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  3. Year after year, the world’s nations gather to find ways to reduce carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas, with little meaningf

Year after year, the world’s nations gather to find ways to reduce carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas, with little meaningf

admin2012-07-05  43
问题     Year after year, the world’s nations gather to find ways to reduce carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas, with little meaningful progress. Frustrated by this slow pace, the United States and five other countries announced this week a modest but potentially game-changing initiative to cut three other pollutants that also contribute significantly to climate change.
    The three pollutants—methane (甲烷), black carbon and hydrofluorocarbons (氢氟碳)—together account for about 30 percent to 40 percent of the rise in global temperatures. Unlike carbon dioxide, they do not remain in the atmosphere for a long time, but, while they are there, they drive temperatures upward.
    Mainstream scientists believe that to avoid disastrous increases in the sea levels and widespread drought, the rise in global temperatures by 2050 should not exceed 2 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels. Though cuts in carbon dioxide will also be necessary to reach that goal, curbing these three pollutants will help enormously.
    Officials hope further that by tackling these pollutants they can achieve relatively quick and measurable reductions in emissions without waiting for politicians to act or the United Nations process to produce a global agreement on carbon dioxide.
    The plan’s founding members are the United States, Canada, Sweden, Mexico, Ghana and Bangladesh. Washington and Ottawa will jointly underwrite a $15 million start-up fund. Clearly, the program must be scaled up over time, with many more countries participating. In the short term, officials say their purpose is to educate and test inexpensive and technologically accessible ways of capturing these gases.
    Soot, a huge health hazard, can be reduced by installing filters on diesel engines, replacing traditional cook stoves with more efficient models and banning the open burning of agricultural waste. Methane can be captured from oil and gas wells, leaky pipelines, municipal (城市的) landfills and wastewater treatment plants.
    Significantly reducing hydrofluorocarbons, or HFCs, could be harder. These compounds, widely used in air-conditioners and originally developed to replace the refrigerants that were damaging the ozone layer, turned out to be a disastrous greenhouse gas. Efforts to find less-harmful substitutes have met resistance from countries like India, where most HFCs are manufactured.
    Governments everywhere should obviously be pushing to reduce carbon dioxide, the most dangerous greenhouse gas. In the meantime, opening an important second front in the climate war will demonstrate that progress is possible.  
What can be inferred about HFCs from Para. 7?
选项 A、It is developed by India.
B、It is hard to be captured.
C、It damages the ozone layer.
D、It doesn’t belong to natural gas.
答案D
解析 推理判断题。由定位句可知，HFC被发明用以替代制冷剂，它广泛应用于空调中。由此可知，HFC不是自然气体，而是人工合成的。此外，定位句还提到制冷剂之所以被HFC替代，是因为它破坏了大气的臭氧层，但HFC的缺点却在于它是一种温室气体，因此D)“它不是自然气体”正确。A)“它是由印度发明的”不符合原文。原文提出HFC大部分是由印度生产，而不是说印度发明了它，故排除；B)“它很难被捕捉”与原文不符。原文中提到明显减低HFC比较困难，而不是说捕捉这种气体不易，故排除；C)“它破坏了臭氧层”和原文不符。破坏臭氧层的是制冷剂，故排除。
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