2019 年托福阅读复习模拟练习及答案解析三
托福阅读原文
Two species of deer have been prevalent inthe Puget Sound area of Washington State in the Pacific Northwest of the UnitedStates. The black-tailed deer, a lowland, west-side cousin of the mule deer ofeastern Washington, is now the most common. The other species, the Columbianwhite-tailed deer, in earlier times was common in the open prairie country; itis now restricted to the low, marshy islands and flood plains along the lowerColumbia River.
Nearly any kind of plant of the forestunderstory can be part of a deer's diet. Where the forest inhibits the growthof grass and other meadow plants, the black-tailed deer browses on huckleberry,salal, dogwood, and almost any other shrub or herb. But this is fair-weatherfeeding. What keeps the black- tailed deer alive in the harsher seasons of plantdecay and dormancy? One compensation for not hibernating is the built- in urgeto migrate. Deer may move from high-elevation browse areas in summer down to thelowland areas in late fall. Even with snow on the ground, the high bushyunderstory is exposed; also snow and wind bring down leafy branches of cedar,hemlock, red alder, and other arboreal fodder.
The numbers of deer have fluctuatedmarkedly since the entry of Europeans into Puget Sound country. The earlyexplorers and settlers told of abundant deer in the early 1800s and yet almostin the same breath bemoaned the lack of this succulent game animal. Famousexplorers of the
north American frontier, Lewis and Clark arrived at the mouthof the Columbia River on November 14, 1805, in nearly starved circumstances.They had experienced great difficulty finding game west of the Rockies and notuntil the second of December did they kill their first elk. To keep 40 peoplealive that winter, they consumed approximately 150 elk and 20 deer. And whengame moved out of the lowlands in early spring, the expedition decided toreturn east rather than face possible starvation. Later on in the early yearsof the nineteenth century, when Fort Vancouver became the headquarters of theHudson's Bay Company, deer populations continued to fluctuate. David Douglas,Scottish botanical explorer of the 1830s, found a disturbing change in theanimal life around the fort during the period between his first visit in 1825and his final contact with the fort in 1832. A recent Douglas biographerstates
：\
picturesquely dotted the meadows around thefort were gone [in 1832], hunted to extermination in order to protect the crops.\
Reduction in numbers of game should haveboded ill for their survival in later times. A worsening of the plight of deerwas to be expected as settlers encroached on the land, logging, burning, andclearing, eventually replacing a wilderness landscape with roads, cities,towns, and factories. No doubt the numbers of deer declined still further.Recall the fate of the Columbian white-tailed deer, now in a protected status.But for the black-tailed deer, human pressure has had just the opposite effect.Wildlife zoologist Helmut Buechner(1953), in reviewing the nature of bioticchanges in Washington through recorded time, says that
\any other time in its history, thewinter population
fluctuating around approximately 320,000 deer (mule andblack- tailed deer), which will yield about 65,000 of either sex and any ageannually for an indefinite period.\
The causes of this population rebound areconsequences of other human actions. First, the major predators of deer wolves,cougar, and lynx
Second, conservation hasbeen insured by limiting times for and types of hunting. But the most profoundreason for the restoration of high population numbers has been the fate of theforests. Great tracts of lowland country deforested by logging, fire, or bothhave become ideal feeding grounds of deer. In addition to finding an increaseof suitable browse, like huckleberry and vine maple, Arthur Einarsen, longtimegame biologist in the Pacific Northwest, found quality of browse in the openareas to be substantially more nutritive. The protein content of shade-grownvegetation, for example, was much lower than that for plants grown inclearings.
托福阅读试题
1.According to paragraph 1, which of thefollowing is true of the white-tailed deer of Puget Sound?
A.mity is native to lowlands and marshes. B.it is more closely related to the muledeer of eastern Washington than to other types of deer.
C.hits has replaced the black-tailed deerin the open prairie.
—
—have been greatly reduced in numbers.
2019年托福阅读复习模拟练习及答案解析三.doc
