阅读理解解析版 · 第 2 周 · 2025 新课标 I 卷

In my ninth-grade writing class last year, I met a cowboy who saved his town, a strict father who demanded his son earn straight A's, and a modern-day Juliet who died of heartbreak after her parents rejected the love of her young life.24 More than once, I found myself wondering just how my students, who'd created these people, knew their subjects so well.

But things were different for their first essay, which was about the question: "Why is writing important?" Most of the essays filled less than one page, and few contained a sentence that could be interpreted as a thesis (论点) statement. I was shocked. Then I realized that the problem was the question itself. They could have written pages on the necessity of computers, but writing, in and of itself, simply didn't strike them as important.25 This would have to change.

As a new unit started, I asked everyone to write a persuasive piece on a health-related topic of their choice. This time they found the exercise much more interesting. For the next two assignments, a personal-narrative unit followed by a creative-writing workshop, I only required that the piece meet the specifications of its genre (体裁) and that it contain a thesis. The results were staggering. The students took on diverse topics and turned in stories, 10 to 20 pages each, with characters that broadened my view and touched my heart.26

I walked into class believing that writing is important as a means of communication. However, my students demonstrated something more important to me. When the final bell rang in June, I walked away with a yearbook full of messages about writing's most powerful significance — the ability to connect people, to put us in another's skin, to teach us what it means to be human.27

While safety improvements might have been made to our streets in recent years, transport studies also show declines in pedestrian (行人) mobility, especially among young children. Many parents say there's too much traffic on the roads for their children to walk safely to school, so they pack them into the car instead.28

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 rethink of our streets and the role they play in our lives.

Life on city streets started to change decades ago. Whole neighbourhoods were destroyed to make way for new road networks and kids had to play elsewhere. Some communities fought back. Most famously, a Canadian journalist who had moved her family to Manhattan in the early 1950s led a campaign to stop the destruction of her local park. Describing her alarm at its proposed replacement with an expressway, Jane Jacobs called on her mayor (市长) to champion "New York as a decent place to live, and not just rush through."29 Similar campaigns occurred in Australia in the late 1960s and 1970s as well.

Although these campaigns were widespread, the reality is that the majority of the western cities were completely redesigned around the needs of the motor car.30 The number of cars on roads has been increasing rapidly. 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.

We invest a lot in roads that help us rush through, but we fail to account for the true costs. Do we really recognise what it costs us as a society when children can't move safely around our communities? The authors of Movement have it right: it's time to think differently about that street outside your front door.

Microplastics have become a common source of pollution across the Earth — they have settled in the deep sea and on the Himalayas, stuck inside volcanic rocks, filled the stomachs of seabirds and even fallen in fresh Antarctic snow.32 They are even appearing inside humans.

Now, new research suggests that a simple, cheap measure may significantly reduce the level of microplastics in water from your tap (水龙头): boiling and filtering (过滤) it. In a study published Wednesday in Environmental Science & Technology Letters, researchers from China found that boiling tap water for just five minutes — then filtering it after it cools — could remove at least 80 percent of its microplastics.33

Crucially, this process relies on the water containing enough calcium carbonate (碳酸钙) to trap the plastics. In the study, boiling hard water containing 300 milligrams of calcium carbonate led to an almost 90 percent drop in plastics. But in samples with less than 60 milligrams of calcium carbonate, boiling reduced the level of plastics by just 25 percent.33

Additionally, the research didn't include all types of plastics. The team focused only on three common types — polystyrene, polyethylene and polypropylene — and they didn't study other chemicals previously found in water such as vinyl chloride.

Still, the findings show a potential path forward for reducing microplastic exposure — a task that's becoming increasingly difficult. Even bottled water, scientists found earlier this year, contains 10 to 1,000 times more microplastics than originally thought.34

Scientists are still trying to determine how harmful microplastics are — but what they do know has raised concerns. The new study suggests boiling tap water could be a tool to limit intake. "The way they demonstrated how microplastics were trapped through the boiling process was nice," Caroline Gauchotte-Lindsay, an environmental engineer at the University of Glasgow in Scotland who was not involved in the research, tells New Scientist. "We should be looking into upgrading drinking water treatment plants so they remove microplastics."35