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  3. Ten years ago, when environmental lawyer Kassie Siegel went in search of an animal to save the world, the polar bear wasn’t at a

Ten years ago, when environmental lawyer Kassie Siegel went in search of an animal to save the world, the polar bear wasn’t at a

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问题     Ten years ago, when environmental lawyer Kassie Siegel went in search of an animal to save the world, the polar bear wasn’t at all an obvious choice. Siegel and Brendan Cummings of the Center for Biological Diversity in Joshua Tree, Calif. , were looking for a species whose habitat was disappearing due to climate change, which could serve as a symbol of the dangers of global warming. Her first candidate met the scientific criteria—it lived in ice caves in Alaska’s Glacier Bay, which were melting away—but unfortunately it was a spider. You can’t sell a lot of T-shirts with pictures of an animal most people would happily step on.
    Next, Siegel turned to the Kittlitz’s murrelet, a small Arctic seabird whose nesting sites in glaciers were disappearing. In 2001, she petitioned the Department of the Interior to add it to the Endangered Species list, but Interior Secretary Gale Norton turned her down. Elkhorn and staghorn coral, which are threatened by rising water temperatures in the Caribbean, did make it onto the list, but as iconic species they fell short insofar as many people don’t realize they’re alive in the first place. The polar bear, by con-trast, is vehemently alive and carries the undeniable charisma of a top predator. And its dependence on ice was intuitively obvious: it lives on it most of the year. But it took until 2004 for researchers to demonstrate that shrinking sea ice was a serious threat to the bears’ population. On Feb. 16, 2005—the day the Kyoto Protocol to curb greenhouse gas emissions took effect, without the participation of the United States—Siegel petitioned to list polar bears as endangered. Three years later her efforts met with equivocal(不明确的)success, as Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne designated the bears as "threatened"(not endangered), a significant concession from an administration that has stood almost alone in the world in its reluctance to acknowledge the dangers of climate change. The Endangered Species Act(ESA), whose odd lists of snails and bladderworts sometimes seemed stuck in the age of Darwin, had been thrust into the mainstream of 21st-century environmental politics. Break out the T-shirts!
Which of the following is chosen by Siegel as the symbolic animal?
选项 A、The murrelet nesting in glaciers.
B、The polar bear in the North Pole.
C、The spider in Alaska’s Glacier Bay.
D、Staghorn corals in the Caribbean.
答案B
解析 第二段第二句说Siegel申请将Kittlitz’s murrelet列入濒危物种名单，但却遭到美国内政部长的拒绝。所以A不对。第一段最后两句说蜘蛛满足科学的濒危标准，但是如果T恤衫上印着大部分人都喜欢踩踏的蜘蛛，估计这种T恤也不会热卖，起不到宣传的作用，所以C不对。根据第二段第三句所说，可知D也不对。故选B。
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