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  3. As the earth’ s surfaces warm, evaporation(蒸发)is drying out forests and soils, increasing susceptibility to fire. Last summer, m

As the earth’ s surfaces warm, evaporation(蒸发)is drying out forests and soils, increasing susceptibility to fire. Last summer, m

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问题     As the earth’ s surfaces warm, evaporation(蒸发)is drying out forests and soils, increasing susceptibility to fire. Last summer, more than 7.3 million acres of U.S. forests burned during an intense drought. Most alarmingly, as an intergovernmental panel concluded in 2001, earth’ s biological systems are already responding to climate change. The current epidemic(传染病)of bark beetles adds a new dimension to the risk of fires.
    Mountain bark beetles attack lodgepole, ponderosa(黄松), Douglass fir(枞木), sugar and western white pines, destroying them by injecting a fungus(真菌). The galleries of eggs they lay inside the bark pave the way for the trees’ death within a year. Healthy trees secrete pitch to drown the invaders and plug the holes they bore, but drought dries out the pitch. Woodpeckers and nuthatches keep adult numbers in check, but with warmer winters, beetle populations can quadruple in a year, outpacing their pursuers.
    Warming is increasing the reproduction, abundance and geographic range of beetles, destabilizing the age-old, hard won truce between insects and vegetation. Since 1994, mild winters in Wyoming have helped the beetle larvae(幼虫)survive the season. Usually, 80 percent die, but the mortality rate has dropped to less than 10 percent. In Alaska, spruce bark beetles are sneaking in an extra generation a year due to warming, and have destroyed 4 million acres in the Kenai Peninsula in the past five years. "This is another example of global climate change that has deadly implications for my state," declared Alaska’s Republican Sen. Ted Stevens last year.
    Warming is also expanding the beetles’ range into higher altitudes. In the past four or five years, they have begun to attack whitebark pines at an elevation of 8,000 feet or higher. Jesse Logan, who works for the Utah Forest Service, told the Billings(Mont.)Gazette last month that this development coincides with an overall wanning trend that began in the 1980s. "Beetles are cold-blooded, so their metabolism is related to the environment they’re in," according to Logan, who said the beetles seem to be a reliable indicator of global climate change.
Which of the following statement is true?
选项 A、The life expectancy of the bark beetles is becoming shorter.
B、Global warming doesn’ t influence the earth’ s biological systems.
C、The number of woodpeckers is rapidly increasing because of warmer winters.
D、We can rely on bark beetles to indicate global climate change.
答案D
解析 细节题。根据本文的大意(见第1题解析)，A、B和文章的意思相悖。C中因为暖冬数量增加的是这种甲虫，而不是啄木鸟，故错误。D这一细节在文中结尾，“the beetles seem to be a reliable indicator of global climate change”提及过，故选D。
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