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  3. Wild elephants roam across the crowded plains of India; forested river banks wind through cattle ranches in Brazil; a ribbon of

Wild elephants roam across the crowded plains of India; forested river banks wind through cattle ranches in Brazil; a ribbon of

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问题     Wild elephants roam across the crowded plains of India; forested river banks wind through cattle ranches in Brazil; a ribbon of green stretches across Europe where the Iron Curtain used to be. Using such wildlife corridors to link up larger but isolated protected areas are the most widely adopted strategy for halting biodiversity decline, with millions of dollars spent creating and protecting them every year. But has enthusiasm for a neat idea got ahead of the science?
    The principle is simple. As wildlife habitat is broken into isolated fragments by farms, roads, and settlements, we need to link them up with corridors of green. Then even if the entire habitat cannot be re-created, old migration patterns can be revived, escape routes created ahead of climate change and—perhaps most crucially—isolated populations can interbreed, enhancing their genetic diversity and their resilience to encroaching threats.
    Recently, Paul Beier, a veteran conservation biologist from Northern Arizona University, and his colleague Andrew Gregory, warned that "despite much research, there is little evidence that conservation corridors work as intended. " There is, they say, plenty of evidence that wild animals will move through corridors. But advocates of the corridors want, and claim, much more than this. They say that animals don’t just go for a walk in their conservation woods, but that they move permanently and interbreed with neighboring populations. In this way corridors supposedly unite isolated, threatened populations into an interbreeding and much more resilient—whole.
    Such claims sometimes hold up. In the United Kingdom, the expansion of Kielder Forest in the 1960s provided a link between isolated populations of threatened red squirrel. Genes from isolated populations have now "leapfrogged through hundreds of forest fragments" across 100 kilometers and more. But the Kielder Forest is much wider than a conventional corridor. Few studies have looked for gene flow in genuine corridors; even fewer have found it. One study investigated the genetic diversity of small marsupials in a narrow forest corridor traversing 4. 5 kilometers of grasslands in Queensland, Australia. It found that genetically distinct populations had persisted at either end. Mixing was a myth.
    Other studies have shown that conservation corridors work. But most have looked at short corridors of 100 meters through largely natural landscape. "That species can travel a-long short corridors in a natural setting does not mean that they will be successful dispersing along much longer corridors embedded in a heavily impacted landscape," says Gregory. "Still less that such movements occur frequently enough to allow enough gene flow to occur so that the connected habitat blocks function as one population. "
    Perhaps we should not make the perfect the enemy of the good. Surely any corridor is better than none? But consider this. The edges of wild areas are known danger zones for wildlife, where predators and diseases may invade. Linking two existing protected areas with a long narrow corridor may expose it to greater danger along these edges. Unless the benefit exceeds the threat, then there is serious potential to do harm.
To which of the following would Beier and Gregory most likely agree?
选项 A、We should dismiss wildlife corridors for its threat to wildlife.
B、We should gather information to work out how corridors can work.
C、We can minimize the impact of development by creating corridors.
D、We can make the benefit outweigh the threat by designing corridors properly.
答案B
解析 第二段首先指出了贝耶尔等人的观点：几乎没有证据能够证明动物保护走廊起到了预期作用。随后指出了动物走廊倡导者的预期：通过动物走廊各动物群可以融为一体，形成一个适应性大大增强的杂交动物群。第四、五段作者借用实例和研究结果具体分析走廊的作用：尽管有野生动物走廊确实起到了作用，但大多数传统动物走廊却并没有很大效用；穿过自然区域的短走廊可能会有一作用，但镶嵌在深受人类影响环境中的长走廊没有起到明显作用。可见，作者和贝耶尔等人观点一致，认为野生动物走廊起作用的证据不足。因此他们会赞同在这方面搜集更多信息，[B]选项正确。
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