2025新高考Ⅰ卷英语文本探索

持续更新中……

A 篇

As the world races to decarbonize everything from the electricity grid to industry, it faces particular problems with transportation — which alone is responsible for about a quarter of our planet’s energy-related greenhouse gas emissions. The fuels for transport need to be not just green, cheap and powerful, but also lightweight and safe enough to be carried around.

Fossil fuels — mainly gasoline and diesel — have been extraordinarily effective at powering a diverse range of mobile machines. Since the industrial revolution, humanity has perfected the art of dredging these up, refining them, distributing them and combusting them in engines, creating a vast and hard-to-budge industry. Now we have to step away from fossil fuels, and the world is finding no one-size-fits-all replacement.

Each type of transportation has its own peculiarities — which is one reason we have different formulations of hydrocarbons today, from gasoline to diesel, bunker fuel to jet fuel. Cars need a convenient, lightweight power source; container ships need enough oomph to last months; planes absolutely need to be reliable and to work at subzero temperatures. As the fossil fuels are phased out, the transport fuel landscape is “getting more diverse,” says Timothy Lipman, codirector of the Transportation Sustainability Research Center at the University of California, Berkeley.

Every energy solution has its pros and cons. Batteries are efficient but struggle with their weight. Hydrogen — the lightest element in the universe — packs a huge energy punch, but it’s expensive to make in a “green” way and, as a gas, it takes up a lot of space. Liquid fuels that carry hydrogen can be easier to transport or drop into an existing engine, but ammonia is toxic, biofuels are in short supply, and synthetic hydrocarbons are hard to produce.

The scale of this energy transition is massive, and the amount of renewable energy the world will require to make the needed electricity and alternative fuels is “a little bit mind-blowing,” says mechanical engineer Keith Wipke, manager of the fuel cell and hydrogen technologies program at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Colorado. Everything, from the electrical grid to buildings and industry, is also thirsty for renewable power: It’s estimated that overall, the global demand for electricity could more than double by 2050. Fortunately, analyses suggest that renewables are up to the task. “We need our foot on the accelerator pedal of renewables 100 percent, as fast as we can, and it will all get used,” says Wipke.

In order to stay below 1.5 degrees of planetary warming and limit some of the worst effects of climate change, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change recommends that the world hit net-zero emissions by 2050 — meaning that whatever greenhouse gases we still put into the air we take out in other ways, such as through forests or carbon capture. Groups including the International Energy Agency (IEA) — a Paris-based intergovernmental organization that analyzes the global energy sector — have laid out pathways that can get the world to net zero.

The IEA’s pathway describes a massive, hard-to-enact shift across the entire world, including all kinds of transport. Their goal: to replace fossil fuels (which release long-captured carbon into the air, where it wreaks havoc on the climate) with something more sustainable, like green hydrogen or biofuels (which either don’t produce greenhouse gases at all or recycle the ones that are already in the air).

Although some transportation sectors are still in flux, we can now get a pretty good glimpse of what will likely be powering the ships, planes, trains and automobiles of tomorrow. Here’s a peek into that future.

Cars

Road passenger vehicles (including taxis, buses and motorcycles) together make up the biggest chunk of global transport emissions — about 45 percent of them.

Today, the clear winner for light duty traffic is electric batteries. (Of course, to cut emissions you need a green, renewable grid to provide the electricity; that transition is happening independently of transport.) More than a dozen nations have declared that all new cars must be electric by 2035 or earlier, and we’re on track to get there: About 14 million electric cars were sold in 2023, making up about 18 percent of new car sales. It wasn’t a clear path, though. “You learn more from your failures than you do your successes,” says Wipke: “There have been a lot of learnings along the way.”

Surprisingly, electric cars date back to the 1800s, when they were popular because they were simpler, quieter and less smelly to drive than gasoline versions. It was the invention of Henry Ford’s Model T in the early 1900s that made gas cars the winner; these were less than half the price of electric roadsters of the time and had broader reach. They were a hit: Today there are over a billion gasoline-fueled vehicles on the road.

In the early 2000s, it looked like hydrogen fuel cells would be the solution to decarbonizing cars. These chemical cells are filled with hydrogen gas and then run like a battery — combining hydrogen with oxygen in the air to make power and water. Swapping to fuel cells would have given drivers a regimen similar to the one they were used to: the ability to go hundreds of miles between minutes-long refueling sessions. “The thought was, let’s not make people sacrifice or change their behaviors. Let’s give them something just like gasoline, but just a different fuel,” says Wipke.

But there were problems, predominantly in the logistical challenges of building a network of hydrogen filling stations, and the economics of producing all the needed hydrogen in a green way. “The big problem is not the vehicles — the vehicles are great. It’s the infrastructure,” says Lipman.

In the face of those issues, battery cars swung past fuel cells to market dominance, even though early versions of electric cars struggled to realize 100 miles in range and took hours, sometimes tens of hours, to fully recharge. The fact that you could just plug them in to existing electrical infrastructure was a huge bonus. And the overall efficiency of a battery is high — you don’t lose energy through the multiple steps of first creating a fuel and then powering your car. Plus, R&D promised ever better and cheaper batteries.

The challenge is achieving a high energy density (a lighter battery means a lighter car, which uses less energy per mile and so can go farther on a single charge), while keeping the battery cheap, safe, quick to charge, capable of powering bursts of acceleration, and operational across wide temperature ranges. Most electric cars today are powered by lithium-ion batteries, which have come a long way and are still improving. Since they were first commercialized in 1991, their average energy density by weight has more than doubled and prices have dropped by an order of magnitude. But there’s a limit to how good they can get, and lithium metal is prone to price spikes in the face of skyrocketing battery demand. So researchers and companies are pursuing two dramatic changes to battery tech.

As of 2023, some Chinese companies have started commercial production of sodium-ion batteries. Sodium is plentiful — it’s the sixth most common element on Earth — so it’s far, far cheaper than lithium, making it a great option for budget EVs. The trade-off is that sodium is heftier than lithium — each atom weighs 3.3 times more — which limits the energy that can be packed into any given battery weight. In other words, these batteries are heavy. Chinese cars with sodium batteries are expected to cost around $10,000 but go just 150 miles or so. Compare that to, say, a Tesla 3 (with a modern lithium-ion battery), which sells for more than four times as much but has over twice that range.

Car companies are also starting to promise solid-state batteries sometime within the next five years. Solid-state batteries get their name from the fact that they swap the liquid that’s typically in lithium-ion batteries with a thin layer of solid ceramic or polymer. This small-sounding shift offers safety benefits and opens the door to better options for the electrode ends of the battery. As a result, solid-state batteries promise much higher energy densities, though they haven’t yet hit the vehicle market. By 2027-28, Toyota plans to release a car with a solid-state battery that goes more than 600 miles on a single charge.

Overall, experts foresee roads filled with electric cars by 2050, but those cars will sport a variety of different types of batteries to suit users with different priorities: price or performance. We’re going to need a lot of batteries. In the IEA’s pathway to net-zero emissions by 2050, 60 percent of new car sales will be electric by 2030, requiring nearly 20 new gigascale battery factories to start up every year. That’s an epic — but doable — mission.

Trucks

Road freight vehicles — including massive semitrucks — make up the next-largest slice of the transport emissions pie, accounting for nearly 30 percent. For these heavy-duty road vehicles, especially long-haul ones, one preferred solution now harkens back to the original plan for decarbonizing cars: fuel cells.

Say you have an 18-wheeler pulling 80,000 pounds and need to go 500 to 600 miles. “To store that much energy in batteries could require up to 10,000 pounds of batteries on your truck,” says Wipke, “whereas maybe it’s 1,000 to 2,000 pounds of hydrogen storage, including the fuel cell.” And a hydrogen tank can be refilled in minutes. This translates to easier logistics for trucking companies, and less weight means less energy needed.
Like batteries, fuel cells have improved since their invention. “Hydrogen has made a lot of strides in the last 20 years, technically,” Wipke says. The pressure that the hydrogen can be stored under in a car has doubled, for example, so more fuel can be packed into a given space. And designers have overcome the problem of water freezing inside the fuel cell and breaking it.

Though the fiery inferno of the 1937 Hindenburg airship disaster gave hydrogen fuel an enduring bad reputation, experts point out that all fuels are flammable. Researchers typically say that a well-built hydrogen car is generally no riskier than a gasoline one — hydrogen, for example, is so light that it tends to float away quickly if a crash or leak occurs. There are also fail-safe technologies at hydrogen filling stations to prevent someone from just spraying it around, notes Wipke — which don’t exist for gasoline. But hydrogen filling stations are hard to make reliable. “You have compressors, you have flow valves. As a result, there’s more things that could break,” Wipke says.

Those kinks should be ironed out as fuel cell usage ramps up. In May, the Atlanta-based nonprofit Center for Transportation and the Environment opened the world’s largest-yet hydrogen fueling station. Located near Berkeley, California, it is designed to power 30 trucks that will take shipping containers and cars from the Port of Oakland to their next stop. Lipman is involved, with his team crunching all the numbers on the station’s reliability and usage, along with overseeing the trucks themselves. If all goes well, he says, it will expand. “We’re hoping to have thousands of trucks in 10 years.”

California isn’t alone in its pursuit of hydrogen. As of 2023, the US Department of Energy has invested $8 billion in a Regional Clean Hydrogen Hubs Program, establishing up to 10 centers that can make and distribute hydrogen fuel. Globally, hydrogen use in road transport increased by around 45 percent in 2022 over 2021 (although that’s still just tens of thousands of trucks and buses in total around the world).

A big challenge, though, is to make all the needed hydrogen in a green way. Although hydrogen is plentiful (it’s the most abundant element in the universe) and there are some natural geological deposits to mine, creating a pure, concentrated supply takes energy. The cheapest way to get hydrogen is to steam-reform fossil fuels, but this produces carbon dioxide. The cleanest way is to use renewable electricity to crack water into hydrogen and oxygen but making such “green hydrogen” is much, much more expensive.

As of 2022, hydrogen demand hit nearly 100 million metric tons, but less than 1 percent of this was made in a low-emissions way. According to the IEA’s net-zero pathway, the world will need twice this amount of hydrogen for fuels by 2030, including 11 million metric tons of straight hydrogen power for transport. The IEA has documented a lot of political support for green hydrogen, and a steep increase in the rate at which low-emission hydrogen production projects are being announced, which is all good news. But actual, real-world deployment, the agency notes, is “not taking off” and a lot more policy support is needed to get it to ramp up.

Trains

Rail is already the most electrified transport subsector, according to the IEA, and makes up only a slim 1 percent of transport emissions. So this is the smallest, most-solved problem of the batch.

Trains, like trucks, are heavy beasts that need a lot of power. But many trains already run on electric wires or rails. Others use a fuel, usually diesel, but turn that into electricity on board in order to power an electric motor (which has better torque than a fossil-fuel-fed engine). It’s a relatively simple step to swap out that diesel for something else, like hydrogen or batteries, to supply power for an already-existing electric motor. “Trains are pretty easy to electrify,” says chemical engineer Hartej Singh, who analyzes decarbonization for the nonprofit Rocky Mountain Institute in Washington, DC.

Expanding electric rail, the IEA says, is a good idea — especially if it replaces flights. Today, every mile a passenger travels on a train has, on average, one-fifth the emissions of the same distance traveled on a plane. But, the IEA notes, putting in a new electric rail line is an expensive proposition.

Ships

Shipping — accounting for about 10 percent of transport emissions — has a particular need to go extraordinary distances and lengths of time before refueling: Crossing an ocean calls for weeks-long journeys of thousands of miles.

Shipping currently predominantly uses bunker fuel — a high-sulfur variant of fossil fuel often described as the gunk left over at the bottom of an oil barrel. But that’s changing fast, thanks to International Maritime Organization goals, adopted in 2023, to hit net-zero emissions by close to 2050. “That’s basically the entire global fleet needing to transition off fossil fuels,” says Tristan Smith, an engineer at University College London who studies shipping. For now, just 1.2 percent of the ships in the global fleet use lower-emission fuels, but 21 percent of the new ships on order are designed to run on these alternatives. Smith sees a clear path ahead to get where shipping needs to go.

For now, one popular low-emission alternative is bio-methanol (made from plants). But this is a short-term distraction, says Smith: There’s simply not enough land to grow enough biofuel stock for the global fleet. For the long term, he’s betting on ammonia — NH3 — as the best solution.

This is a hydrogen-rich liquid fuel that provides a lot of oomph. Plus, we already know how to make it and move it around; globally some 150 million metric tons are produced every year, mainly for fertilizer. Ammonia counterintuitively works out to be cheaper than straight hydrogen, notes Smith (even though it has hydrogen as an ingredient), because pure hydrogen comes with the extra energy and cost burden of putting it under pressure and keeping it cold to store it. Ammonia, by contrast, is relatively easy to keep liquid. And though ammonia requires more storage space than fossil fuels, this matters less for ships than for, say, cars.

You do have to redesign your engine to run on ammonia, though. Ammonia is hard to ignite, and the engine needs catalysts to remove other pollutants, like the greenhouse gas nitrous oxide. All of this is being tackled: The Green Pioneer, run by Australian mining and green energy company Fortescue, is the first ship to trial an ammonia-burning engine (with some diesel in the mix), along with refueling strategies and safety protocols. The main problem with ammonia, says Smith, is that it’s toxic, so spills are nasty. All in all, Smith sees a clear path ahead for ammonia. “We can see a situation where there’s an explosion of ordering [of ammonia-engine ships] from the middle of next year,” he says.

Ammonia will put yet more strain on the demand for green hydrogen. By 2030, the IEA calls for an additional 8 million metric tons of hydrogen for ammonia-based transport fuels, on top of the 11 million metric tons of straight hydrogen for transport uses. There’s billions of dollars of investment already being plowed into green ammonia, Smith says. “We need lots of billions.”

There are additional ways to reduce emissions from ships — including shipping less cargo to begin with, improving logistics to run fewer ships shorter distances, designing sleeker hulls, and even putting up modern sails. That includes strange rotating poles called Flettner rotors that can help to propel a ship in a way similar to how a spinning baseball moves sideways in the air. All of them could help to whittle down shipping’s carbon burden.

Planes

Perhaps the hardest sector to decarbonize is aviation, which makes up about 12 percent of the transport emission pie. A plane must fight gravity, so it can’t carry a fuel that’s too heavy. The fuel can’t take up too much room, needs to work at the freezing temperatures found at altitude, and above all, it must be reliable. “It’s one thing if a truck or a car loses its propulsion and it coasts to the side of the road. It’s much different if you’re in the air and you lose power,” says Wipke.

In 2022, the United Nations’ International Civil Aviation Organization pledged for the industry to become carbon neutral by 2050, so the race is on to swap out the current fuel, kerosene, for something cleaner: sustainable aviation fuels. Most of these fuels still spew carbon dioxide out of the tailpipe, but since many are made from something, such as plants, that originally removed carbon dioxide from the air, the net effect can be to cut emissions at least in half, if not almost entirely. As of 2022, around 300 million to 450 million liters of “sustainable fuels” were being used in aviation — but that’s less than 0.15 percent of the total market.

For now, the most cost-effective option for sustainable fuel is biofuel made from fats, oils and greases (such as used cooking oil) that have been chemically converted into kerosene. This is a mature, already-commercial technology, says the RMI’s Singh, who focuses on aviation fuels. But long-term, there simply isn’t enough of this source material. “We could probably only cover about 6 percent of demand by 2050,” says Singh.

The next option is biofuel made from forestry residue, such as fallen branches and logs or even nut husks. This source material could provide about as much fuel as waste oils, but the chemical conversion is more complicated; the one company Singh knew of trying to make this work commercially recently shut down its biggest plant.

One long-term option for sustainable jet fuel is to make hydrocarbons from recycled air. These synthetic fuels (sometimes called power-to-liquid fuels, or e-fuels) take carbon dioxide from the air and combine that carbon with low-emission hydrogen (yes, yet more low-emission hydrogen). Direct air capture plants, as they’re called, are industrial facilities that use liquids or solids like a sponge to sop up CO2 from the ambient air. These are just now ramping up to large-scale commercial operation: The planet’s first megaton-scale plant — sucking around half a million metric tons of CO2 from the air each year — should be opening in Texas in 2025.

Using straight hydrogen is also a possible long-term option, either by burning it in an engine (the way NASA launches rockets) or using it to run a fuel cell. But that requires special tanks to store hydrogen at high enough pressures and low enough temperatures to fit into a plane. “You need to reconfigure the entire way we think about airplane design,” says Singh. A few companies are taking the possibility of hydrogen flight very seriously, including H2FLY, a subsidiary of Joby Aviation, which ran a test flight of a small demonstration hydrogen plane in September 2023. Airbus and a partner are now working toward building a liquid hydrogen airport-refueling facility in Toulouse, France.

“I think we underestimate this skill of the engineers,” says Smith, who sees the difficulties with ammonia-powered ship engines and hydrogen-fuel-cell-powered planes as surmountable obstacles. “You just put some good engineers on a project, and they systematically work through everything.”
Batteries are also a possibility, especially for shorter, smaller flights like those taken by electric vertical takeoff and landing craft (eVTOLs), which are essentially flying taxis. A lot of long-shot research is being done now on batteries that are hard to make work but would have spectacular potential. Lithium-air batteries, for example would pull oxygen from the air on the go as one vital electrode ingredient, making them incredibly lightweight and well suited to aviation.

“We need to think of this as a jigsaw puzzle,” says Singh, with different pieces filling in different parts of the problem. Batteries might end up powering short hops, while fuel cells tackle regional traffic, and sustainable fuels get saved up for the long-haul flights that are too hard to electrify.

In fact, the whole transport sector is a puzzle, with many pieces needed to complete a picture that’s not quite clear yet. “I can’t see the future any better than anybody, or I probably would be retired right now,” says Wipke. “But I do really enjoy watching things evolve. The pace of development is tremendous.”

 原卷试题

1. What percentage of global transport emissions did road vehicles account for in 2018?
A. 11.6%.                          B. 45.1%.                           C. 74.5%.                          D. 86.1%.
2. Which mode of transport can go green comparatively easily?
A. Planes.                          B. Trucks.                          C. Trains.                           D. Ships.
3 What does Wipke suggest regarding energy transition?
A. Limiting fuel consumption.                                       B. Putting more effort into renewables.
C. Improving energy efficiency.                                     D. Making electricity more affordable.

C 篇

What do you see when you look out your front door? It’s probably a street, and on that street cars are likely to have right of way over any other form of movement. If you want to leave your house, you’re going to need to negotiate around these cars. And if you have a small child with you, you’ll need to pay special attention, holding their hand tight, lest they run on to the street and risk being killed or seriously injured.

This small child doesn’t know that the street out the front of their house is, potentially, a very dangerous place. A very dangerous place: the street outside is something all parents take great care to teach their children to be wary of: never to linger on, never to cross without an adult. Remember: Look right, look left, look right again.

Luckily, pedestrian fatalities in Australia are slowly decreasing. In 1998 398 pedestrians died, but by 2018 the number had fallen to 177, though this past decade the figure has remained pretty steady. Worldwide, some 270,000 pedestrians are killed each year on roads, and this number also shows a downward trend over time.

So are our streets becoming less dangerous to walk on? Not necessarily. While safety improvements might have been made to your street in recent years, many transport studies also show declines in pedestrian mobility, especially among young children.

When quizzed on these trends, close to 70 per cent of parents in New South Wales said there’s too much traffic on the roads for their children to walk safely to school in the morning. Many parents of small children will bundle them into the car instead — much safer.

Dutch authors Thalia Verkade and Marco te Brömmelstroet are bothered by facts like these. In their new book Movement: How to Take Back Our Streets and Transform Our Lives they call for a radical rethink of our streets and the role they play in our lives.

Verkade and te Brömmelstroet lead with a series of provocations: Why do we think about streets first and foremost as places to move from A to B? Why does the need for speed and efficiency triumph over other kinds of uses? And do we even know how to imagine alternatives?

Questions like these hadn’t occurred to Verkade, a Rotterdam-based journalist, until she met te Brömmelstroet, otherwise known as “the Cycling Professor,” at the University of Amsterdam. On assignment to write a series on bicycle superhighways, Verkade’s interview with te Brömmelstroet completely upended how she thought about streets, inspiring the three-year journey of discovery recounted in Movement.

Be warned, she writes, “Read this book and you might never look at the street outside your front door in the same way again.”

The cars that ate Paris — and Los Angeles, Sydney and Delhi too

It’s hard to overestimate how radically the automobile has transformed how we live together in communities. With its mass adoption across developed nations in the twentieth century came the wholesale reconstruction of city neighbourhoods.

The principle of circulation took hold: looking down on Manhattan in the 1930s from his privileged view in an aeroplane, Le Corbusier was struck by a vision of the city as a body in need of fluidity of movement. He called motor cars “machines of circulation” and likened roads to human arteries, promoting flow and reducing stagnation. Instead of crooked laneways and dense housing, motorways were built to clear congestion and connect far-flung suburbs.

Life on city streets changed. Playing on the street became more dangerous as more and more people drove cars. Whole neighbourhoods were demolished to make way for new road networks. Kids learned to play elsewhere.

Some communities fought back. Most famously, a Canadian journalist who had moved her family to Manhattan in the early 1950s, resisting the pull of low-rise suburbia in favour of cheaper inner-city housing and street buskers, found herself leading a community campaign to stop the demolition of her local park, Washington Square. Describing her alarm at its proposed replacement with a sunken expressway, Jane Jacobs called on her mayor to champion “New York as a decent place to live, and not just rush through.”

Jacobs would go on to lead a successful ten-year battle to save the park and the surrounding Greenwich Village, inspiring community campaigns across the world. In Amsterdam, Verkade and te Brömmelstroet write, a mass campaign of tactical resistance from community and activist groups prevented the demolition of the city centre to make way for a new road network.

Similar campaigns occurred in Australia in the late 1960s and 1970s as well, with new alliances forged in places like inner Sydney between working-class unions, student groups, environmentalists and historical preservation societies, united in their fight against proposed new motorways.

Like Jacobs, people wanted places to live, not places to rush through. The communities saved by these activist campaigns are now highly valued tracts of real estate. People love to live in places like Greenwich Village, Verkade and te Brömmelstroet’s Amsterdam, and Fitzroy, Surry Hills and Potts Point because they are walkable, loveable, liveable.

But as iconic as these campaigns to “save our streets” were, the reality is that the majority of Australian, North American and European cities were completely redesigned around the needs of the motor car. After the campaign to save Washington Square, the number of cars on roads doubled every ten years until the end of the 1970s. Ownership then accelerated even faster, until the world hit one billion registered vehicles in 2011 — one vehicle per every seven people in the world.

Those who studied the impact of motorways came to realise that the more roads you built, the more people expected to be able to drive — generating what’s called “induced demand.” If you keep on building more and more roads, people will drive more. In Australia we now have over twenty million cars for just over twenty-six million people, among the highest rate of car ownership in the world.

The next billion cars on this planet won’t take too long: it’s predicted there will be two billion cars on the roads by 2030, driven by rapid rates of motorisation sweeping across the developing world. Like first world cities, cities of the developing world are rapidly expanding their road networks to make way for floods of new cars, ushering in a tsunami of new infrastructure projects. Some twenty-five million new kilometres of roadway is expected to be laid by mid-century, a 60 per cent expansion from 2010.

At this rate, we’re careering headlong into a future of planetary-scale bitumen and concrete.

Can we imagine anything different?

If you want to see how cities could work without relying on a car to get around, visit the Netherlands, home to the writers of Movement, where a quarter of all trips are by bike. You can find more than 37,000 kilometres of cycle paths here, many of them segregated, as well as a network of bicycle “super highways” connecting towns and cities built in recent years.

This is the place where urban designers come to study how streets could work differently — not primarily for motor cars but for cyclists. Here you can find streets where cycle lanes run up the centre and cars are relegated to side lanes, where intersections like the “chips cone” assist cyclists riding together in large volumes. Sensors on traffic lights prioritise cyclists’ movement in wet weather.

But even the Dutch don’t quite have it right. Despite the investment in infrastructure, they still experience high casualty rates on roads. In 2021 a third of all road fatalities involved cyclists. This reflects the high rates of cycling in general, of course, but also shows that helping cyclists move more efficiently and across greater distances doesn’t always mean safe streets. In fact, as mobility diversifies to take in new kinds of vehicles like e-scooters and e-bikes, cycle paths themselves are also becoming more dangerous.

The authors of Movement see a big problem in valuing streets primarily for personal mobility. It turns out that even with mass investments in road networks, the average time spent travelling remains roughly the same. Why? Because greater distances also become the norm.

By prioritising investments that help us rush through, we also neglect to invest in other parts of our communities. And we neglect to account for the true costs incurred. Do we really recognise what it costs us as a society when children can’t move safely around our communities?

As much as this is a story about mobility in cities, at the heart of Movement is a call to pay attention to how decisions are being made about the street and community you live in. The message here is that how we live together in communities, and how we come to prioritise some activities over others shouldn’t be handed over to technocrats, planners, developers and politicians. We all have an interest in caring about the shared spaces in which we live.

Marco the Cycling Professor spends a lot of time campaigning for small changes to where he lives, in Ede. Why is it that a local school has prioritised a car drop-off zone but not created space for something else? How did this get to the top of the local council’s list of investments, encouraging parents to drive rather than helping them with other actions? Was it a popular vote, or did an active minority campaign for the car option when everyone else went about their lives thinking about other things? (Yes.)

Marco letter-drops the community, invites everyone to respond to the proposal, urges people to show up to the meetings. He manages to get the drop-off zone defeated.

Everyday actions can make a difference, sometimes. In Paris, mayor Anne Hidalgo has used her powers to reduce car use in the city core and plans to ban all non-residential city traffic there by 2024. Car-free zones have been created outside schools, diesel cars banned, speed limits dropped to thirty kilometres per hour, and substantial investments made in new cycle paths.

Car ownership is down to three in ten Parisians. The city is being completely reimagined as a “fifteen-minute city” prioritising access to local services over freedom of movement. Why should everyone have the right to cross the city by car whenever they want? Many other European cities are following suit.

What about Australia?

Keep spending to keep moving

Roads receive a lot of investment in Australia — collectively, it looks like we care about them a lot. In New South Wales alone, the latest budget included an $11 billion allocation for new road projects — on top of the estimated $21 billion spent on the West Connex motorway since 2015. That doesn’t include the costs of maintaining local roads, paid through council rates. In 2018–19, the national figure was as much as $8.3 billion, or an estimated half of all rates collected by local governments that year.

Massive spending like this is justified because of the way our time has come to be valued. In the field of transport economics, the value of time is expressed as a function of movement: if you are in any way held up when you are travelling to and from work in your car, then the time you are delayed is given a dollar value, multiplied by the volume of people estimated to be travelling each day for work.

On this basis, Infrastructure Australia’s Infrastructure Audit estimated the total cost of road congestion in Australia’s six largest cities to be $19 billion in 2016, expected to blow out to $39 billion by 2031. With those figures in mind, it doesn’t take long before multibillion-dollar investments to build new road infrastructure start to look kind of reasonable.

But what if we applied the “value of time” metric in other ways?

What do children sacrifice to let cars rule our streets? They lose the time they might have spent playing on the street, walking safely to a park, walking safely to school. Do we know how to value this time lost? Do we know how to cost how time spent isolated compares with time spent playing with others?

With less mobility come greater levels of obesity. A recent study by the Monash Business School Centre for Health Economics estimated the annual cost of childhood obesity in Australia at $43 million. While obesity in children is increasing for a host of reasons, one determinant is exercise. There is a cost there, being borne by children. We need to get better at valuing it.

What of other costs of car-dominated communities? There is the value of time lost when someone is killed — otherwise known as the “value of a statistical life” — which is currently $195,000 per year in Australia, or $4.5 million per death on average. In 2020, when 1106 people lost their lives due to road accidents (just over one in six were collisions between cars and cyclists or pedestrians), we can count the cost at $4.98 billion.

If you care to multiply the total number of road deaths reported in Australia between 2012 and 2021 (11,894) by the figure of $4.5 million per life lost, you’ll arrive at a figure of $53.5 billion. That’s not including the costs of serious injuries. The World Health Organization says the current global road death toll of 1.4 million per year will rise to 1.8 million by 2030. That means road traffic, judged by accidents alone, is deadlier than malaria.

There are other costs. In OECD countries, the health impacts of air pollution were estimated at US$1.7 trillion in 2010, with about half of this attributable to road transport. The evidence increasingly shows that diesel fumes increase the risk of dementia, Alzheimer’s disease and Parkinson’s disease. As research continues to show causal relationships between air pollution and human health, a bigger picture of what we are losing in cities is emerging.

Animals also suffer: some ten million are estimated to be hit on Australian roads each year. The carnage is driving some species close to extinction: recently, motor vehicle deaths were found to be the leading cause of death for the endangered Queensland cassowary, whose numbers have been reduced to a few thousand in recent years.

This is without touching on the environmental costs attached to the burning of fossil fuels, the manufacture of cars and the laying down of concrete. What is the value-of-time equation associated with how the burning of fossil fuels for transport will affect future lives?

Australians in particular are clearly being let down by allowing such a limited range of metrics to be used in such powerful ways. These metrics also miss another vital feature of public spaces — their contribution to the flourishing of individuals, communities, cities and societies. Everyday streets and public spaces are not just engineering problems to be solved, or costs to be avoided; they are also places in which social and individual benefits are realised. Can we place a dollar value on this kind of flourishing?

Ultimately, how we value our streets says a lot about how we value our time. As Annie Dillard famously wrote, “How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. What we do with this hour, and that one, is what we are doing.” No one wants to spend their life stuck in traffic, but the law of induced demand says we’re not getting that time back by spending more and more on roads. The authors of Movement have it right: it’s time to think differently about that street outside your front door. Hey, you might even like to stop and linger awhile. Why the rush?

 原卷试题

8. What phenomenon does the author point out in paragraph 1?
A. Cars often get stuck on the road.                                B. Traffic accidents occur frequently.
C. People walk less and drive more.                               D. Pedestrians fail to follow the rules.
9. What were the Canadian journalist and other campaigners trying to do?
A. Keep their cities livable.                                           B. Promote cultural diversity.
C Help the needy families.                                          D. Make expressways accessible.
10. What can be inferred about the campaigns in Australia in the late 1960s and 1970s?
A. They boosted the sales of cars.                                  B. They turned out largely ineffective.
C. They won government support.                                 D. They advocated building new parks.
11. What can be a suitable title for the text?
A. Why the Rush?                                                        B. What’s Next?
C. Where to Stay?                                                        D. Who to Blame?

D 篇

Boiling tap water before use can remove at least 80 per cent of the tiny, potentially harmful plastic particles it contains.

Nano and microplastics (NMPs) are pieces of plastics like polystyrene, polythene and polypropylene that range from between 0.001 to 5 millimetres in diameter. Their impact on health is still being studied, but researchers suspect they are damaging to humans.

Eddy Zeng at Jinan University in China and his colleagues took samples of tap water and measured their levels of NMPs, finding an average concentration of 1 milligram per litre. They then boiled the samples for 5 minutes, before allowing them to cool. The levels of NMPs were then remeasured and found to have reduced by more than 80 per cent.

“We estimated that intakes of NMPs through boiled water consumption were two to five times less than those through tap water on a daily basis,” says Zeng. “This simple but effective boiling-water strategy can ‘decontaminate’ NMPs from household tap water and has the potential for harmlessly alleviating human exposure to NMPs through water consumption.”

The NMPs were removed by becoming ensnared in crystalline structures of limescale formed from the calcium in the water, says Zeng. More particles were removed from “hard” water – that containing high levels of calcium – than from “soft” water, which has lower levels of it.

Allowing the water to reach boiling point was an important contributing factor to how efficiently those crystalline structures were created. “Boiling water has some other benefits, such as killing bacteria and parasites and removing trace heavy metals,” he says.

“The way they demonstrated how things were deposited through the boiling process was nice,” says Caroline Gauchotte-Lindsay at the University of Glasgow, UK. However, she adds that the world should be seeking to solve the problem of microplastics in drinking water long before they reach homes. “We should be looking into modifying drinking water treatment plants so they remove microplastics,” she says.

语法填空

An exhibition at the Jiushi Art Museum in Shanghai is featuring artwork inspired by Go, one of the oldest board games in the world, which originated in China more than 4,000 years ago.

The Game Art Vs Go Culture: 2023 China-Netherlands-Japan Invitation Exhibition in Shanghai, which started on May 31 and will run until July 21, is showcasing 41 artworks by 17 artists.

Presented by the Shanghai International Culture Association, the exhibition is one of the many events the organization is hosting that is related to the interactions between different cultures.

The idea of the exhibition was derived from the historical Go game between South Korean Go master Lee Se-dol and AlphaGo, the artificial intelligence Go player developed by Google's Deep-Mind. In March 2016, the two competed in five games, with AlphaGo losing one game.

Go, or weiqi in Chinese, is one of the earliest binary-based games. The movements of the black and white pieces reflect the basic ideas of Eastern philosophy, according to Tu Ningning, curator of the exhibition.

"The exhibition brings together Go culture, cutting-edge technology and contemporary art," says Tu. "We hope to present the rather abstract Go game and AI in a visual context, and initiate dialogues with minimalism art, conceptual art and expressionism."

In a Go game, each player places a piece on the point of intersection of any two lines on the checkered board marked with 19 vertical and 19 horizontal lines. When a player encloses vacant points with boundaries made using their own pieces, they "conquer" that part of the board.

"Go is a game of algorithms. Each move should serve a long-term purpose. You try to lead the opponent into your trap and force them to follow your guidance till they lose," explains Wang Wei, a Go player among the visitors to the exhibition.

"The players' personalities are revealed during the game, and one's weaknesses are exposed to the opponent," she adds. "A decent winner always tries to outplay the opponent by no more than one or two points as a gesture of modesty and respect for the other side."

Tu says it was the balance between the black and white pieces, beauty in the strategic placement of the pieces, and the energy flow following each move that inspired artists to create oil paintings, sculptures, digitally generated graphics and silk-screen prints for the showcase.

"I'm fascinated with the fact that the seemingly casual drop of a piece can overturn the whole game of Go. It is the same with art. A spontaneous stroke can change the outlook of the painting," says Zhang Fangbai, one of the artists involved in the exhibition. "You can achieve great rhythm and a sense of melody with free strokes of the brush, which you can also find in the game of Go. I think they both belong to the world of Taoism."