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  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.
The author believes that people would stop wasting plastic if they______.
选项 A、knew the history of its invention
B、realized its impact on the environment
C、got punished for wasting it
D、appreciated its true value
答案D
解析 细节辨认题。定位句指出如果人们能认识到塑料的真正价值，就不会把塑料浪费在生产一些不重要的用完即丢的物品上，而是会更好地利用这种具有多方面用途的材料，因此答案为D)。A)“了解它的发明史”，文中并未提及，故排除；B)“意识到它对环境造成的影响”，由第二段可以看出，这是制定禁塑令的原因，但它并不能使人们停止浪费塑料，故排除；C)“因浪费塑料而受到惩罚”，原文没有提及，故排除。
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