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  3. Few creatures on earth are as cute as the black lion tamarin, and few have a

Few creatures on earth are as cute as the black lion tamarin, and few have a

游客2023-12-30  9
问题     Few creatures on earth are as cute as the black lion tamarin, and few have as dramatic a story line. Pug-nosed and diminutive, with a comic fringe of hair, these monkeys dwell in trees in small tracts of forest in southeastern Brazil. Or they did until 1905, when they were declared extinct. No one saw a black lion tamarin again in the wild until 1970. Later, in the 1990s, some Brazilian researchers turned up a small set of isolated, inbred populations scattered over a wide region. Since that time, they have been engineering tamarin migration, doing everything they can to save the world’s most distinctive primates.
    Although they are no larger than house cats, tamarins have brains big for their size and a family life organized like our own. They live in groups anchored by an adult male and adult female, along with their offspring. When a mother bears young, she usually produces twins, and although members of the group share in their upbringing, it is most often the father who carries them around in the trees, where the families feed on fruit, insects and birds’ eggs.
    Unhappily for the lion tamarins, their tree-bound niche began to disappear after the Portuguese landed in Brazil and began clearing forest to make room for Rio de Janeiro, the settlements and farms. As is the case for so many threatened species, the breakup of their habitat sounded the death knell for tamarins, depriving them of the continuity of forest they require to remain abundant and safe from potential threats in any vicinity. The animals avoid predators by hardly ever coming down from the trees, so even a narrow logging road through a forest can begin the breakup by preventing them from moving from one patch of forest to another.
    A simple solution was to build bridges across roads, allowing the monkeys to move from one forest to another. With some lumber and the researchers’ work, habitats that had been separated became continuous again, improving opportunities for migrating and mating. The next step was to broaden the distribution of the population. The researchers captured two families of black lion tamarins and moved them to a new forest. After a year, the moves were declared a success: Not only had 80 percent of the tamarins survived, but they had also produced new offspring. So far, so good. The researchers had learned the animals could adjust to the new habitats, even if the insects there tasted a little different or the trees were a slightly different size.
    The techniques for saving species in the wild vary. Species with less stringent habitat requirements, like wild turkeys, have been rescued by moving them into new settings as well as outlawing their killing. More challenging to preserve are species that require a lot of land, like elephants, and species that have highly specific requirements for habitat and prey—like black-footed ferrets. Ultimately, as in all challenges, knowledge is power to save wild species from extinction. [br] The author wants to tell us that_________.
选项 A、the primatologists have been devising ways to save the threatened tamarins
B、the black lion tamarin is the most distinctive of all animals
C、the tamarins organize their family life like our own
D、the Portuguese were the disaster-makers to the tamarins
答案 A
解析 文章先从tamarins的一种濒危物种说起，然后讲到它们的遭遇以及研究工作者们的努力，由此可推断出作者想要告诉读者的是这些研究工作者，即灵长类动物学家们想尽办法来拯救这些濒危的绢毛猴。所以答案为A。
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