泽熙美文Reading Comprehension
The British
History not only gives cities their shape; it also molds their self-image. Since 1941, when London emerged from eight months of bombing with many of its landmarks pulverized but its resilience intact, the British capital has regarded itself as indomitable. But at 9 a.m. on a wintry Monday, a shock wave cracked that image, much as a V-2 rocket hitting a house would damage neighboring properties. Londoners learned that the city’s entire fleet of buses had been recalled to its depots, defeated not by bombs—the service had run quixotically but without interruption throughout the Blitz—but by snow. A mere six inches (5cm) of it.
To say Britain isn’t good at coping with snowing would be to exercise British understatement. Heavy snow is too rare to warrant serious investment in equipment, especially in London and the southeast, where this was, as excitable weather forecasters declared, the biggest “snow event” in 18 years. The heavy fall may cost some ￡3 billion (about $4.3 billion), since a fifth of the workforce took a “duvet day” and business stayed shuttered. It also stopped Tube service, caused chaos at airports and closed schools. Thousands remained shut for 48 hours, suggesting that Londoners, even more than Washingtonians, lack the “flinty Chicago toughness” President Barack Obama missed when a cold snap in the U.S. capital suspended his daughters’ school for a day.
When Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao’s London visit was also interrupted by snow, Britain’s international humiliation was complete. Still, say this for Londoners: they can laugh at themselves. “Good thing Hitler’s dead” remarked a stock clerk in a supermarket. “He couldn’t get us with the Blitz, but the place is so incapacitated now, he’d walk right in.” Meeting adversity with a sort of gloomy wit is not a characteristic that always serves Brits well; they sometimes crack jokes when they should be complaining. Yet in this coldest of economic climates, an unquenchable sense of humor is one commodity that won’t lose its value. (by Catherine Mayer, from Time, February 16, 2009)
1. How was the traffic like during the Blitz? ______
A.It had been completely tied up.
B.It had run gallantly and effectively.
C.It had run toughly and intermittently.
D.It had run idealistically and impractically.
正确答案：D
2. According to the author, the ROOT cause of the disaster is ______.
A.the heavy snow
B.Londoner’s incapacity
C.weak precaution
D.unreliable weather forecast
正确答案：C
3. What is/are greatly influenced by the snow? ______
A.Transportation system
B.Telecommunication system.
C.Sino-British relation.
D.All of the above.
正确答案：A
4. In quoting the stock clerk’s remark, the author most probably implies that ______.
A.London is now so weak that it may be broken through easily
B.Londoners are always resilient despite all the hardships
C.the indomitable image of London was not intact anymore
D.Londoners are optimistic though they face with an embarrassing situation
正确答案：C
5. What is the author’s attitude towards Britain’s coping with the heavy snow? ______
A.Suspicious.
B.Objective.
C.Indifferent.
D.Optimistic.
正确答案：B
6. The author wrote the passage to ______.
A.amuse and entertain
B.remind and warn
C.explain and inform
D.question and criticize
正确答案：C
Our Guilty Secret
Next time you pick up a lunchtime sandwich, take a moment to think about where it has come from. Think of the effort it took to grow the wheat for the bread, to feed the cows to make the cheese, to cultivate the salad from seed. Imagine if you took a few bites from it and simply threw the rest straight in the bin. And if you did that every day, with everything you ate.
Supermarkets and sandwich chains regularly discard a quarter as many sandwiches as they sell. Most of chat food is perfectly edible, but little of it is given away to the poor or homeless. Instead, it is destroyed and often sent to landfill. Meanwhile, one billion people go hungry, in a globalized economy.
Consumers are no better. In the United Kingdom alone, according to government estimates, a third of the food we buy goes into the bin. The appalling amount wasted in restaurants and fast-food eateries is another story. Tristram Stuart’s Waste: Uncovering the Global Food Scandal lays bare our wasteful habits, from the farm to shrink-wrapped supermarket packaging and beyond. Stuart, a “freegan” and environmental campaigner, has based his book on painstaking research carried out over several years of first-hand experience of foraging in supermarket bins, as well as interviews with company executives and trawls through the meagre data provided by governments and businesses.
The book, with 68 pages of detailed notes and 69 pages of bibliography, bristles with facts but points also to the huge gaps in our knowledge of waste. Most retailers, for instance, prefer not to say how much food they waste, regarding it as a trade secret. Giving it away would put them at a competitive disadvantage, they tell Stuart.
Waste is certainly one of the most important environmental books to come out in years. But it is more than that. It is an indictment of our consumer culture that should make us all feel deeply ashamed. The scale of our food waste problem-and its effect on the developing world-revealed in this book will leave you shocked. And, the author hopes, demanding change.
Avoiding the unnecessary wasting of food is deeply ingrained in most cultures. “Your eyes are bigger than your belly” was how children who helped themselves to more than they could eat were scolded in the Belfast of my childhood. Those who failed to finish, or gorged themselves on too much, would be reminded first of the starving children in Africa then, for good measure, of the Irish famine of the 1840s.
We need not go back so far to discover raw memories of food shortages. Rationing during the second world war and early 1950s left its mark on British life for decades, and famines during and following the war scarred Europe and parts of Asia. In the past two decades, we have seen famines in Africa roll horrifically across our television screens.
Human societies have found ingenious ways to eke out our valuable food resources: to store, pickle and preserve; to find uses for byproducts; to fatten animals on scraps; and even to burn or distil the last residues. Much of our cultural heritage is defined by what we eat. As Stuart reminds us in his chapter-headings—quotations from the Bible, the Koran and folk sayings—we have evolved elaborate rules and customs that embody the imperative to use food efficiently.
Yet our culture of thrift, built up over millennia, seems to have broken down within a few decades into a culture of carelessness. The food wasted each day in the United Kingdom and the United States alone would be enough to alleviate the hunger of 1.5 billion people—more than the global number of malnourished. How did this happen?
Retailers must shoulder a large part of the blame. The illusion of plenty they like to foster, by constantly refilling shelves and ensuring there is always more food than can be bought in a day, comes in for an excoriating attack. These practices, in turn, force suppliers to overproduce for fear that if the retailer runs out of a product, they will be held to blame.
If this sounds like poor economics, it isn’t. Food has become so cheap in most developed countries that retailers make more profit
