2015湖北第一轮质检英语试题及答案(3)

第三部分：阅读理解（共20小题；每小题2分，满分40分）
阅读下列短文，从每题短文所给各题的四个选项（A、B、C、D）中，选出最佳选项，并在答题卡上将该项涂黑。
A
Nowadays, people demand convenience. They eat fast food and use paper towels. Some even wear disposable (一次性的) underwear. The containers, packaging and trash left in the wake of this convenience fills our landfills and pollutes our environment. So while we save time and effort, we are slowly killing the environment.
   Fortunately, governments are beginning to force us to change our wasteful habits. Free plastic bags, a major fault of disposable culture, have been banned at supermarkets and stores around the world—and most recently in China.
   The ban has drawn people’s attention to the dangers of a disposable culture.
  “About 94 percent of the materials used in making durable (耐用的) products become waste before the product is manufactured. Eighty percent of what we make is thrown away within six months of production,” a book titled Natural Capitalism and written by Paul Hawken, Amory B. Lovins, and L. Hunter Lovins warns us.
   There are many causes of disposable culture. Desire for convenience is one of them.
   People are working longer hours, therefore they have less time and energy for tasks like cooking and cleaning. This makes us more likely to buy things that save us time, such as pre-cooked meals and magical cleaning products.
“Everyone these days wants their homes to be absolutely spotless, but they can’t handle the idea of touching something dirty,” reads a post on a blog titled “Life Less Plastic”.
Psychology (心理学) also plays a role in encouraging disposable culture.
 Someone who carries a cloth bag to a supermarket like Carrefour might be sneered at and thought to be “granny-like”. If someone refills a Coke bottle with water, people might whisper: “Is he that poor?”
Disposable culture is also driven by fashion and technology. People constantly replace things they own for a bigger TV, a more–stylish mp3 player, a multifunctional cellphone. This need for “new” contributes to our wasteful culture.
Regulations against plastic bags generally only give governments the right to ban retailers (零售商) from handing them out for free. They’re not banned altogether. But it’s a good start.
“Be of good cheer,” writes Bibi van der Zee in a Guardian blog. “Where plastic bags lead, the rest can surely follow”.
51. Many people are in favour of the disposable culture because         .
A. 80% of durable products can last very long
B. They are too busy to finish the tasks of housework  
C. Psychology plays a leading role in promoting disposable culture
D. They tend to enjoy the convenience brought by disposable culture
52. The underlined words “sneered at ”is closest in meaning to         .
A. shouted at B. looked at C. laughed at         D. knocked at
53. What’s the attitude of the author towards the ban?  
A. neutral        B. positive        C. negative          D. indifferent
54．Which is the best title of the passage?  
A. Costly convenience B. Dangers of a disposable culture
C. Killing the environment D. Life Less Plastic
B
When America appeared from the ashes of a bruising war with Britain in 1814, the nation was far from united. Noah Webster thought that a common language would bring people together and help create a new identity that would make the country truly independent of the British. 
Webster’s dictionary, now in its 11th edition, adopted the Americanized spellings familiar today—er instead of re in theatre, dropping the u from colour, and losing the double l from words such as traveller. It also documented new words that were uniquely American such as skunk, opossum, hickory, squash and chowder. 
The Internet is creating a similar language evolution, but at a much faster pace. There are now thought to be some 4.5 billion web pages worldwide. And with half the population of China now on line, many of them are written in Chinese. Still, some linguists predict that within 10 years English will dominate the Internet—but in forms very different to what we accept and recognize as English today. 
That’s because people who speak English as a second language already outnumber native speakers. And increasingly they use it to communicate with other non-native speakers, particularly on the Internet where less attention is paid to grammar and spelling and users don’t have to worry about their accent. 
Users of Facebook already socialize in a number of different “Englishes” including Indian English, or Hinglish, Spanglish (Spanish English) and Konglish (Korean English). While these variations have long existed within individual cultures, they’re now expanding and coming online. 
“On the Internet, all that matters is that people can communicate—nobody has a right to tell them what the language should be,” says Baron. 
Some words are adaptations of traditional English; in Singlish, or Singaporean English, “blur” means “confused” or “slow”: “She came into the conversation late and was blur as a result.” Others combine English words to make something new. In Konglish, “skinship” means intimate physical contact: handholding, touching and caressing. 
“While most people don’t speaking English as their first language, there is a special commercial and social role for English driven by modern forms entertainments,” says Robert Munro, a language expert.