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  3. Public opinion is still largely unaware of or indifferent to the need to pre

Public opinion is still largely unaware of or indifferent to the need to pre

游客2024-06-05  46
问题     Public opinion is still largely unaware of or indifferent to the need to preserve rare species, whether for cultural or for scientific reasons. Some people indeed are actively hostile. Species have been dying out since life began, they argue, and have continuously been replaced by new species. Why, therefore, should we interfere with the process? Let us abandon to their fate the great Indian rhinoceros, the Arabian ostrich, the Tasmanian wolf, and all those other animals that cannot adapt themselves to the modern world. Others will arise to take their place.
    But, of course, this argument has got its time-scale all wrong, It would take millions of years to evolve a set of new species to replace those we are now losing. In the meantime the world is filling up with the hardy and adaptable pests, rats and rabbits, starlings and house sparrows. The cultural argument for preserving wild life, that it is part of our natural heritage, argues itself, except to those who are blind to cultural values anyway, what is less obvious and more in need of explanation is the scientific case for preventing the extirpation of rare species.
    In these days of torrential achievement in the physical sciences we are apt to forget that it is possible only because most of the basic thinking in the sciences has already been done. The seed has been sown and the fruit is now being harvested. Could that basic thinking have been brought to so triumphant a conclusion so early if the raw material, the fundamental physical phenomena, had been subjected to the sort of erosion and extinction that today constantly threatens the raw material of the biological sciences? Supposing the world stock of radium had gone the way of the dodo and the great auk by 1850. Who at that early date could have put up a sound argument in favor of conserving it if it had been known and in danger of destruction?
    It is just this danger which now confronts the biological sciences, whose basic thinking is by no means yet done, but which hold the key to man’s achievement of a satisfactory mastery over both his nature and his nurture in the coming centuries. Animal and plants species are natural experiments in genetics and adaptation to environment that have taken millions of years to work out. Research as we may with fruit-flies, we can never catch up with nature. We have not the time. Is it not therefore folly to allow our vital experimental material to vanish through carelessness? [br] The raw material of the biological sciences has been subjected to ______.
选项
答案 erosion and extinction
解析 文章末段提到生物学正面对这样的危险(It is just this danger which now confronts the biological sciences)，指示代词“this”回指到上一段。上一段中“threaten”点出了危险所在：“threaten”所在的定语从句的先行词就是答案。答题时一定要删掉“the sort of”，不然就文不对题了。这题有相当难度。
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