2. 外语
  3. Sexual Reproduction Birds do it. Bees do it. But dandelions don’t. The prodigious spread of these winsome weeds underscores a

Sexual Reproduction Birds do it. Bees do it. But dandelions don’t. The prodigious spread of these winsome weeds underscores a

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问题                            Sexual Reproduction
   Birds do it. Bees do it. But dandelions don’t. The prodigious spread of these winsome weeds underscores a little-appreciated biological fact. Contrary to human experience, sex is not essential to reproduction. Asexual organisms can often churn out multiple generations of clones, gaining a distinct edge in the evolutionary numbers game. And therein lies the puzzle: If sex is such an inefficient way to reproduce, why is it so widespread?
   Sex almost certainly originated nearly 3. 5 billion years ago as a mechanism for repairing the DNA of bacteria. Because ancient earth was such a violent place, the genes of these unicellular organisms would have been frequently damaged by intense heat and ultraviolet radiation. " Conjugation" — the intricate process in which one bacterium infuses genetic material into another — provided an ingenious, if cumbersome, solution to this problem, although bacteria continued to rely on asexual reproduction to increase their numbers.
   Animal sex, however, is a more recent invention. Biologist Lynn Margulis of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst believes the evolutionary roots of egg and sperm cells can be traced back to a group of organisms known as rotests that first appeared some 1. 5 billion years ago.(Modern examples include protozoa, giant kelp and malaria parasite. ) During periods of starvation, Margulis conjectures, one rotest was driven to devour another. Sometimes this cannibalistic meal was incompletely digested, and the nuclei of prey and predator fused. By joining forces, the fused cells were better able to survive adversity, and because they survived, their penchant for union was passed on to their distant descendants.
   From this vantage point, human sexuality seems little more than a wondrous accident, born of a kind of original sin among protozoa. Most population biologists, however, believe sex was maintained over evolutionary time because it somehow enhanced survival. The mixing and matching of parental genes, they argue, provide organisms with a novel mechanism for generating genetically different offspring, thereby increasing the odds that their progeny could exploit new niches in a changing environment and, by virtue of their diversity, have a better chance of surviving the assaults of bacteria and other tiny germs that rapidly evolve tricks for eluding their hosts’ defenses.
The word "underscore" underlined in Paragraph 1 most probably means______.
选项 A、overestimate
B、underestimate
C、underline
D、underlie
答案C
解析 词义题型，答案是C。underscore此处意为“强调、凸显”，A选项意为“高估”，B选项意为“低估”，C选项意为“强调”，D选项意为“构成……的基础或原因”，故选C。本题核心：1．充分利用上下文语境推测词义；2．区分单词之间的细微差异。本题中underscore、underline、underlie前缀相同，对三者表意异同的甄别要依赖于平时对常见常用词汇的积累。
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