A
(2018高考命题专家原创卷三)
In the fight to conserve tropical rainforests,here’s a tool you don’t often hear about:orange peels.Specifically,12,000 tons of them,dumped (倾倒) on the land.“You don’t usually associate waste treatment with biodiversity benefits,something that’s good for the environment.”
Tim Treuer is an ecologist at Princeton University,and he’s talking about a unique conservation story.It started in the early 1990s,when an orange juice producer called Del Oro set up a company near the Guanacaste Conservation Area in Costa Rica,a region that contains several national parks and a wildlife protection zone.
Del Oro needed somewhere to dump the orange peels,and the company also owned forested land next to the parkland that it had no intention of growing crops on.So a deal was struck:if Del Oro donated its forested land,it could dump orange peel waste on degraded (退化的) land within the conservation area.Then a thousand dump trucks’ worth of orange peels were lying on the land in 1998.“And within about six months the orange peels had been turned from orange peels into this thick black rich soil.”
“I couldn’t even find the site the first time I saw it.”He couldn’t find it because,over 16 years,the orange peel waste had sent the land on a journey to become a vine-choked jungle,with three times the diversity of tree species of the neighboring control plot,richer soil and a much thicker covering.In other words,the experiment was a success.The results appear in the journal Restoration Ecology.
Treuer says perhaps this lesson could be applied elsewhere.“It’s a shame that we live in a world with nutrient-limited degraded ecosystems and also nutrient-rich waste streams.We’d like to see those things come together a little bit.That’s not a license for any agricultural company to just start dumping their waste products on protected areas,but it does mean that land managers,people involved with industrial-scale agricultural operations should start thinking about ways to do thoughtful experimentation to see if in their particular system they can have similar win-win-win results.”
1.What does the underlined word “It” in Paragraph 2 refer to?
A.Waste treatment. B.A conservation story.
C.An orange juice company. D.The biodiversity benefit.
2.What does the author say about orange peels?
A.They are particularly hard to break down.
B.They can change the color of the land soil.
C.They are beneficial to biological diversity.
D.They can gradually destroy the surface soil.
3.What do Treuer’s words in the last paragraph suggest?
A.Waste can be used for environmental protection.
B.No waste can be thrown randomly on the protected areas.
C.Large-scale agricultural operations start with experiments.
D.Land managers must be ready to take on their responsibility.
语篇解读:本文是说明文,主要介绍了倒在退化土地上的废弃橘子皮竟成了保护热带雨林生物多样性的工具。
答案及剖析:
1.B 细节理解题。根据第二段中的Tim Treuer is an ecologist at Princeton University, and he’s talking about a unique conservation story.可知,It 指代的应是Tim Treuer要讲的有关生态保护的故事。
2.C 细节理解题。根据第一段中的You don’t usually associate waste treatment with biodiversity benefits,something that’s good for the environment.和第四段中的with three times the diversity of tree species of the neighboring control plot,richer soil and a much thicker covering.可知,橘子皮对生物多样性是有益的。
3.A 推理判断题。根据最后一段中Treuer所说的话,尤其是It’s a shame that we live in a world with nutrient-limited degraded ecosystems and also nutrient-rich waste streams.We’d like to see those things come together a little bit.可知,Treuer认为,我们生活在营养受限的、退化的生态系统中,同时却有许多营养成分丰富的、泛滥成灾的废弃物,我们想看到这些东西能一点点地整合利用起来。再结合文章的主旨可知,Treuer认为我们可以利用废弃物来保护环境。
