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

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

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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.
The last sentence of the passage is meant to
选项 A、persuade human beings to show more affection for turtles.
B、stress that even the most ugly species should be protected.
C、call for effective measures to ensure sea turtles’ survival.
D、warn our descendants about the extinction of species.
答案C
解析 推断题。文章最后一句说：最终我们还要想法解决这些问题，否则这种比恐龙还要长寿的生物将会在人类手中灭绝，让我们的后代困惑于怎么这种丑陋的生物会得到如此的钟爱。这就是在呼吁人们想办法保护海龟，不要让海龟灭绝在人类手上，因此C项“要求采取有效措施确保海龟生存”正确。
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考研英语一

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