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  3. The destruction of the world’s greatest rain forest, the Amazon, is accelerating. Philip Fearnside, an American ecologist predic

The destruction of the world’s greatest rain forest, the Amazon, is accelerating. Philip Fearnside, an American ecologist predic

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问题     The destruction of the world’s greatest rain forest, the Amazon, is accelerating. Philip Fearnside, an American ecologist predicts that 2.7 million hectares — an area the size of Belgium — will fall victim to chain saws and bulldozers(推土机)this year. Already, an estimated 6 percent of the Amazon forest has been razed. So much of the rain forest which is more than half the size of the United States — went up in flames this year that the region’s major cities became enshrouded(隐蔽)in smoke from slash-and-burn clearing techniques. The smoke forced the closure of airports in five Brazilian states, as well as roads and river traffic.
    Little disturbed by Indians who have occupied the jungle for centuries, the Amazon is now threatened by an array of forces: cattle ranchers, land-starved peasants, gold miners and other mining operations, timber companies and hydroelectric projects.
    Officials see the vast region as an outlet for settling millions of landless peasants. They contend that minerals under the forest canopy(天篷、树冠), worth billions of dollars, should be exploited for a nation that desperately needs new sources of wealth. They insist the region’s powerful rivers must be harnessed to create energy for the growing population.
    But Fabio Feldmann, Brazil’s leading environmental congressman, complains that the government does not have a central plan to deal with Amazon development. He says this has not only exacerbated(恶化、加剧)the destruction but — because the tropical forest’s soil cannot sustain more than two or three years of farming — has meant that deforestation has provided only short-term gains or benefited just a handful of people.
    Fearnside and other scientists are also concerned that as man destroys the rain forest, millions of species of plants and animals — the vast majority of which have not even been discovered yet — will become extinct.
    Several new threats to the Amazon have arisen in the past year. The government has begun putting a string of pig-iron factories in Maranhao State. The factories will require millions of tons of charcoal fuel, which will be mined at the expense of the natural forest.
    Electronorte, the government electric utility in the Amazon, has begun work on two massive dams that environmentalists say will inundate(淹没、泛滥)large tracts of rain forest and require the evacuation of more than 1,000 Indians from their homelands.
    Anthropologists, meanwhile, increasingly worry whether Brazil’s Indians can survive the settlement of the Amazon. More and more Indians are coming into contact with the modern world every year and dying from diseases for which they have no immunity.
Which of the following is NOT mentioned by the author as a threat to the Amazon?
选项 A、Landless peasants.
B、Massive river dams.
C、Pig-iron factories.
D、The Indians.
答案D
解析 事实细节题。只有D项无法归入第二段所述各威胁力量，且该段开首已指明Little disturbed by Indians who…。A，B，C均不符题意。
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