精品解析：河南省驻马店市新蔡县第一高级中学2023-2024学年高一下学期3月月考英语试题

河南省新蔡县第一高级中学2024年3月份月考英语试题 注意事项： 1.答题前请填好自己的姓名、班级、考号等信息； 2.请将答案正确填写在答题卡上。 一、听力(共两节，满分30分)略 二、阅读理解(共两节，共20小题.每小题2.5分，满分50分) 第一节(共15小题；每小题2.5分，共37.5分) A Vast lands of America are dominated by corn, nearly 100macres of it, stretching from Ohio to the Dakotas. What once was forest today produces the corn that feeds people, cattle and, when made into ethanol (乙醇), cars. Now, the nation’s airlines want to power their planes with corn, too. United Airlines signed a deal with a Nebraska ethanol company to buy enough sustainable fuel, to power 50,000 flights a year. The government could decide on its tax incentives (税收激励) for the industry as soon as December. “Mark my words, the next 20 years, corn farmers are going to provide 95% of all the sustainable airline fuel,” President Biden said in July. The airlines’ ambitious goal would likely require nearly doubling ethanol production, which airlines say, with great expectation, would decrease their greenhouse gas emissions. If they succeed, it could transform America’s Corn Belt, stimulating farmers and ethanol producers, but potentially further damaging one of the nation’s most important resources: groundwater. Corn requires a lot of water to grow and it can take hundreds of gallons to produce a single gallon of ethanol. But as airlines take the idea of ethanol, the vital groundwater faces serious risks. “We’re on track to massively increase water usage without any real sense of how sensitive our groundwater is,” said Jeffrey Broberg, who is concerned about groundwater in Minnesota, a major corn state. The Department of Energy said in a statement that “water use is a critical part of the conversation surrounding bio-energy sustainability”. It pointed to a 2022 department study that concluded that the United States could significantly reduce pressure on groundwater by shifting fuel production away from water-intensive crops like corn, instead growing more crops that don’t require irrigation (灌溉), like various types of str