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

admin2013-06-05  85

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 the last paragraph which of the following statements is TRUE?

选项 A、Since people do not know much of rubbish, they are little afraid of it.
B、American’s landfills have run out of space for dumping rubbish.
C、It is hard to draw up sensible policies to deal with rubbish recently.
D、People are determined to recycle lots of rubbish to save the planet.

答案C

解析 推断题。本题可考虑排除法:根据本段第一句第一个逗号之前可知“无知产生恐慌”。根据“such as”之后至本句结束可知,“1978年的纽约垃圾驳船事件使美国人误以为他们国家的垃圾填埋地已用光了。”所以A、B错误。根据本段第二句冒号之前可知“人们对垃圾的无知使得很难采取明智的政策”,因而C正确。第二句冒号之后的“循环使用是拯救地球的唯一方法”还是“昂贵的时间浪费”是针对冒号之前的解释,D断章取义,错误。所以,正确答案是C。
转载请注明原文地址:https://kaotiyun.com/show/PVd4777K
0

最新回复(0)