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  3. The now extinct passenger pigeon has the dubious honor of being the last species anyone ever expected to disappear. At one point

The now extinct passenger pigeon has the dubious honor of being the last species anyone ever expected to disappear. At one point

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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
【C6】
选项
答案B
解析 分析句子结构可知，此处为介词短语at an…pace，意为“以……的速度”，由此可知，空格处应填入一个形容词或分词，充当pace的定语。由下一句“每天有几十万只旅鸽被捕获，做成受欢迎的鸽子馅饼”可知，本句是说，对旅鸽的商业诱捕“以前所未有的速度”进行，故unprecedented符合语境。
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