题目内容:
Directions: In this part, you will have 15 minutes to go over the passage quickly and answer the questions on Answer Sheet 1. For questions 1 - 7, choose the best answer from the four choices marked A , B, C and D. For questions 8-10, complete the sentences with the information given in the passage.The Great Australian Fence
A war has been going on for almost a hundred years between the sheep farmers of Australia and the dingo, Australia's wild dog. To protect their livelihood, the farmers built a wire fence, 3,307 miles of continuous wire network, reaching from the coast of South Australia all the way to the cotton fields of eastern Queensland, just shore of the Pacific Ocean.
The Fence is Australia's version of the Great Wall of China, but even longer, erected to keep out hostile invaders, in this case hordes of yellow dogs. The empire it preserves is that of the wool- growers, sovereigns of the world's second largest sheep flock, after China's -- some 123 million head - and keepers of a wool export business worth four billion dollars. Never mind that more and more people - conservationists, politicians, taxpayers and animal lovers -- say that such a barrier would never be allowed today on ecological grounds. With sections of it almost a hundred years old, the dog fence has become, as conservationist Lindsay Fairweather ruefully admits, an icon of Australian frontier ingenuity.
To appreciate this unusual outback monument and to meet the people whose livelihoods depend on it, I spent part of an Australian autumn traveling the wire. It's known by different names in different states : the Dog Fence is South Australia, the Border Fence in New South Wales and the Barrier Fence in Queensland. I would call it simply the Fence.
For most of its prodigious length, this epic fence winds like a river across a landscape that,unless a big rain has fallen, scarcely has rivers. The eccentric route, prescribed mostly by property lines, provides a sampler of outback topography : the Fence goes over sand dunes, past salt lakes, up and down rock-strewn hills, through dense scrub and across barren plains.
The Fence stays away from towns. Where it passes near a town, it has actually become a tourist attraction visited on bus tours. It marks the traditional dividing line between cattle and sheep. In- side, where the dingoes are legally classified as vermin, they are shot, poisoned and trapped. Sheep and dingoes do not mix and the Fence sends that message mile after mile.
What is this creature that by itself threatens an entire industry, inflicting several millions of dollars of damage a year despite the presence of the world's most obsessive fence? Cousin to the coyote and the jackal, descended from the Asian wolf, Canis lupus dingo is introduced to Australia more than 3,500 years ago probably with Asian seafarers who landed on the north coast. The adaptable dingo spread rapidly and in a short time became the top pre
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