单选题   SECTION A MULTIPLE CHOICE QUESTIONS
    In this section there are four passages followed by nine multiple choice questions. For each question, there are four suggested answers marked A, B, C and D. Choose the one that you think is the best answer.
    Passage One
    Conservationists on Tuesday appealed to countries to urgently address new threats to whales, dolphins and other cetaceans as climate change opens up previously inaccessible areas of the Arctic and industries move in to new areas.
    As emotional arguments broke out in the  annual International Whaling Commission's conference between pro-and anti-whaling nations over the fight of small, aboriginal groups to hunt a few whales each year, WWF appealed to countries to better regulate fishing and stop the oil and gas industries devastating populations.
    'A few thousand whales are killed each year because of whaling but 300,000 whales, dolphins and other cetaceans are killed just in fishing gear. Now the greater threat is from the oil and gas industries. Cetaceans have so far been lucky because the Arctic has been mostly inaccessible but as climate change develops new areas are opening up. These are some of the most important areas left for whales and cetaceans,' said Wendy Eliott, head of the WWF delegation to the meeting in Panama.
    'It is essential these issues are addressed by the IWC. But whaling governments like Norway, Iceland and Japan refuse to acknowledge the conservation committee of the IWC and do not participate.'
    Shell plans to begin drilling operations in the Beaufort and Chukchi seas off Alaska as early as this month, and other oil companies are planning new off-shore drilling platforms in the Russian far east near the feeding area of critically endangered western gray whales. There are only an estimated 26 breeding females remaining and the oil-rich zone off Sakhalin Island is the only place where they can teach their calves to feed, said Elliott. 'This could mark the beginning of a massive oil exploration effort,' she said.
    The IWC, which is regularly torn by disputes, grants five-year permits to communities with a strong tradition of subsistence whaling. This year, several Caribbean countries, including the commission for the annual quota of whales to be renewed. Most whaling opponents do not try to block small-scale aboriginal hunts as they do not threaten larger whale populations. While governments argue that the use of whales and dolphins contribute to national food security, cultural preservation and sustainable livelihoods, some are seen by conservationists as ill-disguised commercial whaling.
    On Monday, pro-whaling countries led by Japan shot down a Latin American-led proposal to create a no-kill zone for whales in the southern Atlantic Ocean. Argentina, Brazil, South Africa and Uruguay put forward a proposal to declare the southern Atlantic a no-kill zone for whales, a largely symbolic measure as whaling ended there long ago.
    Thirty-eight countries voted in favor of the measure and 21 voted against, with two abstentions. Under commission rules, proposals need to enjoy a 'consensus' of 75% support for approval.
    Passage Two
    In an effort to sustain commercial and recreational fishing for the next several decades, the United States this year will become the first country to impose catch limits for every species it manages, from Alaskan Pollock to Caribbean queen conch. Although the policy has attracted scant attention outside the community of those who fish in America and the officials who regulate them, it marks an important shift in a pursuit that has helped define the country since its founding.
    Catch limits are intended to protect the 528 species in federally managed fisheries. Unlike most recent environmental policy debates, which have divided neatly along party lines, this one is about a policy that was forged under President George W. Bush and finalized with President Obama's backing. 'It's something that's arguably first in the world,' said Eric Schwaab, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's assistant administrator for fisheries. 'It's a huge accomplishment for the country.'
    Five years ago, Bush signed a reauthorization of the Magnuson-Steven Act, which dates to the mid-1970s and governs all fishing in U.S. waters. A bipartisan coalition of lawmakers joined environmental groups,  some fishing interests and scientists to insert language in the law requiring each fishery to have annual catch limits in place by the end of 2011 to end overfishing.
    Although NOAA didn't meet the law's Dec. 31 deadline-it has finalized 40 of the 46 fishery management plans that cover all federally managed stocks-official said they are confident that they will have annual catch limits in place by the time the 2012 fishing year begins for all species. (The timing varies depending on the fish, with some seasons starting May 1 or later. ) Some fish, such as mahi-mahi and the prize game fish wahoo in the southeast Atlantic, will have catch limits for the first time.
    Until recently the nation's regional management councils, which write the rules for the 528 fish stocks under the federal government's jurisdiction, regularly flouted scientific advice and authorized more fishing than could be sustained, according to scientists. Joshua Reichert, managing director of the Pew Environment Group, said the law's ban on overfishing forced fishery managers to impose limits that some commercial and recreational fishers had resisted for years. 'This simple but enormously powerful provision had eluded lawmakers for years and is probably the most important conservation statute ever enacted into America's fisheries law.' Reichert said.
    And unlike many environmental regulations, which are written and enforced by Washington officials, the fishing limits were established by regional councils representing a mix of local interests. 'Because the final decisions were left on the local level, you have a higher assurance of success,' said James L. Connaughton, who helped prepare the reauthorization bill while chairing the White House Council on Environmental Quality. 'If it had been imposed in Washington, we'd still be stuck in 10 years of litigation.'
    But the changes have not come without a fight, and an array of critics is seeking to undo them. Some commercial and recreational operators, along with their congressional allies, argue that regulators lack the scientific data to justify the restrictions. And they suggest that the ambitious goals the law prescribes, including a mandate to rebuild any depleted fish stock within a decade, are arbitrary and rigid.
    Passage Three
    The mystery of the expansion of sea ice around Antarctica, at the same time as global warming is melting swaths of Arctic sea ice, has been solved using data from U.S. military satellites.
    Two decades of measurements show that changing wind patterns around Antarctica have caused a small increase in sea ice, the result of cold winds off the continent blowing ice away from the coastline.
    'Until now these changes in ice drift were only speculated upon using computer models,' said Paul Holland at the British Antarctic Survey. 'Our study of direct satellite observations shows the complexity of climate change.'
    'The Arctic is losing sea ice five times faster than the Antarctic is gaining it, so, on average, the Earth is losing sea ice very quickly. There is no inconsistency between our results and global warming.'
    The extent of sea ice is of global importance because the bright ice reflects sunlight far more than the ocean, meaning temperature rises still further.
    This summer saw a record low in Arctic sea ice since satellite measurements began 30 years ago. Holland said the changing pattern of sea ice at both poles would also affect global ocean circulation, with unknown effects. He noted that while Antarctic sea ice was growing, the Antarctic ice cap — the glacier and snow pack on the continent — was losing mass, with the fresh water flowing into the ocean.
    The research on Antarctic sea ice, published in Nature Geoscience, revealed large regional variations. In places where warm winds blowing from the tropics towards Antarctica had become stronger, sea ice was being lost rapidly. 'In some areas, such as the Bellingshausen Sea, the sea ice is being lost as fast as in the Arctic,' said Holland.
    But in other areas, sea ice was being added as sea water left behind ice being blown away from the coast froze. The net effect is that there has been an extra 17, 000 sq km of sea ice each year since 1978-about a tenth of a percent of the maximum sea ice cover.
    Antarctica is a continent surrounded by an ocean, whereas the Arctic is an ocean surrounded by a continent. For that reason, said Holland, sea ice was not able to expand by the same mechanism in the Arctic as at the southern pole, because if winds pushed the ice away from the pole it quickly hit land.
    Holland did the research with Ron Kwok at Nasa's jet propulsion laboratory in California, where maps of sea ice movements were created from more than 5m individual daily measurements collected over 19 years. The maps showed, for the first time, the long-term changes in sea ice drift around Antarctica.
    Kwok said: 'The Antarctic sea ice cover interacts with the global climate system very differently than that of the Arctic, and these results highlight the sensitivity of the Antarctic ice coverage to changes in the strength of the winds around the continent.'
    Passage Four
    Tigers, the largest of the world's cats, are the heart and soul of Asia's jungles, grasslands, and deserts. They're so adaptable that they even thrive in the frigid Himalayan foothills-and they are the dominant predator, literally the kings and queens, of every ecosystem they inhabit. But Asia's exploding human population is eating away their forest home, and both tigers and their prey have been caught in the crosshairs, killed in vast numbers by hunters and more recently, by poachers.
    In just 100 years' time, we humans have engineered their grand-scale death. A century ago, more than 100,000 tigers roamed across 30 nations, from Turkey to Siberia, throughout Southeast Asia down to the tip of Indonesia. Today, they hang on in just 12 countries; though they're the national animal of six nations, they've vanished from two of them, North and South Korea. They've disappeared from 93 percent of their former range; just 42 breeding populations remain, scattered across the continent. Half of all our wild tigers live in India.
    Recently, the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute analyzed the genetic vigor of tigers in a string of reserves across central India, where I just spent three weeks. One of them, Pench Tiger Reserve, is a 100-square-mile (257-square- kilometer) patch that looks like an illustration from The Jungle Book: groves of towering bamboo, big-leafed teak trees and 'strangler fig' banyans filled with acrobatic langur monkeys. But Pench is essentially a leafy island. It's hard to believe that a century ago, this was mostly unbroken forest. Today it, (like many parks, especially in India) is being squeezed by an encroaching, crowded sea of humanity. These parks are bordered by a patchwork of rice paddies, crop fields, bordering on villages, cities, and all sorts of development. The surrounding land is segmented by roads, railways, scarred by massive mines and other barriers that render it dangerous and virtually impassable for these wide-ranging predators.
    Researchers found that in Pench and other reserves that lacked corridors connecting them to other forests, tigers were far more inbred. Those cats had 47 to 70 percent less gene flow, and as we know from the medical history of European royalty, inbreeding does not create the healthiest bloodlines.
    Tigers have lived in these lands for thousands of years; like all modern cats, they originated in Southeast Asia. The great roaring cats, Panthera were the first to branch off the cat family tree 10.8 million years ago. It's a group that includes tigers, lions, leopards, jaguars and snow leopards.

单选题     According to the passage, the heated disputes in the annual IWC conference were about ______. (Passage One)

单选题     Which of the following is NOT mentioned as the responsibilities of IWC? ______ (Passage One)

单选题     We can learn from the passage that the proposal about the no-kill zone was ______. (Passage One)

单选题     Which of the following statements about 'catch limit policy' is CORRECT? ______ (Passage Two)

单选题     It can be inferred from the passage that ______. (Passage Two)

单选题     The contradiction of changes in sea ice coverage at both poles has been made clear by ______. (Passage Three)

单选题     According to what Holland said, we can draw the conclusion that ______. (Passage Three)

单选题     According to the passage, which of the following statements about tigers is CORRECT? ______ (Passage Four)

单选题     What is the tone of the passage? ______ (Passage Four)

单选题     SECTION B SHORT—ANSWER QUESTIONS
    In this section there are six short-answer questions based on the passages in SECTION A. Answer the questions with No MORE THAN TEN WORDS in the space provided on ANSWER SHEET TWO.
    What cause(s) the bigger threat to whales according to Wendy Eliot? (Passage One)

单选题     According to the passage, who formulates the specific rules for fishery limits? (Passage Two)

单选题     What is the main idea of the passage? (Passage Two)

单选题     How large is the maximum sea ice cover about? (Passage Three)

单选题     Why is the area bordering Pench dangerous for predators? (Passage Four)

单选题     What is the author's purpose of mentioning the medical history of European royalty? (Passage Four)