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  3. The Indian vulture is medium in size and bulky. Its body and covert feathers are pale, its quills are darker. Its wings are broa

The Indian vulture is medium in size and bulky. Its body and covert feathers are pale, its quills are darker. Its wings are broa

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问题     The Indian vulture is medium in size and bulky. Its body and covert feathers are pale, its quills are darker. Its wings are broad and its tail feathers short. Its head and neck are almost bald, and its bill is rather long.
    It usually is 80—103 cm long and has a wing span of 1. 96 to 2. 38 m. It weighs 5. 5—63 kg. It is smaller and less heavily built than the Eurasian griffon. It is distinguished from that species by its less buff body and wing coverts. It also lacks the whitish median covert bar shown by Griffon.
    The Indian vulture is an Old World vulture native to India, Pakistan and Nepal. It has been listed as Critically Endangered on the IUCN Red List since 2002, as the population severely declined. Indian vultures died of renal failure caused by diclofenac poisoning. It breeds mainly on hilly crags in central and peninsular India. The birds in the northern part of its range once considered a subspecies are now treated as a separate species, the slender-billed vulture Gyps tenuirostris. These were lamped together under the name long-billed vulture.

    They may look ugly and threatening, but the sudden steep decline in three species of India’s vultures is producing alarm rather than celebration, and it presents the world with a new kind of environmental problem. The dramatic decline in vulture number is causing widespread disruption to people living in the same areas as the birds, as well as serious public health problems across the Indian sub-continent.
    While their reputation and appearance may be unpleasant, scruffy and scary to Western eyes, vultures have long played a very important role in keeping towns and villages all over India clean, by feeding on dead cows. In India, cows are sacred animals and are traditionally left in the open when they die in their thousands every year.
    The disappearance of the vultures has led to an explosion in the numbers of wild dogs feasting on the remains of these dead animals. There’re fears that rabies may increase as a result, and ultimately affect human in the region, since wild dogs are the main carriers of this terrifying disease. Rabies could also spread to other animal species, causing an even greater problem in the future.
    The need for action is urgent, so an emergency project has been launched to find a solution by trying to identify the disease causing the birds’ deaths and, if possible, develop a cure. The project will be run in a Vulture Care Centre in Haryana, north of Delhi, and will be financed by the Darwin Initiative, an international wildlife grants programme.
    The three species of vulture affected are the long-billed, the slender-billed and the Indian white-backed vulture. Experts think a virus may be responsible, although no one has found proof of this yet. It’s feared that the disease could also spread to other parts of the world, including Africa and Europe.
    Large-scale vulture deaths were first noticed at the end of the 1980s in India’s Keoladeo National Park. The birds were lacking in energy, with drooping necks, dying after several weeks of sickness. Then reports began to come in of vulture deaths all across India. A population survey at that time showed that the white-backed species had declined by 96 per cent, while the other species had declined by 92 per cent. All three species are now listed as "critically endangered".
    As most vultures lay only single eggs and take five years to reach maturity, reversing this population decline will be a long and difficult exercise.
Questions 56 to 60
Fill in the blanks bellow with information from the passage, using no more than three words for each blank.
Why the disease is a serious problem
- More wild dogs, causing 【R1】______in rabies in humans.
- Other animals could catch rabies.
- Vulture disease might spread to other countries (Africa/Europe)
Proposed work of the Vulture Care Centre
- 【R2】______and develop a cure
Symptoms of the disease
- 【R3】______
- 【R4】______
Rate of vulture decline
- white-backed—96 per cent
- other (2)species—【R5】______per cent
【R4】
选项
答案dropping neck
解析 (根据文章第九段的第一句话，得了病的鸟儿的主要病状就是缺少能量，脖子下垂，几周后病死。故填dropping neck。)
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本试题收录于： A类竞赛（研究生）题库大学生英语竞赛（NECCS）分类
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