2022年09月六级第1套选词填空原文翻译及答案解析

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 __26__ 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.

现已灭绝的旅鸽拥有一种不光彩的殊荣，即它是人们最不期望消失的物种。曾经，旅鸽的数量超过任何其他鸟类。粗略估计其种群数量高达五十亿，在19世纪初，约占北美本地鸟类总数的40%。

Despite their huge population, passenger pigeons were __27__ to human intrusion into their nesting territory. Their nests were shabby things and two weeks after the eggs __28__, 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 __29__. First the Native Americans and then the transplanted Europeans came to consider the birds a great __30__.

尽管种群庞大，旅鸽却容易受到人类侵入其筑巢领地的威胁。它们的巢穴简陋，在卵孵化两周后，亲鸽会抛弃幼鸟，让它们自谋生路。人们发现这些幼鸽非常美味，成年鸟类也相当可食。先是美洲原住民，后来是移居的欧洲人，都视这种鸟为美味佳肴。

By the 1850s, commercial trapping of passenger pigeons was proceeding at an __31__ pace. Hundreds of thousands of the birds were being harvested every day to be made into popular pigeon pies. In addition, large __32__ 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 __33__ resource. By the 1880s, it was noticed that the bird population had become seriously __34__. The last passenger pigeons killed in the wild were shot in 1899.

到了19世纪50年代，旅鸽的商业捕猎正以空前的速度进行。每天有数十万只鸟被捕获，制成受欢迎的鸽肉馅饼。此外，大片旅鸽的筑巢领地被清除，用于种植作物和开辟牧场。尽管旅鸽数量众多，但并非无限资源。到19世纪80年代，人们注意到鸟群数量已严重枯竭。最后在野外被杀的旅鸽是在1899年被射杀的。

Eventually those billions and billions of birds shrank to a single remaining __35__, 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.

最终，那数十亿只鸟缩减到仅剩一个标本，一只名为玛莎的旅鸽，于1914年9月1日在辛辛那提动物园的囚禁中死亡。这不仅是一个时代的终结，也是人类首次能够准确记录一个物种的灭绝时间。