Early in the age of affluence that followed World War Ⅱ, an American retailing analyst named Victor Lebow proclaimed, "Our enormously productive economy... demands that we make consumption our way of life, that we convert the buying and use of goods into rituals, that we seek our spiritual satisfaction, our ego satisfaction, in consumption.... We need things consumed, burned up, worn out, replaced and discarded at an ever increasing rate."Americans have responded to Lebow"s call, and much of the world has followed.Consumption has become a central pillar of life in industrial lands and is even embedded in social values. Opinion surveys in the world"s two largest economies—Japan and the United Sates—show consumerist definitions of success becoming ever more prevalent.Overconsumption by the world"s fortunate is an environmental problem unmatched in severity by anything but perhaps population growth. Their surging exploitation of resources threatens to exhaust or unalterably spoil forests, soils, water, air and climate.Ironically, high consumption may be a mixed blessing in human terms, too. The time-honored values of integrity of character, good work, friendship, family and community have often been sacrificed in the rush to riches.Thus many in the industrial lands have a sense that their world of plenty is somehow hollow—that, misled by a consumerist culture, they have been fruitlessly attempting to satisfy what are essentially social, psychological and spiritual needs with material things.Of course, the opposite of overconsumption—poverty—is no solution to either environmental or human problems. It is infinitely worse for people and bad for the natural world too. Dispossessed peasants slash-and-burn their way into the rain forests of Latin America, and hungry nomads turn their herds out onto fragile African grassland, reducing it to desert.If environmental destruction results when people have either too little or too much, we are left to wonder how much is enough. What level of consumption can the earth support When does having more cease to add noticeably to human satisfaction It can be inferred from the passage that ______.
A. human spiritual needs should match material affluence
B. there is never an end to satisfying people"s material needs
C. whether high consumption should be encouraged is still an issue
D. how to keep consumption at a reasonable level remains a problem
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Passage Two There was a time in my life when beauty meant something special to me.I guess that would have been when I was about six or seven years old, just several weeks or maybe a month before the orphanage (孤儿院) turned me into an old man. I would get up every morning at the orphanage, make my bed just like the little soldier that I had become and then I would get into one of the two straight lines and march to breakfast with the other twenty or thirty boys who also lived in my dormitory. After breakfast one Saturday morning I returned to the dormitory and saw the house parent chasing the beautiful monarch butterflies who lived by the hundreds in the bushes scattered around the orphanage. I carefully watched as he caught these beautiful creatures, one after another, and then took thegn from the net and then stuck straight pins through their head and wings, pinning them onto a heavy cardboard sheet. How cruel it was to kill something of such beauty.I had walked many times out into the bushes, all by myself, just so the butterflies could land on my head, face and hands so I could look at them up close. When the telephone rang the house parent laid the large cardboard paper down on the back cement(水泥) step and went inside to answer the phone.I walked up to the cardboard and looked at the one butterfly who he had just pinned to the large paper. It was still moving about so I reached down and touched it on the wing causing one of the pins to fall out.It started flying around and around trying to get away but it was still pinned by the one wing with the other straight pin.Finally its wing broke off and the butterfly fell to the ground and just trembled. I picked up the torn wing and the butterfly and I spat on its wing and tried to get it to stick back on so it could fly away and be free before the house parent came back.But it would not stay on him. What is the author’s attitude towards the house parent’s pinning some butterflies on the cardboard
A. tolerant
B. unconcerned
C. disgusted
D. discouraged
Passage Four Throughout the past century humanity did everything in its power to control nature. We dammed earth’s rivers, chopped down the forests and exhausted the soils. Burning up fuels, we pumped a great deal of greenhouse gases into the air, altering the chemistry of the atmosphere and warming the planet in just a few decades.And as our population began in the year 2000 above the 6 billion mark, still spreading across the continents, dozens of animal and plant species were dying out every, day, including the first primate(灵长类) to disappear in more than 100 years. As the start of the 21st century there were unmistakable signs that nature was beginning to take its revenge. Melting ice in both poles of the earth suggested that the climate was changing rapidly. Weather was even more changeable than usual, giving some places too little rain and others too much.Fires raced across the dried American West last summer, and recent storms spread damages from Britain to China.No specific event could be directly blamed on global warming.Floods and drought will be more frequent and severe.Other sad signs from an overburdened planet include falling grain and fish harvests and fierce competition for scarce water supplies. But there were also, in the year 2000, signs of great awareness.Connected by the Internet, hundreds of millions of people gathered for the 30th anniversary of Earth Day. Governments from Washington to Lima took steps to protect the large wild areas from development. Progress was made toward using more renewable energy from the wind and the sun, and new cars that used both gasoline and electricity spotted(显示) fuel-economy statistics. The goal for the new century is "sustainable development" .Is that possible It depends on how well we understand that humanity is part of nature, not lord and master. What is the result of the human control over the nature
A. Natural resources are being exhausted.
B. There is a global warming effect.
C. Species of animals and plants are reduced.
D. All of the above.
Early in the age of affluence that followed World War Ⅱ, an American retailing analyst named Victor Lebow proclaimed, "Our enormously productive economy... demands that we make consumption our way of life, that we convert the buying and use of goods into rituals, that we seek our spiritual satisfaction, our ego satisfaction, in consumption.... We need things consumed, burned up, worn out, replaced and discarded at an ever increasing rate."Americans have responded to Lebow"s call, and much of the world has followed.Consumption has become a central pillar of life in industrial lands and is even embedded in social values. Opinion surveys in the world"s two largest economies—Japan and the United Sates—show consumerist definitions of success becoming ever more prevalent.Overconsumption by the world"s fortunate is an environmental problem unmatched in severity by anything but perhaps population growth. Their surging exploitation of resources threatens to exhaust or unalterably spoil forests, soils, water, air and climate.Ironically, high consumption may be a mixed blessing in human terms, too. The time-honored values of integrity of character, good work, friendship, family and community have often been sacrificed in the rush to riches.Thus many in the industrial lands have a sense that their world of plenty is somehow hollow—that, misled by a consumerist culture, they have been fruitlessly attempting to satisfy what are essentially social, psychological and spiritual needs with material things.Of course, the opposite of overconsumption—poverty—is no solution to either environmental or human problems. It is infinitely worse for people and bad for the natural world too. Dispossessed peasants slash-and-burn their way into the rain forests of Latin America, and hungry nomads turn their herds out onto fragile African grassland, reducing it to desert.If environmental destruction results when people have either too little or too much, we are left to wonder how much is enough. What level of consumption can the earth support When does having more cease to add noticeably to human satisfaction Apart from enormous productivity, another important impetus to high consumption is ______.
A. the conversion of the sale of goods into rituals
B. the people"s desire for a rise in their living standards
C. the imbalance that has existed between production and consumption
D. the concept that one"s success is measured by how much they consume
The river is ( )that one.
A. as three times long as
B. the third time as
C. three times the length of
D. three times longer as