15. 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.”
