话题02：低碳和环保 2023届高考英语阅读理解最新热点话题分类训练（全国通用）

【高考英语三轮冲刺】话题02：低碳和环保10篇 2023届高考英语阅读理解最新热点话题分类训练（全国通用） 1.（2023·江西宜春·统考一模） Steven Strauss was skeptical when he first heard about a poplar tree (杨树) bio-engineered to suck more carbon dioxide out of the air. So when two entrepreneur — Maddie Hall and Patrick Mellor — asked him to help test out the idea, Strauss was interested but hesitant. “If it works, it would be a wonderful thing”, he said, “But typically in research on agriculture or forestry, it works in the lab or the greenhouse, but tells you nothing.” Four years later, these two entrepreneurs have raised $30 million for Living Carbon, a company that aims to plant between 4 million and 5 million poplar trees by the spring of 2024, using photo-synthesis enhanced seeds. Eventually, the company hopes to enter the carbon offset market, selling credits to companies that need to reach net-zero emission goals to help fight global warming. One of the field trials will be conducted in a forest at Oregon State University, where Strauss is a distinguished professor of forest biotechnology. Other locations are throughout the United States, including the site of an abandoned mine in Pennsylvania with degraded soils. Co-founders Hall and Mellor hope the trials will prove that the taller poplar trees can store as much as 27 percent more CO₂ than ordinary trees. The company’s next step will be to show that the CO₂ can be stored in wood, outlasting the poplar’s lifespan, which can reach up to 200 years. The Department of Energy, which provided Living Carbon with a $500,000 grant in 2021, predicted that the company’s approach could remove billions of tons of CO₂ from the atmosphere if successfully scaled up. Investors have since lined up, including Toyota Ventures and Singapore’s state-owned Temasek. Hall, the CEO of Living Carbon, has described high hopes for the project. “Today Earth no longer has the ability to avoid carbon as quickly,” she wrote in a blog post,“And now it’s time for the big suck.” 1．What is Strauss’s first