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  3. THE ivory-billed woodpecker is not large, as birds go: It is about the size of a crow, but flashier, its claim to fame is that,

THE ivory-billed woodpecker is not large, as birds go: It is about the size of a crow, but flashier, its claim to fame is that,

admin2009-04-26  5
问题     THE ivory-billed woodpecker is not large, as birds go: It is about the size of a crow, but flashier, its claim to fame is that, though it had been thought extinct since 1944, a lone kayaker spotted it about two years ago, flying around among the cypress trees in the Cache River National Wildlife Refuge. And that sighting may prove the death-blow to a $319m irrigation project in the Arkansas corner of the Delta.
    The Grand Prairie Area Demonstration Project seemed, at first, a fine idea. The Grand Prairie is the fourth-largest rice-bowl in the world, with 363,000 acres under paddies. But it is running out of water, with farmers driving wells deeper and deeper into the underlying aquifer. The new project, dreamed up around a decade ago, would tap excess water from the White river when it floods and pumps it, at the rate of about one billion gallons a day, to storage tanks on around 1000 rice farms.
    Unfortunately, it would also divert water from the region’s huge, swampy wildlife refuges, home to black bears and alligators and the pallid sturgeon. Tiny swamp towns like Clarendon and Brinkley, which are heavily black and almost destitute, rely on nature tourism for the little economic activity they have. In Brinkley, the barber offers an "ivorybill" haircut that makes you look like one.
    The project has some powerful local backers. They include Blanche Lincoln, the state’s senior senator, who grew up on a rice farm in Helena, and Dale Bumpers, a former four-term senator and governor of Arkansas. Mr. Bumpers, long an icon of the environmental movement and prominent in the efforts to establish the refuges, now believes the water project is important for national security in food and trade, and that it will not damage the forests he has worked to protect.
    Opponents worry that the project, apart from its environmental risks, will overwhelm the innovative water conservation methods that rice-farmers are already using, and give the biggest water users an unfair advantage. They also object that it means using subsidised pumps to provide subsidised water for a crop that doesn’t pay. Rice is one of the most heavily assisted crops in America; rice payments cost taxpayers almost $10 billion between 1995 and 2004, and rich farmers round Stuttgart in Arkansas County (an efficient and politically shrewd group) took in $21.2m in subsidies in 2004 alone.
选项 A、an ivory-billed woodpecker was shot by a lone kayaker two years ago.
B、the ivory-billed woodpecker was accustomed to living among cypress trees.
C、the irrigation project is probably broken off by the ivory-billed woodpecker.
D、the appearance of the ivory-billed woodpecker may make the irrigation project terminated.
答案D
解析 第一段：Its claim to fame is that,...a lone kayaker spotted it about two years ago, flying around...And that sighting may prove the death-blow to a $319m irrigation project...本题主要考查对重点单词和词组的理解，spotted是spot的完成时态，在此理解为"被发现"，而 death-blow为"致命打击"，文中用这个词是为了说明程度颇深，足以使整个工程完全"终止"，而不是使工程仅仅处于简单的"中止停顿"状态，所以此处要把握好程度问题。判断C的关键在于如何理解death-blow的含义，文中指的是灌溉项目可能会因为象牙喙啄木鸟的出现而彻底停止，而不是暂时中止、日后再继续。谨记：结合上下文去猜测单词或词组的含义，着重观察含义近似项的不同之处。文中说两年前一个独行客在柏树林中发现了一只象牙喙啄木鸟，并未提及他是否猎杀了它及它是否习惯于生活在柏树林中，故A和D均不对。
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