2. 外语
  3. Originally, plastic was hailed for its potential to reduce humankind’s heavy environmental footprint. The earliest plastics were

Originally, plastic was hailed for its potential to reduce humankind’s heavy environmental footprint. The earliest plastics were

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问题     Originally, plastic was hailed for its potential to reduce humankind’s heavy environmental footprint. The earliest plastics were invented as substitutes for shrinking supplies of natural materials like ivory or tortoiseshell. Today, plastic is perceived as nature’s nemesis(难以战胜的对手). But a generic distaste for plastic can muddy our thinking about the trade-offs involved when we replace plastic with other materials.
    Take plastic bags, the emblem(象征)for all bad things. They clog storm drains, tangle up recycling equipment, litter parks and beaches and threaten wildlife on land and at sea. Such problems have fueled bans on bags around the world and in more than a dozen American cities. Unfortunately, the bans typically lead to a huge increase in the use of paper bags, which also have environmental drawbacks. In other words, plastics aren’t necessarily bad for the environment; it’s the way we make and use them that’s the problem.
    It’s estimated that half of the nearly 600 billion pounds of plastics produced each year go into single-use products. Some are indisputably valuable, like disposable syringes(注射器), which have been a great ally in preventing the spread of infectious diseases like HIV, and even plastic water bottles, which, after disasters like the Japanese tsunami(海啸), are critical to saving lives. Yet many disposables, like the bags, drinking straws and packaging commonly found in beach clean-ups, are essentially prefab litter with a heavy environmental cost.
    And there’s another cost. Pouring so much plastic into disposable conveniences has helped to diminish our view of a family of materials we once held in high esteem. Plastic has become synonymous with cheap and worthless, when in fact those chains of hydrocarbons(碳氢化合物)ought to be regarded as among the most valuable substances on the planet. If we understood plastic’s true worth, we would stop wasting it on trivial throwaways and take better advantage of what this versatile material can do for us.
    In a world of nearly seven billion souls and counting, we are not going to feed, clothe and house ourselves solely from wood, ore and stone; we need plastics. And in an era when we’re concerned about our carbon footprint, we can appreciate that lightweight plastics take less energy to produce and transport than many other materials.
    Yet we can’t hope to achieve plastic’s promise for the 21st century if we stick with wasteful 20th-century habits of plastic production and consumption. We have the technology to make better and safer plastics—forged from renewable sources, rather than finite fossil fuels, using chemicals that inflict minimal or no harm on the planet and our health.
From the results of banning plastic bags, we learn that______.
选项 A、better materials are still to be found to replace plastic bags
B、the way of making and using plastic bags matters a lot
C、plastic bags indeed cause many environmental problems
D、the bans on plastic bags greatly boost the paper industry
答案B
解析 细节推断题。由定位句可知，禁塑令通常导致纸质袋使用数量的大幅增加，这也给环境带来一些不利影响。换句话说，塑料本身不一定不利于环境，问题的关键在于我们制造和使用塑料的方式，故B)为正确答案。A)“仍然需要找到更好的材料来替代塑料袋”，文中没有提及，故排除；C)“塑料袋确实引起许多环境问题”，表述本身正确，但这不是从禁塑令结果得到的信息，故排除；D)“禁塑令极大地促进了纸行业的发展”，文章并没有谈及禁塑令影响纸行业的问题，故排除。
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