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  3. Public opinion is still largely unaware of or indifferent to the need to preserve rare species, whether for cultural or for scie

Public opinion is still largely unaware of or indifferent to the need to preserve rare species, whether for cultural or for scie

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问题     Public opinion is still largely unaware of or indifferent to the need to preserve rare species, whether for cultural or for scientific reasons. Some people indeed are actively hostile. Species have been dying out since life began, they argue, and have continuously been replaced by new species. Why, therefore, should we interfere with the process? Let us abandon to their fate the great Indian rhinoceros, the Arabian ostrich, the Tasmanian wolf, and all those other animals that cannot adapt themselves to the modern world. Others will arise to take their place.
    But, of course, this argument has got its time-scale all wrong, It would take millions of years to evolve a set of new species to replace those we are now losing. In the meantime the world is filling up with the hardy and adaptable pests, rats and rabbits, starlings and house sparrows. The cultural argument for preserving wild life, that it is part of our natural heritage, argues itself, except to those who are blind to cultural values anyway, what is less obvious and more in need of explanation is the scientific case for preventing the extirpation of rare species.
    In these days of torrential achievement in the physical sciences we are apt to forget that it is possible only because most of the basic thinking in the sciences has already been done. The seed has been sown and the fruit is now being harvested. Could that basic thinking have been brought to so triumphant a conclusion so early if the raw material, the fundamental physical phenomena, had been subjected to the sort of erosion and extinction that today constantly threatens the raw material of the biological sciences? Supposing the world stock of radium had gone the way of the dodo and the great auk by 1850. Who at that early date could have put up a sound argument in favor of conserving it if it had been known and in danger of destruction?
    It is just this danger which now confronts the biological sciences, whose basic thinking is by no means yet done, but which hold the key to man’s achievement of a satisfactory mastery over both his nature and his nurture in the coming centuries. Animal and plants species are natural experiments in genetics and adaptation to environment that have taken millions of years to work out. Research as we may with fruit-flies, we can never catch up with nature. We have not the time. Is it not therefore folly to allow our vital experimental material to vanish through carelessness?
This passage aims to make the public aware of ______.
选项
答案the importance to preserve the rare species
解析 文章先是说有人认为濒危物种不需保护，自然界自会产生新物种替代它们，后几段则反驳其论点并讲述了保护物种的重要性，文章的目的就应该是唤起大众保护物种的意识。
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