Passage B
A bag of chips I bought recently in England had some bad news printed on the back. First, the chips had 14 g of fat. Worse,
they had caused 75 g of carbon to be released into the atmosphere.
The bag called my attention to my carbon footprint: those 75 g, added to the 2.3 million from the plane I took there and
back, plus the total of all the carbon impacts—the emissions into the air that contribute to global warming—of everything else
I do and buy. Footprints math uses life-cycle assessment, or LCA, which calculates the amount of carbon released over the
entire life history of those chips, from planting the potatoes to tossing the empty bag into the trash.
While our footprints are a significant measure we’ve all been getting used to, they do not tell the whole story. We don’t
just trample the planet; we also sometimes leave a positive impression. A more encouraging way to conceptualize our impact is
by our handprints, the sum total of all the reductions we make in our footprints. When she bought my plane tickets, my travel
agent also paid for a carbon offset—planting trees in a deforested region—as a boost to my handprint.
Handprints are the brainchild of Gregory Norris, a lecturer at the Harvard School of Public Health. Norris was dismayed
to find that his Harvard students, after learning how to calculate LCAs, would say the planet would be better off if they had not
been born. “LCA was bringing nothing but bad news,” says Norris, “telling us every person hurts the planet every day.
Something was missing—that we can also benefit the planet. I needed to name these benefits to make them as tangible as
footprints. Handprints was a natural choice.”
Norris has set up a website, handprinter.org, which lets us calculate our handprint and pledge of confirm ways we intend
to enlarge it, with a Facebook status update about the action. Bonus: if your friends make the same move (like boosting fuel
efficiency by inflating tires to the correct pressure or saving paper by printing two-sided documents) because they learned it
from you, your handprint increases too. The more people you recruit, the bigger your handprints. Handprints can also be
grouped, and Norris envisions a day when families, schools and clubs, companies and cities—maybe even nations—could
compete on the size of their handprints.
Elke Weber, a cognitive scientist at Columbia University’s Business School and Earth Institute, says the handprint might
remedy a major reason so few people move from awareness of global warming to ongoing action. When folks harp on the harm
we do to the planet, we feel bad and want to do something to feel better—and then we tune out. But if we have a positive goal
in mind that we can take small, manageable steps toward, we feel good—and are more likely to keep going. Step by step by
hand.
【題組】50. Which of the following statements is true?
(A) The term handprints was first proposed by Elke Weber.
(B) The idea of carbon footprints severely frustrated Norris’ students.
(C) The author likes the idea of a national contest of hand size.
(D) Handprints show the harms human beings do to the earth.
Passage C
The Cedar of Lebanon was important to various ancient civilizations. The trees were used by the Phoenicians for building
commercial and military ships, as well as houses, palaces, and temples. The ancient Egyptians used its resin in mummification,
and its sawdust has been found in the tombs of Egyptian Pharaohs. The Sumerian Epic of Gilgamesh designates the cedar
groves of Lebanon as the dwelling of the gods to which Gilgamesh, the hero, ventured.
Hebrew priests were ordered by Moses to use the bark of the Lebanon Cedar in circumcision
and the treatment of leprosy.
The Hebrew prophet Isaiah used the Lebanon Cedar as a metaphor for the pride of the world. According to the Talmud, the
Jews once burned Lebanese cedar wood on the Mount of Olives to celebrate the new year. Foreign rulers from both near and
far would order the wood for religious and civil constructs, the most famous of which are King Solomon's Temple in Jerusalem
and David's and Solomon's Palaces. Because of its significance the word Cedar is mentioned 75 times (Cedar 51 times, Cedars
24 times) in the Bible, and played a pivotal role in the cementing of the Phoenician-Hebrew relationship. Beyond that, it was
also used by Assyrians, Babylonians, Persians, Greeks and Romans.
Over the centuries, extensive deforestation has occurred, with only small remnants of the original forests surviving.
Deforestation has been particularly severe in Lebanon and on Cyprus; on Cyprus, only small trees up to 25 m (82 ft) tall
survive, though Pliny the Elder recorded cedars 40 m (130 ft) tall there. Extensive reforestation of cedar is carried out in the
Mediterranean region, particularly Turkey, where over 50 million young cedars are being planted annually. The Lebanese
populations are also now expanding through a combination of replanting and protection of natural regeneration from browsing
by goats, hunting, forest fires, and woodworms.
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