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  3. The now extinct passenger pigeon has the dubious honor of being the last spe

The now extinct passenger pigeon has the dubious honor of being the last spe

游客2023-08-04  44
问题     The now extinct passenger pigeon has the dubious honor of being the last species anyone ever expected to disappear. At one point, there were more passenger pigeons than any other species of bird. Rough【C1】________of their population went as high as five billion and they accounted for around 40 percent of the total indigenous bird population of North America in the early 19th century.
    Despite their huge population, passenger pigeons were【C2】________to human intrusion into their nesting territory. Their nests were shabby things and two weeks after the eggs【C3】________. the parent pigeons would abandon their offspring, leaving them to take care of themselves. People discovered that these baby pigeons were really tasty, and the adult birds were also quite【C4】________. First the Native Americans and then the transplanted Europeans came to consider the birds a great【C5】________.
    By the 1850s, commercial trapping of passenger pigeons was proceeding at an【C6】________pace. Hundreds of thousands of the birds were being harvested every day to be made into popular pigeon pies. In addition, large【C7】________of the pigeons’ nesting territory were being cleared away for planting crops and creating pasture land. As numerous as the passenger pigeons were, they were not an【C8】________resource. By the 1880s, it was noticed that the bird population had become seriously【C9】________. The last passenger pigeons killed in the wild were shot in 1899.
    Eventually those billions and billions of birds shrank to a single remaining【C10】________. a passenger pigeon named Martha, who died on September 1, 1914, in captivity at the Cincinnati Zoo. In addition to being the end of an era, it was also the first time humans were able to exactly time the extinction of a species.
    A) vulnerable    F) refuge     K) excerpts
    B) unprecedented G) plazas     L) estimates
    C) tracts        H) infinite   M) edible
    D) specimen      I) hatched    N) depleted
    E) robust        J) expired    O) delicacy [br] 【C5】
选项
答案 O
解析 空格前为不定式短语to consider the birds a great，空格后为句点，由此可知，空格处应填入一个名词，被形容词great修饰，充当宾语birds的补足语。由前两空的分析可知，人们发现幼年旅鸽和成年旅鸽都很好吃，那么本句承接上文，具体说哪些人开始食用旅鸽，根据此处语境“首先是美洲原住民，然后是移居的欧洲人，都开始把这种鸟视为________”可知，备选名词中delicacy能够衔接上文。
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