汕头二模英语试题阅读理解4篇文章原文及译文.doc

汕头市2013年普通高中高三教学质量测评试题（二）英语

阅读理解原文4篇及中文译文

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Green invaders are taking over America. Nope, not invaders from space. Plants. You might not think of plants as dangerous, but in this case they are threatening nature's delicate food web.

The invaders are plants from other countries brought here to make gardens and yards look pretty. Ever since people started to arrive on America's shores, they've carried along trees, flowers, and vegetables from other places.

Now there are so many of those plants, they are crowding out the native plants that have lived here since before human settlers arrived.

And that's a problem, says Dr. Doug Tallamy. He's an entomologist (an insect expert) at the University of Delaware. He explains that almost all the plant-eating insects in the United States—90% of them—are specialized. That means they eat only certain plants.

Pretty orange and black monarch butterflies, for example, can only dine on one plant: milkweed. If people cut down milkweed and replace it with something else, the butterflies starve, because their bodies cannot accept any other food.

But the trouble doesn't stop there, it goes right across the food web.

When insects can't get the right plants to eat and they die off, then the birds don't have enough bugs for their meals. Tallamy points out that almost all migrating birds depend on insects to feed their young.

"We cannot let the plants and animals around us disappear, " says Tallamy. "The way to preserve them is to give them food to eat. But when we plant non-native plants, we are clobbering the food web, because then we don't have the insects the birds need to live."

Fewer of the right plants mean fewer bugs, and fewer bugs mean fewer birds.

And that's bad for the Earth, because we need a variety of living things to keep the planet healthy and beautiful.

The good news is, gardeners everywhere are working hard to protect native plants and get rid of the invaders. Many local garden centers sell native plants.

"Just Google 'native plants' and your location, and you can find out which plants really belong where you live, " says Tallamy.

Planting the right things makes a real difference, and fast. He describes planting milkweed in a tiny city courtyard about the size of a living room one spring. By summertime, that milkweed patch had produced 50 new monarch butterflies!

Tallamy encourages kids to go out and plant native plants. "Adopt a bird species in trouble and see if you can plant some things that will

attract the insects they need, " he suggests. "It will happen—insects move around a lot, and they will find the plants you put out there for them!"

外来绿色植物的入侵者正在超过美国的人口数量。不是空间中的侵略者，而是植物。你可能不认为植物是有危险的，但在这种情况下，他们正在微妙的威胁着大自然的食物网。

这些从其他国家引进的植物侵入者，将花园和庭院装饰的非常漂亮。自从人们抵达美国海岸时，这些来自其他地方的物种便与树木、花卉和蔬菜一同也进入了美国。

现在有太多这样的植物，它们甚至开始排挤早在人类出现时便已存在的植物。

这是一个问题，特拉华大学昆虫学家（昆虫专家）Tallamy博士说，在美国，几乎90 ％吃植物的昆虫都是职业的。也就是说，他们只吃特定的植物。

例如漂亮的橙色和黑色君主蝴蝶，它们只会吃一种植物：milkweed 。如果人们将milkweed砍锄或同其它植物一起移植的话，这些蝴蝶便会饿死，因为它们的身体接受不了任何其它食物。

对于整个食物网而言，麻烦并不止如此。当昆虫无法得到适合的可食植物时便会死去，这样一来鸟类便没有足够的食物。Tallamy指出，几乎所有的候鸟都要依靠昆虫来喂养自己的幼鸟。

“我们不能让身边的植物和动物消失了, ”Tallamy 说“能够保护它们的方法就是给它们提供食物。但是，当我们种植非本地植物时，