問題詳情


(B)In the past two years, scores of scientific studies have suggested that trillions of murmuring,droning, susurrating honeybees, butterflies, caddisflies, damselflies and beetles are dying off. Mostof the studies describe declines of 50% and more in different measures of insect health over decades.The immediate reaction is consternation. Because insects enable plants to reproduce, throughpollination, and are food for other animals, a collapse in their numbers would be catastrophic. “Theinsect apocalypse is here,” trumpeted the New York Times last year.Yet only a handful of databases record the abundance of insects over a long time. There are nostudies at all of wild insect numbers in most of the world, and reliable data are too scarce to declare aglobal emergency. Where the evidence does show a collapse—in Europe and America—agriculturaland rural ecosystems are holding up. Plants still grow, attracting pollinators and reproducing. Farmyields also remain high. As some insect species die out, others seem to be moving into the nichesthey have left, keeping ecosystems going, albeit with less biodiversity than before.People rely on healthy ecosystems for everything from nutrient cycling to the local weather,and the more species make up an ecosystem, the more stable it is likely to be. The scale of theobserved decline raises doubts about how long ecosystems can remain resilient. An experiment inwhich researchers gradually plucked out insect pollinators from fields found that plant diversity heldup well until about 90% of insects had been removed. Then it collapsed. As one character in a novelby Ernest Hemingway says, bankruptcy came in two ways: “gradually, then suddenly.”
34. Which of the following words can best describe most of the people’s instantaneous reaction tothe drastic decrement of insect population?
(A) fright
(B) bewilderment
(C) agitation
(D) placidness

參考答案

答案：A
難度：非常困難0
統計：A(0),B(2),C(0),D(0),E(0)

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