31　微阶段刷题过关卷(十一)-【提分教练】2022-2023学年新教材高中英语必修第三册(外研版2019)

微阶段刷题过关卷(十一) (时间：65分钟　分值：70分) Unit 6　Starting out, Understanding ideas & Using language 第Ⅰ卷(满分32.5分) Ⅰ. 阅读理解(共8小题；每小题2.5分，满分20分) A In the fight to conserve tropical rainforests, here's a tool you don't often hear about: orange peels. Specifically, 12，000 tons of them were dumped (倾倒) on the land. You don't usually associate waste treatment with biodiversity benefits, something that's good for the environment. An ecologist at Princeton University is talking about a unique conservation story. It started in the early 1990s, when an orange juice producer set up a company near the Guanacaste Conservation Area in Costa Rica, a region that contains several national parks and a wildlife protection zone. The company needed somewhere to dump the orange peels, and the company also owned forested land next to the parkland that it had no intention of growing crops on. So a deal was struck: if the company donated its forested land, it could dump orange peel waste on degraded (退化的) land within the conservation area. Then a thousand dump trucks' worth of orange peels were lying on the land in 1998. “And within about six months the orange peels had been turned from orange peels into this thick black rich soil.” “I couldn't even find the site the first time I saw it.” He couldn't find it because, over 16 years, the orange peel waste had sent the land on a journey to become a vine­choked jungle, with three times the diversity of tree species of the neighbouring control plot, richer soil and a much thicker covering. In other words, the experiment was a success. The results appeared in the journal Restoration Ecology. The ecologist says perhaps this lesson could be applied elsewhere. “It's a shame that we live in a world with nutrient­limited degraded ecosystems and also nutrient­rich waste streams. We'd like to see those things come together a little bit. That's not license for any agricultural company to just start dumping their waste products on protected areas, but it does mean