Habitat loss, pesticides (农药) and climate change are threatening insect populations worldwide. In 2019, Biological Conservation reported that 40％ of all insects species are declining (减少) globally and that a third of them are endangered.
And while it may sound nice to live in a world with fewer bad insects, environmental writer Oliver Milman says that human beings would be in big trouble without insects. That’s because insects play important roles in pollinating (给……授粉) plants we eat, breaking down waste in forest soil and forming the base of a food chain that other larger animals-including humans-rely upon.
“It would be an extremely terrible place to live in-and certainly not something we should ever aim for,” Milman says of an insect-free existence. “You would certainly have mass starvation and social unrest...It’d be a place where there would be smelly waste and dead bodies everywhere because insects that break down those materials would be gone.”
Milman charts the troubling decline of insects in his new book, The Insect Crisis: The Fall of the Tiny Empires That Run the World. He says that while it’s impossible to know exactly what’s happening with every insect species in the world, the overall trends are not good: The butterfly population in North America has declined quickly in the past 40 years, for example, and a U.N. assessment done in 2019 found that half a million insect species are under threat of extinction, some in the coming decades.
“The world, our surroundings, would be far quieter, far duller without insects,” he, says. “When you start kind of digging down into these figures looking at the research, it’s clear that there’s something seriously wrong...There is a straight decline in most insect populations, and that spells major trouble for them but also for us.”
【小题1】What should be the proper opinion about the insects according to the passage?| A．They can benefit the growth of plants. | B．They can prevent plants from harvesting. |
| C．They are harmful to humans. | D．They can produce a lot of waste. |
| A．The insects might make the world a terrible place to live in. |
| B．The insects might make much trouble to the dead bodies. |
| C．People would certainly have mass starvation with an insect-free existence. |
| D．The insects might produce too much smelly waste. |
| A．By comparing two insects. | B．By giving some examples. |
| C．By analyzing the data. | D．By using his research. |
| A．Positive. | B．Uninterested. | C．Supportive. | D．Worried. |
