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  3. Not many people know this, but Norway was invaded by aliens in 1960. The aliens don’t live on the land, but in the sea, and toda

Not many people know this, but Norway was invaded by aliens in 1960. The aliens don’t live on the land, but in the sea, and toda

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问题     Not many people know this, but Norway was invaded by aliens in 1960. The aliens don’t live on the land, but in the sea, and today there are thought to be more than 20 million of them. They have spread across the Barents Sea, travelling in groups of 10,000 or more, and eating everything. These aliens aren’t from outer space. They are a kind of crab called the red king crab, and they usually live in the north Pacific Ocean.

    How did crabs that are native to the North Pacific Ocean find their way to Europe? The answer is simple—humans took them there. The red king crab is very big and delicious. In 1960, the Russian government wanted to increase the number of crabs they could catch, so they took some to the Russian Barents Sea. The crabs multiplied rapidly, spreading through the Barents Sea from the Russian part to the Norwegian part. As well as eating everything from baby fish to other crabs, they also cut holes in fishing nets.
    Ironically, in an age of overfishing, the only way to solve the problem of the red king crab in Europe is to catch and eat them all.
    It is not the kind of alien invasion that we find in Hollywood movies and science fiction novels, but alien species are causing a huge problem around the world, and too few people are aware of it. An alien species is simply a type of plant, animal, or insect that has been brought from a place where it is native to a place where it is not.Such species are usually referred to as " introduced species," and examples in Japan include tomato, potato, apple, peach, tobacco, corn, the mulberry tree, the tea plant, and the silkworm. The majority of these introduced species fit into the local environment without causing any problems, often because they find it difficult to spread in the wild, and tend to stay on farms. Some of these species however, find it easy to spread in the wild, and start causing problems, often by causing local species to go extinct or by damaging the health of animals and humans.

    The disruption caused by invasive species can be enormous: it is estimated that the cost of dealing with invasive species and money lost from damaged land is about $ 135 billion per year in the United States alone. Let’ s look at one example to understand how they can cause so much damage.
    In 1788, Thomas Austin, an Englishman who liked hunting, released 24 rabbits into the Australian wild. By 1950, there were more than 600 million rabbits in Australia. Furthermore, they had helped to cause the extinction of one in every eight mammal species in Australia by competing with them for food. They had also destroyed an unknown number of plat species, and they were the cause of a lot of soil erosion in Australia because they ate all the plants. The government tried to kill the rabbits by infecting them with the myxomatosis virus, which killed 80 percent of the rabbits. Today, there are still between 200 and 300 million rabbits in Australia, but now they are resistant to the virus.
    Once introduced, invasive species are hard to get rid of. Sometimes we can introduce something that eats them, but that doesn’ t always work because these species can become invasive themselves. Clearly the best way is to avoid releasing new species into the wild, and working hard to get rid of the ones that are already there. In 2004, a survey for the Convention on Biological Diversity found 2,248 invasive species in Japan. The Japanese government passed the Invasive Alien Species Act in 2004 to help deal with the problem. Now there are many volunteer groups that are trying to eradicate invasive species in Japan. Why don’ t you help them save Japan from the alien invaders?
    We are living in a time when many species of animals and plants are in danger of becoming【A1】________. However, not many people are【A2】________the fact that, in order to save them, we sometimes have to【A3】________other kinds of plants and animals. This is because some of the plants and animals that we are used to seeing every day are destroying the species that are【A4】________our country. Solving this problem is very difficult, expensive and will take a long time, but if we don’ t start dealing with the problem of【A5】________species now, many of our native plants and animals will disappear forever.
【A1】
选项
答案extinct
解析 文章第四段最后一句提到，其中一些物种很容易在野外传播，并开始引发问题，通常是导致当地物种灭绝或损害动物和人类的健康。因此，我们所生存的时代，是一个许多动植物都处在面临灭绝危险的时代。因此，填入extinct。
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