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  3. Year after year, the world’s nations gather to find ways to reduce carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas, with little meaningf

Year after year, the world’s nations gather to find ways to reduce carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas, with little meaningf

admin2012-07-05  57
问题     Year after year, the world’s nations gather to find ways to reduce carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas, with little meaningful progress. Frustrated by this slow pace, the United States and five other countries announced this week a modest but potentially game-changing initiative to cut three other pollutants that also contribute significantly to climate change.
    The three pollutants—methane (甲烷), black carbon and hydrofluorocarbons (氢氟碳)—together account for about 30 percent to 40 percent of the rise in global temperatures. Unlike carbon dioxide, they do not remain in the atmosphere for a long time, but, while they are there, they drive temperatures upward.
    Mainstream scientists believe that to avoid disastrous increases in the sea levels and widespread drought, the rise in global temperatures by 2050 should not exceed 2 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels. Though cuts in carbon dioxide will also be necessary to reach that goal, curbing these three pollutants will help enormously.
    Officials hope further that by tackling these pollutants they can achieve relatively quick and measurable reductions in emissions without waiting for politicians to act or the United Nations process to produce a global agreement on carbon dioxide.
    The plan’s founding members are the United States, Canada, Sweden, Mexico, Ghana and Bangladesh. Washington and Ottawa will jointly underwrite a $15 million start-up fund. Clearly, the program must be scaled up over time, with many more countries participating. In the short term, officials say their purpose is to educate and test inexpensive and technologically accessible ways of capturing these gases.
    Soot, a huge health hazard, can be reduced by installing filters on diesel engines, replacing traditional cook stoves with more efficient models and banning the open burning of agricultural waste. Methane can be captured from oil and gas wells, leaky pipelines, municipal (城市的) landfills and wastewater treatment plants.
    Significantly reducing hydrofluorocarbons, or HFCs, could be harder. These compounds, widely used in air-conditioners and originally developed to replace the refrigerants that were damaging the ozone layer, turned out to be a disastrous greenhouse gas. Efforts to find less-harmful substitutes have met resistance from countries like India, where most HFCs are manufactured.
    Governments everywhere should obviously be pushing to reduce carbon dioxide, the most dangerous greenhouse gas. In the meantime, opening an important second front in the climate war will demonstrate that progress is possible.  
We can learn from Paragraph 4 that______.
选项 A、politicians always make quick reaction to greenhouse gas emissions
B、there is a global agreement on carbon dioxide by the United Nations
C、curbing three pollutants may reduce emissions relatively quickly
D、tackling these pollutants are being faced with pressures from politicians
答案C
解析 推理判断题。本题考查对第四段内容的理解。由定位段町知，政府官员希望通过处理这三种污染物，气体的排放不需要等待政治家的反应和联合国制定关于二氧化碳的全球性的协议就能够得到有效、快速的控制。由此可知，对这三种污染物的控制和处理能够相对快速地削减排放，故C)为答案。A)“政治家往往对温室气体排放反应迅速”和原文意义不符。原文的意思是政治家的反应往往过慢，影响了对气体排放的有效、快速的控制，故排除；B)“联合国制定了关于二氧化碳的全球协议”和原文不符。原文提到不需要等待联合国的协议，由此可知还没有这样一个协议，故该排除；D)“处理这些污染物受到了来自政治家的阻力”是对原文的错误理解。原文只是说政治家们的反应过慢，而不是说他们阻挠处理这些污染物，故排除。
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