单选题
The Earth has been stripped of up to 90% of its species five times before in the past 450 million years. Now it"s about to happen again—and this time there"s no rogue
asteroid
(小行星) to blame. One of the first great roles of terrestrial biology is that no species is forever. The Earth has gone through five major extinction events before. The result of all of the extinctions was the same: death, a lot of it.
As increasingly accepted theories have argued—and as the Science papers show— we are now in the midst of the sixth great extinction, the unsettlingly-named
Anthropocene
(人类纪), or the age of the humans.
As the authors of all this loss, we are doing ore" nasty work in a lot of ways. Overexploitation—which is to say killing animals for food, clothing or the sheer perverse pleasure of it—plays a big role. So we get elephants slaughtered for their tusks,
rhinos poached
(偷猎) for their horns and tigers shot and skinned for their pelts, until oops—no more elephants, rhinos or tigers.
Habitat destruction is another big driver, particularly in rainforests. And you don"t even have to chop or burn an ecosystem completely away to threaten its species; sometimes all it takes is cutting a few roads across it or building a few farms or homes in the wrong spots.
Then too there is global warming, which makes once-hospitable habitats too hot or dry or stormy for species adapted to different conditions. Finally, as
TIME"s
Bryan Walsh wrote in last week"s cover story, there are invasive species—pests like the giant African snail, the lionfish—which hitch a ride into a new ecosystem on ships or packing material, or are brought in as pets, and then reproduce wildly, crowding out native species.
It oughtn"t to take appealing to our self-interest to get us to quit making such a mess of what we"re increasingly coming to learn is an exceedingly destructible world. But it"s that very self-interest that led us to make that mess in the first place. We can either start to change our ways, or we can keep going the way we are—at least until the Anthropocene extinction claims one final species: our own.
单选题
The first sentence in the first paragraph doesn"t indicate that ______.
【正确答案】
A
【答案解析】[解析] 细节题。“The Earth has been stripped of up to 90% of its species five times before in the past 450 million years”意为在过去的4.5亿年中,地球曾经五次损失了90%的生物。A中错在不是现在,而是在过去的4.5亿年。B、C、D都符合文意。本题考察的是对成分复杂句子的解读。
单选题
The sentence "this time there"s no rogue
asteroid
(小行星) to blame" means ______.
【正确答案】
D
【答案解析】[解析] 词汇题。文章前面一直在说之前的五次物种大灭绝,后面要引出的是这一次的物种消亡。提到了“it"s about to happen again”和“this time”,可见之前的灭亡原因是小行星。故选D。A、B都是字面意思,而C则意思相反。
单选题
What is false about the reasons of great extinction?
【正确答案】
A
【答案解析】[解析] 细节题。全文都在讲述造成大灭绝的原因,A项出自“overexploitation—which is to say killing animals for food, clothing or the sheer perverse pleasure of it—plays a big role”,但是逻辑有误,以动物为食只是其中一个原因,故选A。而B、C、D都可以在文中找到。
单选题
According to the Bryan Walsh"s view, which statement is NOT correct?
【正确答案】
D
【答案解析】[解析] 细节题。细节的位置在“there are invasive species...which hitch a ride into a new ecosystem on ships or packing material, or are brought in as pets, and then reproduce wildly, crowding out native species”,介绍了入侵物种的来源和危害,都由船或包装物或作为宠物带来,迅速繁殖,进而挤走了本地生物。A、B、C在句中都可以找出,D错在入侵物种不一定是吃掉了本地物种。