发布时间： 2017年05月22日

四级六级阅读练习（47）：我们对垃圾的爱

小编寄语：熟悉四六级阅读理解题型的同学应该都了解，英语四六级考试阅读理解材料大多选自《时代》《卫报》《今日美国》等外刊。要想阅读理解这部分拿到高分，必须在平常多阅读，掌握新词汇，锻炼阅读速度。但对于很多同学来说，如何每日在浩瀚的互联网世界寻找合适的阅读材料进行分析解读是一项很耗时间的事情。为此，　英语每日精选《卫报》《时代》等外刊上的文章供大家进行阅读练习。

【今日阅读推荐】本篇阅读材料“我们对垃圾的爱——垃圾成堆”选自《经济学人》（原文标题：Our love of garbage Rubbish heaps 2012.4.17）。如果大家觉得比较简单，就当作泛读材料了解了解，认识几个新单词或新表达方式也不错。如果大家觉得这些材料理解上有难度，不妨当做挑战自己的拔高训练，希望大家都有进步^^

ALTHOUGH it is the buried tombs and the lost cities that get all the press, one of the most valuable things that an archaeologist can dig up is rubbish. Palace murals and heroic statues record the sanitised, official version of history, but a society’s garbage tells the true story of how its members lived.

With that thought in mind, archaeologists of the future are in for a treat. The industrial societies of the world’s developed countries are the most wasteful ever, their spoor turning up in every corner of the Earth. Almost by definition, waste is something that most people prefer not to think too much about. But Edward Humes, an American journalist, is fascinated by the stuff. “Garbology” is his attempt to make sense of our historically unprecedented readiness to throw things away.

The book begins at the Puente Hills landfill, an artificial mountain near Los Angeles. It is the biggest dump in America, 30 years old, 170 metres high and containing 130m tonnes of rubbish within a 700-acre footprint. If it were a building, it would be among the 20 tallest in the city. Building a rubbish pile is, it turns out, surprisingly high-tech. The mountain is a giant, putrid layer-cake, with dozens of strata of rubbish separated by soil and plastic liners designed to contain the brew of noxious chemicals that would otherwise leach into groundwater. The rot produces methane, which is collected via a network of pipes that penetrate the mountain, and burned to produce electricity.

From there, Mr Humes traces the history of garbage in America, beginning with New York’s “White Wings”, an army of municipal rubbish collectors created to clean the city’s stinking streets in the 19th century, through the heyday of backyard incinerators (and the smog they produced) to the modern day, where the most common solutions often involve burying the stuff in the ground or dumping it in the sea. He talks to the researchers who are chronicling the plasticisation of the oceans, a swelling suspended solution of pulverised plastic. And he describes the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, an enormous expanse of the Pacific Ocean where currents concentrate the trash over a continent-sized area.

The author is just as interested in the creation of rubbish as its disposal. But whereas few will disagree with the gist of his observations about the shortcomings of our modern, disposable, consumer culture, the analysis is rather superficial. Mr Humes comes close to blaming a single man—J. Gordon Lippincott, an industrial designer—for the creation of the entire wasteful model of modern consumerism. And although it is understandable that an American author should write a book looking mostly at the problems of America, it nevertheless feels like a missed opportunity. Some of the most interesting parts of the book come towards the end, where he discusses some of the possible solutions—such as Denmark’s strategy of burning rubbish to produce electricity, or an Irish scheme to charge shoppers for plastic bags, which led to a 90% drop in their use. Food for thought, and more.

【重点单词及短语】

dig up 挖出；掘起；开垦；发现

Palace mural 宫廷壁画

heroic statue 英雄雕像

in for a treat 会喜欢的

spoor n. 足迹；痕迹

turn up 出现；发生

by definition 按照定义；显然地；当然地

make sense of 了解……的意义；理解；懂得

unprecedented adj. 空前的；无前例的

readiness n. 敏捷；准备

putrid adj. 腐败的；腐烂的；令人厌恶的