题干

When Tom Szaky sees a juice container thrown away, he doesn't see rubbish, but he sees a pencil case. Sweet wrappers? A beautiful kite! But these are not the imaginings of a dreamer. For the 28-year-old CEO of Trenton, New Jersey-based TerraCycle, they’re a business model.
The fast-talking Szaky is leading the new industry of upcycling(升级改造). Instead of recycling (shredding or breaking down materials and enabling them to be reproduced as other products), TerraCycle takes packaging headed for landfills(废物填埋地)and reuses it - more or less whole. TerraCycle’s 85 employees make nearly 200 products, sold at shops such as Petco, Kmart, Whole Foods Market, and Target.
Szaky’s $7.4 million company, now also moving ahead in Mexico, Canada, the United Kingdom and Brazil, is quite different from the business he founded with classmate Jon Beyer in 2002 as a freshman at Princeton University. The two entered a business competition with a plan to sell organic plant fertilizers made from worm waste. They lost the competition, but started the business anyway.
With their goal - to make products entirely out of rubbish - suddenly clear, Szaky knew the time was right to drop out of Princeton.
TerraCycle’s first product used dining-hall waste to feed the worms and thrown-away bottles to package the fertilizer. The result: a cheap, green breakthrough. Word spread, and in 2004, Home Depot began carrying the fertilizer in its Canadian stores.
To Szaky, waste does not exist in nature. TerraCycle is a “second chance” employer of, say, a piece of furniture, an ice-cream container. As Szaky points out, “The biggest problem with most green, fair-trade, and organic products is that they tend to cost more. At TerraCycle, everything is made from rubbish, and rubbish is free. People should be able to protect the planet without having to pay a cost for that right.”
【小题1】What is Tom Szaky now?
A.The CEO of TerraCycle.B.An employee of Home Depot.
C.A student at Princeton UniversityD.The manager of a food company.
【小题2】How did Szaky get the idea of upcycling?
A.From his visits to foreign companies.
B.From his studies at Princeton University.
C.Through shopping at big stores in America.
D.Through the experience of a business competition.
【小题3】What is the goal of TerraCycle?
A.To make cheap and green products.
B.To recycle waste materials in another way.
C.To make products completely out of rubbish.
D.To change worm waste into organic plant fertilizers.
【小题4】What is the advantage of upcycling according to Szaky?
A.The cost is kept rather low.B.More materials are available.
C.It has a large promising marketD.Its products are environmentally friendly.
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同类题2

   Ask someone what they have done to help the environment recently and they will almost certainly mention recycling. Recycling in the home is very important of course. However, being forced to recycle often means we already have more material than we need. We are dealing with the results of that over-consumption in the greenest way possible, but it would be far better if we did not bring so much material home in the first place.

The total amount of packaging increased by 12% between 1999 and 2005. It now makes up a third of a typical household’s waste in the UK. In many supermarkets nowadays food items are packaged twice with plastic and cardboard.

Too much packaging is doing serious damage to the environment. The UK, for example, is running out of it for carrying this unnecessary waste. If such packaging is burnt, it gives off greenhouse gases which go on to cause the greenhouse effect. Recycling helps, but the process itself uses energy. The solution is not to produce such items in the first place. Food waste is a serious problem, too. Too many supermarkets encourage customers to buy more than they need. However, a few of them are coming round to the idea that this cannot continue, encouraging customers to reuse their plastic bags, for example.

But this is not just about supermarkets. It is about all of us. We have learned to associate packaging with quality. We have learned to think that something unpackaged is of poor quality. This is especially true of food. But it also applies to a wide range of consumer products, which often have far more packaging than necessary.

There are signs of hope. As more of us recycle, we are beginning to realize just how much unnecessary material we are collecting. We need to face the wastefulness of our consumer culture, but we have a mountain to climb.

【小题1】What does the underlined word “over-consumption” refer to?
A.Using too much packaging.
B.Recycling too much waste.
C.Making more products than necessary.
D.Having more material than is needed.
【小题2】The author uses figures in Paragraph 2 to show ________.
A.the tendency of cutting household waste
B.the increase of packaging recycling
C.the rapid growth of supermarkets
D.the fact of packaging overuse
【小题3】What can be inferred from Paragraph 4?
A.Unpackaged products are of bad quality.
B.Supermarkets care more about packaging.
C.It is improper to judge quality by packaging.
D.Other products are better packaged than food.
【小题4】What can we learn from the last paragraph?
A.Fighting wastefulness is difficult.
B.Needless material is mostly recycled.
C.People like collecting recyclable waste.
D.The author is proud of his consumer culture.