Taking Rubbish The stretch of the Pacific between Hawaii and California is virtually empty. There are no islands, no shippin

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问题                             Taking Rubbish
    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—oran expensive waste of time.
According to Para. 5 which is the original reason for garbage being poorly understood?

选项 A、Nobody knows how much of it the world generates.
B、Nobody knows what can be done to deal with it.
C、Only a few records about tackling garbage are kept.
D、It is what its owners don’t want or take much interest in.

答案D

解析 推断题。根据题干定位至第五段。本题解析的关键是对该段的理解和结构的把握。第一句首先提出问题:虽然垃圾普遍存在,但是研究却少得可怜。第二句开始解释原因,即A、B、C中的内容。关键是最后一句:“前面的三种原因都是可以理解的,因为根据定义,垃圾是主人不再想要的或不再感兴趣的。”也就是说,因为垃圾的这种界定,所以造成了A、B、C中的状况。因而,正确答案是D。
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