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  3. The lower house of Australia’s Parliament passed sweeping changes in immigration policy on Wednesday that are meant to discourag

The lower house of Australia’s Parliament passed sweeping changes in immigration policy on Wednesday that are meant to discourag

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问题     The lower house of Australia’s Parliament passed sweeping changes in immigration policy on Wednesday that are meant to discouragedeter asylum seekers who try to reach the country by the thousands each year on rickety, overcrowded ships and boats.
    In a major reversal, the measures would reopen a chain of offshore detention centers that human rights groups have criticized as inhumane and possibly illegal. The Labor government of Prime Minister Julia Gillard largely abandoned use of the detention centers when it came to power in 2007.
    The measures passed the lower house with the backing of both the governing party and the opposition coalition, with only two lawmakers voting against them, and the upper house is expected to approve them this week. But the debate was emotional and contentious, descending at times into a shouting match.
    "This is not the end of the efforts to deal with what is the very, very, very, very pernicious trade of people smuggling, which trades on people’s lives and gives people the expectation that in return for very significant sums of money they can be brought to Australia for passage," Chris Bowen, the immigration minister, told the lower house.
    Though the opposition coalition voted for the measure, it seemed determined to score as many political points as possible from Labor’s change of course. Many Labor members left the floor in protest as their rivals excoriated the government. The opposition leader, Tony Abbott, demanded a formal apology from Ms. Gillard for Labor’s previous policy, which he said encouraged risky attempts to reach Australia.
    "After, tragically, almost 1,000 deaths at sea and after $4.7 billion has been blown because of the government’s border protection failures, the prime minister has finally seen the sense of what the opposition has been proposing all along," Mr. Abbott said, adding, " This government’s failures gave the people smugglers a business model. "
    Australia has tried for years to find a policy that will deter would-be immigrants from trying to make the 220-mile crossing from Java to Christmas Island, a remote spot in the Indian Ocean that is Australia’s closest point to Indonesia. More than 600 migrants bound for Australia have died in accidents at sea since 2009.
    Domestic and international human rights groups have condemned the practice of detaining the asylum seekers for long periods in camps overseas while their cases are processed, saying that the practice is cruel and violates Australia’s obligations under the United Nations refugee convention.
    David Manne, a prominent human rights lawyer who succeeded in blocking a proposal last year to process migrants in Malaysia, called the new legislation the product of "interminable political jousting to see who has the harshest policies for dealing with these people. " "Really, all that deterrence policies like this do is sweep vulnerable people from our doorstep to dangers elsewhere," he said before the vote in Parliament.
The word "pernicious"(Line 1, Para.4)probably means
选项 A、profitable.
B、illegal.
C、continual.
D、destructive.
答案D
解析 语义理解题。根据题干提示定位至第四段。文章第一段就提到了澳大利亚政府正在加大力度应对非法人境者，再加上pernicious一词前面的四个very的修饰，可以推测出该词应该是描述非法入境这一行为非常可恶，对澳大利亚造成了很坏的影响，[D]符合句意，故为正确答案。[A]“有利可图的”和[C]“持续的”明显与原文中该词意思不符，故排除；而[B]“非法的”虽然意思相近，但该词意不适合用very进行修饰，故也排除。
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