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  3. The now extinct passenger pigeon has the dubious honor of being the last species anyone ever expected to disappear. At one point

The now extinct passenger pigeon has the dubious honor of being the last species anyone ever expected to disappear. At one point

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问题     The now extinct passenger pigeon has the dubious honor of being the last species anyone ever expected to disappear. At one point, there were more passenger pigeons than any other species of bird. Rough【C1】________of their population went as high as five billion and they accounted for around 40 percent of the total indigenous bird population of North America in the early 19th century.
    Despite their huge population, passenger pigeons were【C2】________to human intrusion into their nesting territory. Their nests were shabby things and two weeks after the eggs【C3】________. the parent pigeons would abandon their offspring, leaving them to take care of themselves. People discovered that these baby pigeons were really tasty, and the adult birds were also quite【C4】________. First the Native Americans and then the transplanted Europeans came to consider the birds a great【C5】________.
    By the 1850s, commercial trapping of passenger pigeons was proceeding at an【C6】________pace. Hundreds of thousands of the birds were being harvested every day to be made into popular pigeon pies. In addition, large【C7】________of the pigeons’ nesting territory were being cleared away for planting crops and creating pasture land. As numerous as the passenger pigeons were, they were not an【C8】________resource. By the 1880s, it was noticed that the bird population had become seriously【C9】________. The last passenger pigeons killed in the wild were shot in 1899.
    Eventually those billions and billions of birds shrank to a single remaining【C10】________. a passenger pigeon named Martha, who died on September 1, 1914, in captivity at the Cincinnati Zoo. In addition to being the end of an era, it was also the first time humans were able to exactly time the extinction of a species.
    A) vulnerable    F) refuge     K) excerpts
    B) unprecedented G) plazas     L) estimates
    C) tracts        H) infinite   M) edible
    D) specimen      I) hatched    N) depleted
    E) robust        J) expired    O) delicacy
【C9】
选项
答案N
解析 空格前为had become seriously。空格后为句点，故可知，空格处应填入形容词或分词，充当连系动词become的表语。上文提到旅鸽因美味可口而被人们大量捕杀，下一句指出“最后一批在野外被杀死的旅鸽是在1899年被射杀的”，由此可知，此处是说“到了19世纪80年代，人们注意到旅鸽的数量已经严重减少”，故depleted符合语境。
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