1.Besides containing attractive flowers,trees and other plants that beautify the community,ecofriendly rain gardens are healthy for the environment and the people living and working nearby.
A rain garden is not very different from a traditional garden.It is just a far more ecofriendly garden.Usually it is built lower than the ground.Rain gardens make smart use of rain and storm water by temporarily holding water from rain and storms and letting it soak(浸入)slowly into the ground before it runs into streams or enters the public drinking water supply.
Thus,a rain garden keeps the water,allowing it to be used as needed by plants in the rain garden,rather than flowing immediately into nearby streams and going unused.The water will soak slowly into the ground within a day or two.This creates an advantage that the rain garden does not allow mosquitoes to breed.This is a simple,attractive,and ecofriendly"green"way to treat storm water.
What's more,planting a rain garden helps reduce pollution and improve the environment.Without using expensive machinery and chemicals,rain gardens remove harmful chemicals in the rainwater and cut down on the amount of pollution reaching streams and rivers by up to 30%.
Native plants are recommended for rain gardens because they are more used to the local climate,soil,and water conditions.They may attract local wildlife such as native birds.Water your rain garden immediately after planting and once a week,unless you have had at least an inch of rain during the week.Once native plants establish the necessary root system,they will require little care.
Often,local governments and private businesses develop large rain gardens in their yards and in public parks as a way to improve the environment and solve flooding problems.However,you don't need to be a professionally environmental engineer to create a rain garden.As long as you're ecoconscious homeowners,you can help the environment by building smaller rain gardens in your yards.

4.Which of the following is NOT true for the function of rain gardensB?
A.They are good for living conditions.
B.They increase pollution.
C.They can beautify the community.
D.They improve the environment.
5.Which of the following is the ecofriendly function of rain gardens discussed in Paragraph 4A?
A.They can help reduce the pollution problem.
B.They can keep the rain and storm water.
C.They can be healthy for the people around.
D.They can make the environment more beautiful.
6.One of the main reasons why native plants are recommended is thatD.
A.they cost less and are much easier to get
B.they may attract local wildlife to come
C.they require little care from the local gardener
D.they are more used to the local growing conditions
7.What do we know about rain gardensC?
A.They need little water after all the plants are planted.
B.They may attract local birds and change the local climate.
C.They usually need at least an inch of rainwater a week.
D.They may reduce the water pollution problem by 70%.
12.Today there are twenty to twenty-five million shopping carts rolling around the world.In fact,the shopping cart is presently one of the most often used items on four wheels,second only to the automobile.Indeed,almost everybody in America will spend a part of his or her life behind a shopping cart.They will,in a lifetime,push it many miles.But few will know-or even think to ask-who it was that invented them.
Mr.Sylvan N.Goldman of Oklahoma City invented the shopping cart in 1937.Mr.Goldman's invention did not make him famous.It did,however,make him very rich.When Goldman invented the cart he was in the supermarket business.Every day he would see shoppers lugging groceries around in baskets that they had to carry.One day Goldman suddenly had the idea of putting baskets on wheels.The wheeled baskets would make shopping much easier for his customers.And by lightening their chore,he would attract their business.Pondering the idea,Goldman walked into his office and sat down on a folding chair.Looking down at the chair,Goldman had another idea.The carts,he realized,should be made so they could be folded up.This would make it easier to store them when not in use.
On June 4,1937,Goldman's first batch of carts was ready for use in his market.He was terribly excited on the morning of that day as customers began arriving.He couldn't wait to see them using his invention.But Goldman was disappointed.Most shoppers gave the carts a long look,but hardly anybody would give them a try.After a while,Goldman decided to ask customers why they weren't using his carts."Don't you think this arm is strong enough to carry a shopping basket?"one offended shopper replied.
Day after day,the same thing happened.People wouldn't use the carts.They preferred a basket on the arm to a basket on wheels.But Goldman wasn't beaten yet.He knew his carts would be a great success if only he could persuade people to give them a try.To this end,Goldman tried something that was both very clever and very funny.Believe it or not,he hired a group of people to push carts around his market and pretend they were shopping!Seeing this,the real customers gradually began copying the phony customers.
As Goldman had hoped,the carts were soon attracting larger and larger numbers of customers to his market.But not only did more people come-those who came bought more.With larger,easier-to-handle baskets,customers unconsciously bought a greater number of goods than before.
Today's shopping carts are five times larger than Goldman's original model.Perhaps that's one reason Americans today spend more than five times as much money on food each year as they did before 1937-before the coming of the shopping cart.

59.The passage is written toC.
A.tell about the life of an inventor 
B.explain the power of advertising
C.introduce the history of an invention
D.analyze the secrets of business success
60.How did Goldman get customers to use the shopping cart?A
A.By showing how it worked.
B.By printing advertisements.
C.By giving a special discount.
D.By describing why it was useful.
61.What unexpected benefit did Goldman gain?B
A.Goldman became famous.
B.Shoppers bought more goods.
C.Shopping carts became larger.
D.More customers came to his store.
62.The passage suggests the following secrets of success EXCEPTD.
A.acting on your ideas 
B.believing in your work
C.using your imagination
D.watching your competition.
9.In a used furniture business,unlike new,you cannot order stock from a catalogue.People call in,and you have to go out and make an offer."You can't (21)B what you don't have."my father would say.
When I was aged thirteen,my father(22)D his store manager,a one-armed guy who could do more with his one arm than many will do with two.With his (23)A gone,my father came to me."Will you come in while I go out to (24)C the day's calls (25)C I find the right person?"he asked.
The store has tens of thousands of (26)A."People like to bargain,"he told me,"So I don't (27)C prices.You just have to know a (28)B."
He took me around."A quarter-horse motor you can sell for four dollars.For a refrigerator,depending on the (29)C,you can sell for thirty-five dollars to sixty dollars.However,if it has a freezer all the way across,sell it for eighty dollars,(30)Dexcellent condition,maybe one hundred dollars.Dishes come in with a houseful of furniture,and I don't even figure them in when I give a price.You can sell them for a nickel to a quarter.Something really nice."
Every day after (31)A,I would pedal down to the store.Soon after,I was writing up a sales slip(纸条)for an attractive plate when my father walked in.I had asked a dollar and the guy did not hesitate.I was very (32)D.My father glanced down at what I was doing,(33)Bthe customer and said,"You sure got a (34)C today.My employee gave you the price and that's the price."
Afterward,I asked my father,"What was that all (35)A?"
It turned out that it was a(n) (36)C plate,worth a few hundred dollars.I was shocked.Here I was (37)D to help my father in the business and instead I was losing money for him.
He said,"I could've stopped the sales if I'd wanted to.You were just writing up the slip and hadn't yet taken the money.(38)C,by civil law,you're (39)Aage.But,a man stands by his word and the word of his agent."
(40)Bmy father a small amount of money,but I learned a lifelong lesson in integrity (正直).

21.A.buyB.sellC.orderD.store
22.A.missedB.firedC.dismissedD.lost
23.A.managerB.bossC.servantD.salesman
24.A.askB.returnC.answerD.give
25.A.ifB.whenC.untilD.unless
26.A.itemsB.goodsC.facilitiesD.instruments
27.A.offerB.decideC.markD.create
28.A.nameB.rangeC.varietyD.catalogue
29.A.priceB.situationC.conditionD.quantity
30.A.onB.forC.byD.in
31.A.schoolB.workC.studyD.play
32.A.upsetB.worriedC.embarrassedD.pleased
33.A.turned onB.turned toC.turned upD.turned down
34.A.plateB.rewardC.bargainD.fortune
35.A.aboutB.forC.aroundD.to
36.A.ordinaryB.fragileC.antiqueD.delicate
37.A.willingB.goingC.managingD.trying
38.A.HoweverB.ThereforeC.BesidesD.Consequently
39.A.underB.aboveC.atD.of
40.A.SpentB.CostC.TookD.Wasted
8.Cowboy or spaceman?A dilemma for a children's party,perhaps.But also a question for economists,argued Kenneth Boulding,a British economist,in an essay published in 1966.We have run our economies,he warned,like cowboys on the open grassland:taking and using the world's resources,confident that more lies over the horizon.But the Earth is less a grassland than a spaceship-a closed system,alone in space,carrying limited supplies.We need,said Boulding,an economics that takes seriously the idea of environmental limits.In the half century since his essay,a new movement has responded to his challenge."Ecological economists",as they call themselves,want to revolutionise its aims and assumptions.What do they say-and will their ideas achieve lift-off?
To its advocators,ecological economics is neither ecology nor economics,but a mix of both.Their starting point is to recognise that the human economy is part of the natural world.Our environment,they note,is both a source of resources and a sink for wastes.But it is ignored in conventional textbooks,where neat diagrams trace the flows between firms,households and the government as though nature did not exist.That is a mistake,say ecological economists.
There are two ways our economies can grow,ecological economists point out:through technological change,or through more intensive use of resources.Only the former,they say,is worth having.They are suspicious of GDP,a crude measure which does not take account of resource exhaustion,unpaid work,and countless other factors.In its place they advocate more holistic(全面的) approaches,such as the Genuine Progress Indicator (GPI),a composite index(复合指标) that includes things like the cost of pollution,deforestation and car accidents.While GDP has kept growing,global GPI per person peaked in 1978:by destroying our environment we are making ourselves poorer,not richer.The solution,says Herman Daly,a former World Bank economist and eco-guru,is a"steady-state"economy,where the use of materials and energy is held constant.
Mainstream economists are unimpressed.The GPI,they point out,is a subjective measure.And talk of limits to growth has had a bad press since the days of Thomas Malthus,a gloomy 18th century cleric who predicted,wrongly,that overpopulation would lead to famine.Human beings find solutions to some of the most annoying problems.But ecological economists warn against self-satisfaction.In 2009 a paper in Nature,a scientific journal,argued that human activity is already overstepping safe planetary boundaries on issues such as biodiversity(生物多样性) and climate change.That suggests that ecological economists are at least asking some important questions,even if their answers turn out to be wrong.
 
73.Why does Boulding compare the way economy is run with cowboy and spaceship?D
A.To advocate the importance of space programs.
B.To applaud the appearance of ecological economists.
C.To arouse people's interest in cowboys'adventures on grassland.
D.To awaken people to the need of sustainable development of economy.
74.What does the underlined word"challenge"in paragraph 1 refer to?B
A.Sending a cowboy into space through a spaceship.
B.Establishing an economics taking environmental limits into account.
C.Revolutionizing the ecological economists'aims and assumptions.
D.Enabling ecological economists to make their ideas achieve lift-offs.
75.Ecological economists will disagree thatA.
A.economies are worth growing through intensive use of resources
B.economics should attach importance to the idea of environmental limits
C.ecological economics is neither ecology nor economics
D.the human economy is part of the natural world
76.According to the passage,which of the following about GPI is true?C
A.It keeps growing although the peak appeared in the year 1978.
B.Mainstream economists regard it as a holistic and objective approach.
C.Ecological economists believe it is a better indicator of economy than GDP.
D.It fails to take the factors such as deforestation and car accidents into consideration.
77.We can infer from the last paragraph that the mainstream economists'attitude toward ecological economics isA.
A.doubtful        B.sensitive          C.optimistic        D.over-concerned.
6.In the 1990s,when an area of Brazilian rainforest the size of Belgium was cut down every year,Brazil was the world's environmental villain(反派角色) and the Amazonian jungle the image of everything that was going wrong in green places.Now,the Amazon ought to be the image of what is going right.Government figures show that deforestation fell by 70% in the Brazilian Amazon region during the past decade.If clearances had continued at their rate in 2005,an extra 3.2billion tonnes of carbon dioxide would have been put into the atmosphere.That is an amount equal to a year's emissions from the European Union.Arguably,then,Brazil is now the world leader in addressing climate change.
But how did it break the vicious cycle(恶性循环)?The answer,according to a paper is that there was no silver bullet but instead a three-stage process in which bans,better governance in frontier areas and consumer pressure on companies worked.
The first stage ran from the mid-1990s to 2004.This was when the government put its efforts into bans and restrictions.The Brazilian Forest Code said that,on every farm in the Amazon,80% of the land had to be set aside as a forest reserve.As the study observes,this share was so high that the code could not be followed-or enforced.This was the period of the worst deforestation.Soybean prices were high and there was a vast expansion of soybean farming on the south-eastern border of the rainforest.
During the second stage,which ran from 2005to 2009,the government tried to boost its ability to police the Amazon.Brazil's president made stopping deforestation a priority,which resulted in better co-operation between different bits of the government.The area in which farming was banned was increased from a sixth to nearly half of the forest.
The third stage,which began in 2009,was a test of whether a system of restrictions could survive as soybean expansion continued.The government shifted its focus from farms to counties (each state has scores of these).Farmers in the 36counties with the worst deforestation rates were banned from getting cheap credit until those rates fell.
By any standards,Brazil's Amazon policy has been a success,made the more remarkable because it relied on restrictions rather than rewards,which might have been expected to have worked better.Over the period of the study,Brazil also turned itself into a farming superpower,so the country has shown it is possible to get a huge increase in food output without destroying the forest.Moreover,the policies so far have been successful among commercial farmers who care about the law and respond to market pressures.Most remaining deforestation is by small holders who care rather less about these things,so the government faces the problem of persuading them to change their ways,too.Deforestation has been slowed,but not yet stopped.

73.Brazil is considered to play a leading role in dealing with climate change becauseC.
A.it has rainforest as large as Belgium
B.it has cut down too much rainforest
C.it has taken action to reduce deforestation
D.it sent 3.2billion tons of carbon dioxide into the air
74.The underlined phrase"silver bullet"in Paragraph 2most probably refers toB.
A.a powerful weapon       B.an effective solution
C.an intelligent device   D.a golden opportunity
75.Which of the following statements is true according to the passage?D
A.80% of the farmland was allowed for farming in the 1st stage.
B.Soybean prices went up where farming land was expanded.
C.The government hired more policemen in the Amazon area.
D.The government enlarged its range of supervision in the 3rd stage.
76.What can we infer from the last paragraph?C
A.Brazil has successfully eliminated deforestation.
B.All the farmers care much about forest protection.
C.Small farm holders are a headache for the Brazilian government.
D.Both the food output and the forest in Brazil have greatly increased.
77.What can be the best title of the passage?A
A.Cutting Down on Cutting Down
B.Brazil,the World Leader in Farming
C.Restrictions Outperforming Rewards
D.Former Awareness Working Wonders.
5.When I first hiked in the silent Ponderosa pines of the Black Hills,I was surprised at how quiet the world became.Nowadays,when I walk in the woods,I notice other things.I hear songs of unseen birds and catch glimpses of wildflower color,all of (25)which make great subjects for me to put in front of a camera.
Finding those birds is (26)why I've spent more time in the woods of Eastern South Dakota this year than any other.Last spring I witnessed and photographed the songbird migration for the first time.I saw brightly colored birds that I'd never seen before.I guess I (27)was hooked (hook) because this spring I was back in the woods searching for more.
I have a goal to photograph all the colorful birds that call South Dakota home.One that has hidden from me to this day is the Scarlet Tanager(猩红比蓝雀).They are best found in Union Grove State Park or Newton Hills and are colored red with black wings.This year,I made three separate trips to find them.I also took time (28)to learn (learn) their song and call.This helped me find a female at dusk at Union Grove,but I could not get a decent photo.Later in the week,as I began another search at Newton Hills,a Summer Tanager flew to a tree next to me and gave me a long look.It was a real treat because the Summer Tanager is much (29)rarer (rare) to find in South Dakota.Later in the day,I finally saw my first male Scarlet …well,his tail feathers anyway.By the time I (30)spotted(spot) him,he was flying deep into the woods.I was disappointed.Then I thought this might be an invitation."Come back into the woods.Lose (31)yourself among the leaves,listen to the song I sing and maybe one day we will meet."I look forward to that day.
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