70. What is the main purpose of writing this passage?
A.
Expressing the writer’s idea
that gene technology will benefit people
B.
Telling people the advantages of gene
technology
C.
Telling the readers that gene
technology will not benefit people
D.
Explaining that gene technology will also
do harm to the humanity
E
The European
capital cities, Berlin and London, running the third and the fourth richest
economies in the world, both produce about a metric ton of rubbish for each
household per year. But when it comes to disposing of their citizens’ waste,
the comfortable similarities end.
London, and
Britain as a whole, is in the middle of a waste crisis. Today, the environment
secretary, Margaret Beckett, is presiding over a waste summit to try to find
out why the UK is not going to reach its 25% recycling and composting (转制成堆肥) target by 2005; currently, it
is managing 11%
By
comparison, Berlin and Germany know exactly where they are going. Although
Berlin has been the capital for less than a decade, and has had east and west
to unite, it has already reached 40% recycling. The city has one ambition: to
have no rubbish to dump or burn in 20 year’s time. So far, the city has not
decided quite how, but it is developing new technologies and moving steadily in
the right direction. London, by comparison, has a chaotic system. The 33
boroughs all have different recycling systems.
Ken
Livingstone, who since taking office as mayor has published a brand-new waste
management strategy for the capital, is responsible for sorting out this hotch
potch. One of the most contentious issues both for London and Berlin is
incineration, with both cities burning a large proportion of their
waste---London 20% and Berlin 32%
Here again
Berlin has made decisions and London is uncertain. Berlin has a state of the
art incinerator in the 1970s and upgraded constantly until in the 1990s it is
impossible to detect any emissions but warm gases. The city has abandoned plans
to build another and instead wants to make the existing one redundant by
reducing the waste so there is none to burn
London
boroughs have plans to increase the size of the incinerator at Edmonton and
there are plans to build more elsewhere. But Livingstone is resisting and the
government is already rethinking its current energy from waste policy.
Samantha
Heath, the chair of Greater London Authority’s environment committee, wants to
invest in the market for recycled goods so there is somewhere for the material
to go and a prospect of selling it, or at least disposing of it for less than
the price of incineration or landfill
Ingolf Rank,
spokesman for Berlin’s City Cleaning company has some advice: “The first task
is to get the public on your side.” Each household has to pay 40 pounds every
three months to dispose of its rubbish. In future, the less they create, the
more they recycle and compost, the less they will have to pay, he says.
Each house in
Berlin has a series of different coloured bins for refuse so glass, paper and plastics
can be separated for recycling. This allows 800 000 tonnes of rubbish a year to
be turned back into useful items.
But Berlin
has ideas that have not ever been heard of in London. For example, at this time
of year, thousands of trees that line Berlin’s streets shed their leaves.
Rather than put these leaves into general rubbish and add to the problems of
disposal, they are collected up in large vacuum cleaners and turned into garden
compost. Most of London has no composting service at all.
Another system
that stops material even being called rubbish is a collection service for
second-hand furniture and electrical goods less than seven years old. Each
offering is inspected, taken to a central shop, and sold at low cost to poorer
people. It saves a lot of material being dumped.
Not all goes
according to plan in Berlin, however. Rank says that people dump waste in the
streets, like mattresses, old furniture or just general rubbish cost the city
2.8 million pounds a year.
One problem
the city has tried to solve but failed, is the excreta of 150 000 dogs. Rank
says it is the owners’ responsibility to clean up after their pets but police
who tried enforce the law were “sometimes bitten (by the dogs), insulted by the
owners and even beaten up. As a result we still have to clean up 40 tonnes of
droppings every day. Nobody is happy about that.”
