For hundreds of millions of years, turtles have struggled out of the sea to lay their eggs on sandy beaches, long before there w

admin2016-01-05  40

问题     For hundreds of millions of years, turtles have struggled out of the sea to lay their eggs on sandy beaches, long before there were nature documentaries to celebrate them, or GPS satellites and marine biologists to track them, or volunteers to hand-carry the hatchlings down to the water’s edge lest they become disoriented by headlights and crawl towards a motel parking lot instead. A formidable wall of bureaucracy has been erected to protect their prime nesting on the Atlantic coastlines. With all that attention paid to them, you’ d think these creatures would at least have the gratitude not to go extinct.
    But Nature is indifferent to human notions of fairness, and a report by the Fish and Wildlife Service showed a worrisome drop in the populations of several species of North Atlantic turtles, notably loggerheads, which can grow to as much as 400 pounds. The South Florida nesting population, the largest, has declined by 50% in the last decade, according to Elizabeth Griffin, a marine biologist with the environmental group Oceana. The figures prompted Oceana to petition the government to upgrade the level of protection for the North Atlantic loggerheads from "threatened" to "endangered"—meaning they are in danger of disappearing without additional help.
    Which raises the obvious question: what else do these turtles want from us, anyway? It turns out, according to Griffin, that while we have done a good job of protecting the turtles for the weeks they spend on land(as egg-laying females, as eggs and as hatchlings), we have neglected the years they spend in the ocean. "The threat is from commercial fishing," says Griffin. Trawlers(which drag large nets through the water and along the ocean floor)and longline fishers(which can deploy thousands of hooks on lines that can stretch for miles)take a heavy toll on turtles.
    Of course, like every other environmental issue today, this is playing out against the background of global warming and human interference with natural ecosystems. The narrow strips of beach on which the turtles lay their eggs are being squeezed on one side by development and on the other by the threat of rising sea levels as the oceans warm. Ultimately we must get a handle on those issues as well, or a creature that outlived the dinosaurs will meet its end at the hands of humans, leaving our descendants to wonder how creature so ugly could have won so much affection.
We can learn from the first paragraph that

选项 A、human activities have changed the way turtles survive.
B、efforts have been made to protect turtles from dying out.
C、government bureaucracy has contributed to turtles’ extinction.
D、marine biologists are looking for the secret of turtles’ reproduction.

答案B

解析 细节题。根据题干定位至第一段。第一句提到了人们为保护海龟所做的种种努力,并且通过最后一句可以判断出,B项“已经为防止海龟灭绝做出了努力”为正确答案。A项“人类的行为改变了海龟的生存方式”、D项“海洋生物学家正在寻找海龟繁殖的秘密”,文中没有提及。C项“政府的行政措施导致了海龟的灭绝”,与文意相反。
转载请注明原文地址:https://jikaoti.com/ti/wDZ7FFFM
0

最新回复(0)