2. 职称英语
  3. Originally, plastic was hailed for its potential to reduce humankind’s heavy

Originally, plastic was hailed for its potential to reduce humankind’s heavy

游客2024-04-24  39
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. [br] Lightweight plastics enjoy a great advantage over other materials because they are______.
选项 A、more durable and harder to break
B、energy-saving in making and transporting
C、easy to produce and use
D、environmentally friendly
答案 B
解析 细节辨认题。由定位句可知，在一个人们很关注自身碳足迹的时代，我们能理解生产和运输轻便塑料所需能耗要比许多其他材料少得多，由此得出答案为B)。A)“更耐用且不易破碎”，原文没有提及，故排除；C)“容易生产和使用”，原文提到一次性塑料用品给人们提供方便，但是没提到很容易生产，故排除；D)“环保的”，原文末句提到了我们有技术生产更好、更安全的塑料，但文中并没有说这是轻便塑料与其他材料相比的优势所在，故排除。
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