2. 外语
  3. The Earth has been stripped of up to 90% of its species five times before in the past 450 million years. Now it’s about to happe

The Earth has been stripped of up to 90% of its species five times before in the past 450 million years. Now it’s about to happe

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问题     The Earth has been stripped of up to 90% of its species five times before in the past 450 million years. Now it’s about to happen again—and this time there’s no rogue asteroid(小行星)to blame. One of the first great rules of terrestrial biology is that no species is forever. The Earth has gone through five major extinction events before. The result of all of the extinctions was the same: death, a lot of it.
    As increasingly accepted theories have argued—and as the Science papers show— we are now in the midst of the sixth great extinction, the unsettlingly-named Anthropocene(人类纪), or the age of the humans.
    As the authors of all this loss, we are doing our nasty work in a lot of ways. Overexploitation—which is to say killing animals for food, clothing or the sheer perverse pleasure of it—plays a big role. So we get elephants slaughtered for their tusks, rhinos poached(偷猎)for their horns and tigers shot and skinned for their pelts, until oops— no more elephants, rhinos or tigers.
    Habitat destruction is another big driver, particularly in rainforests. And you don’ t even have to chop or burn an ecosystem completely away to threaten its species; sometimes all it takes is cutting a few roads across it or building a few farms or homes in the wrong spots.
    Then too there is global warming, which makes once-hospitable habitats too hot or dry or stormy for species adapted to different conditions. Finally, as TIME’s Bryan Walsh wrote in last week’ s cover story, there are invasive species—pests like the giant African snail, the lionfish—which hitch a ride into a new ecosystem on ships or packing material, or are brought in as pets, and then reproduce wildly, crowding out native species.
    It oughtn’ t to take appealing to our self-interest to get us to quit making such a mess of what we ’re increasingly coming to learn is an exceedingly destructible world. But it’ s that very self-interest that led us to make that mess in the first place. We can either start to change our ways, or we can keep going the way we are—at least until the Anthropocene extinction claims one final species: our own.
What is the best title for this passage?
选项 A、What Causes The Great Extinction?
B、The Sixth Great Extinction Is Underway-And We’re to Blame
C、The End of the Anthropocene
D、Quit Seeking Self-interest
答案B
解析 主旨题。文章以之前的大灭绝开头，引入人类面临的大灭绝，在介绍了造成灭绝的原因后，提出了倡议，不仅有客观，而且有对于人类前途的担忧和建议。反观这几个题目，A只强调了客观原因，C项过于含糊，D项只提到了倡议，只有B最为全面。
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