do the same thing on my PC, but there I don"t bookmark; I favorite—coming from “favorite pages”, so the verb is derived from an adjective not a noun． I wasn’t really sure whether people said this，but someone told me recently that they had favorited a site I was looking for and so they could easily give me its address.
In the late 1980s I noticed that lots of my friends had acquired pagers, and kept saying things like “I’ll page you as soon as I know what time we’re meeting”. They couldn"t say it to me, though; 1 refused to have one． So my children bought me a mobile phone, now known simply as a mobile and I had to learn yet more new verbs. I can message someone, that is, I can leave a message （either spoken or written）for them on their phone．Or I can text them, write a few words suggesting when and where to meet, for example. How long will it be before I can mobile them, that is, phone them using my mobile? I haven’t heard that verb yet, but I’m sure I will soon. Perhaps I’ll start using it myself!
小题1:“I’ll pencil it in my diary” in the second paragraph probably means .| A．it was a firm arrangement | B．it was an uncertain arrangement | | C．the arrangement should be written as a diary | D．he prefers a pencil to a pen |
小题2:A website address can be easily found if it has been＿____.| A．emailed | B．messaged | C．favorited | D．texted |
小题3:Which of the following has not been used as a verb, yet?| A．message | B．page | C．email | D．mobile |
小题4:The best title for this passage is____．| A．New Verbs from Old Nouns | B．The Development of the English language | | C．New Technology and New words | D．Technology and Language. |
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High school dropouts（辍学者）earn an average of $ 9,000 less per year than graduates. Now a new study dispels a common belief why they quit. It’s much more basic than flunking out（不及格）.
Society tends to think of high school dropouts as kids who just can’t cut it. They are lazy，and perhaps not too bright．So researchers were surprised when they asked more than 450 kids who quit school about why they left.
“The vast majority actually had passing grades and they were confident that they could have graduated from high school.” John Bridgeland, the executive researcher said. About 1 million teens leave school each year. Only about half of African-American and Hispanic（美籍西班牙的）student will receive a diploma（证书），and actually all dropouts come to regret their decision. So， if failing grades don’t explain why these kids quit, what does? Again，John Bridgeland："The most dependable finding was that they were bored.” “They found classes uninteresting; they weren’t inspired or motivated. They didn’t see any direct connection between what they were learning in the classroom to their own lives, or to their career aspirations.”
The study found that most teens who do drop out wait until they turn sixteen, which happens to be the age at which most states allow students to quit. In the US，only one state，New Mexico，has a law requiring teenagers to stay in high school until they graduate. Only four states: California, Tennessee, Texas and Utah, plus the District of Columbia, require school attendance until age 18, no exceptions, another researcher，says raising the compulsory（义务的）attendance age may be one way to keep more kids in school．
“As these dropouts look back，they realize they’ve made a mistake. And anything that sort of gives these people an extra push to stick it out and it through to the end, is probably helpful measure.”
New Hampshire may be the next state to raise its school attendance age to 18. But critics say that forcing the students unwilling to continue their studies to stay in school misses the point－the need for reform. It"s been called for to reinvent high school education to make it more challenging and relevant, and to ensure that kids who do stick it out receive a diploma that actually means something.
小题1:Most high school students drop out of" school because＿＿．| A．they have failing grades | B．they take no interest in classes | | C．they are discriminated against | D．they are lazy and not intelligent |
小题2:Acceding to the passage，which state has a law requiring school attendance until they graduate?| A．New Hampshire | B．Utah | C．New Mexico | D．The District of Columbia |
小题3:The underlined words “stick it out” probably means“＿＿”．| A．complete schooling | B．solve the problem | | C．love having classes | D．believe in themselves |
小题4:From the passage，we can infer the following EXCEPT that＿．| A．the grades of most dropouts at school were acceptable | | B．about 500, 000 high school dropouts are black and Spanish | | C．classes don"t appeal to dropouts | | D．on average dropouts cannot get good jobs |
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