問題詳情

Question 10-19Geographers say that what defines a place are four properties: soil, climate, altitude,and aspect, or attitude to the Sun. Florida’s ancient scrub demonstrates this principle. Itssoil is pure silica, so barren it supports only lichens as ground cover.( It does, however,sustain a sand-swimming lizard that cannot live where there is moisture or plant matter(5) the soil.) Its climate, despite more than 50 inches of annual rainfall, is blistering desertplant life it can sustain is only the xerophytic, the quintessentially dry. Its altitude is amere couple of hundred feet, but it is high ground on a peninsula elsewhere close to sealevel, and its drainage is so critical that a difference of inches in elevation can bring majorchanges in its plant communities. Its aspect is flat, direct, brutal—and subtropical.Florida’s surrounding lushness cannot impinge on its desert scrubbiness.This does not sound like an attractive place. It does not look much like one either;Shrubby little oaks, clumps of scraggly bushes, prickly pear, thorns, and tangles. “It appearSaid one early naturalist,” to desire to display the result of the misery through which it hasPassed and is passing.” By our narrow standards, scrub is not beautiful; neither does it meetour selfish utilitarian needs. Even the name is an epithet, a synonym for the stunted, thescruffy, the insignificant, what is beautiful about such a place?The most important remaining patches of scrub lie along the Lake Wales Ridge, a chainof paleoislands running for a hundred miles down the center of Florida, in most places lessthan ten miles wide. It is relict seashore, tossed up millions of years ago when ocean levels(20) were higher and the rest of the peninsula was submerged. That ancient emergence isprecisely what makes Lake Wales Ridge so precious: it has remained unsubmerged, itsecosystems essentially undisturbed, since the Miocene era. As a result, it has gathered toitself one of the largest collections of rare organisms in the world. Only about 75 plantspecies survive there, but at least 30 of these are found nowhere else on Earth.
10. What does the passage mainly discuss?
(A) How geographers define a place
(B) The characteristics of Florida’s ancient scrub
(C) An early naturalist’s opinion of Florida
(D)The history of the Lake Wales Ridge

參考答案

答案：B
難度：簡單0.823529
統計：A(1),B(14),C(2),D(0),E(0)

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