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  3. The stretch of the Pacific between Hawaii and California is virtually empty. There are no islands, no shipping lanes, no human p

The stretch of the Pacific between Hawaii and California is virtually empty. There are no islands, no shipping lanes, no human p

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问题     The stretch of the Pacific between Hawaii and California is virtually empty. There are no islands, no shipping lanes, no human presence for thousands of miles—just sea, sky and rubbish. The prevailing currents cause flotsam from around the world to accumulate in a vast becalmed patch of ocean. In places, there are a million pieces of plastic per square kilometre. That can mean as much as 112 times more plastic than plankton, the first link in the marine food chain. All this adds up to perhaps 100m tonnes of floating garbage, and more is arriving every day.
    Wherever people have been—and some places where they have not—they have left waste behind. Litter lines the world’s roads; dumps dot the landscape; slurry and sewage slosh into rivers and streams. Up above, thousands of fragments of defunct spacecraft careen through space, and occasionally more debris is produced by collisions such as the one that destroyed an American satellite in mid-February. Ken Noguchi, a mountaineer, estimates that he has collected nine tonnes of rubbish from the slopes of Mount Everest during five clean-up expeditions. There is still plenty left.
    The average Westerner produces over 500kg of municipal waste a year—and that is only the most obvious portion of the rich world’s discards. In Britain, for example, municipal waste from households and businesses makes up just 24% of the total. In addition, both developed and developing countries generate vast quantities of construction and demolition debris, industrial effluent, mine tailings, sewage residue and agricultural waste. Extracting enough gold to make a typical wedding ring, for example, can generate three tonnes of mining waste.
    Rubbish may be universal, but it is little studied and poorly understood. Nobody knows how much of it the world generates or what it does with it. In many rich countries, and most poor ones, only the patchiest of records are kept. That may be understandable: by definition, waste is something its owner no longer wants or takes much interest in.
    Ignorance spawns scares, such as the fuss surrounding New York’s infamous garbage barge, which in 1987 sailed the Atlantic for six months in search of a place to dump its load, giving many Americans the false impression that their country’s landfills had run out of space. It also makes it hard to draw up sensible policies: just think of the endless debate about whether recycling is the only way to save the planet—or an expensive waste of time.
By mentioning the definition of waste, the author intends to_____.
选项 A、clear the misunderstanding of its meaning and its coverage
B、state that people tends to "like the new and hate the old"
C、manifest the fact people don’t record things about rubbish by sarcasm
D、prove that ignorance can lead to terror and inaction
答案C
解析 属逻辑关系题。选项A意为澄清人们对垃圾的概念和范围的误解，显然不是作者的真正意图，故错误。选项B意为人们倾向于喜新厌旧，这也并未在文中体现，故错误。选项D属于答非所问，其内容为文章末段表达的内容，故错误。垃圾的定义的前一句提到很多国家都缺乏对垃圾产生和处理的记录，这里作者用了讽刺的手法表达，反正垃圾就是人们不要了的东西，何必再记录下来呢，故选项C符合题意。
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