TEXT D

To get a chocolate out of a box requires a considerable amount of unpacking; the box has to be taken out of the paper bag in which it arrived; the cellophane wrapper has to be torn off, the lid opened and the paper removed; the chocolate itself then has to be unwrapped from its own piece of paper. But this insane amount of wrapping is not confined to luxuries. It is now becoming increasingly difficult to buy anything that is not done up in cellophane, polythene, or paper.

The package itself is of no interest to the shopper, who usually throws it away immediately, unless wrapping accounts for much of the refuse put out by the average London household each week. So why is it done? Some of it, like the cellophane on meat, is necessary, but most of the rest is simply competitive selling. This is abused. Packaging is using up scarce energy and resources and messing up the environment.
Little reach is being carried out on the costs of alternative types of packaging. Just how possible is it, for instance, for local authorities to salvage paper, pulp it, and recycle it as egg-boxes? Would it be cheaper to plant another forest? Paper is the material most used for packaging -- 20 million paper bags are apparently used in Great Britain each day -- but very little is salvaged.

A machine has been developed that pulps paper then processes it into packaging, e.g. egg-boxes and cartons. This could be easily adapted for local authorities use. It would mean that people would have to separate their refuse into paper and non-paper, with a different dustbin for each. Paper is, in fact, probably the material that can be most easily recycled; and now, with massive increases in paper prices, the time has come at which collection by local authorities could be profitable.

Recycling of this kind is already happening with milk bottles, which are returned to the dairies, washed out, and refilled. But both glass and paper are being threatened by the growing use of plastic. More and more dairies are experimenting with plastic bottles, and British dairies would be producing the equivalent of enough plastic tubing to encircle the earth every five or six days!

The trouble with plastic is that it does not rot. Some environmentalists argue that only solution to the problem of ever growing mounds of plastic containers is to do away with plastic altogether in the shops, a suggestion unacceptable to many manufacturers who say there is no alternative to their handy plastic packs.

It is evident that more research is needed into the recovery and re-use of various material and into the cost of collecting and recycling containers as opposed to producing new ones. Unnecessary packaging, intended to be used just once, and making things look better so more people will guy them, is clearly becoming increasingly absurd. But it is not so much a question of doing away with packaging as using it sensibly. What is needed now is a more unimportant function.

45. The "local authorities" are ________.
A. the Town council
B. the police
C. the paper manufacturer
D. the most influential citizens
正确答案是

46. If paper is to be recycled ________.
A. more forests will have to be planted
B. the use of paper bags will have to be restricted
C. people will have to use different dustbins for their rubbish
D. the local authorities will have to reduce the price of paper
正确答案是

47. The environmentalists think that ________.
A. more    plastic packaging should be used
B. plastic is the most convenient form of packaging
C. too much plastic is wasted
D. shops should stop using plastic containers
正确答案是