Question

⚠️⚠️URGENTEE⚠️⚠️
3. (URCA CE/2008)

Survival of the cutest

Thousands of creatures will qietly disappear if we only focus on the most fascinating species.

The struggle to preserve the world’s biodiversity is being compromised by fatal flaws in the way conservations draw up their lists of endangered species. An australian botanist warms that the lists reflect the plants and animals that scientists are most interested in studying, rather than the most threatned species or those at risk of extinction. For instance, says Mark burgman of the University of Melbourne, lists compiled and used by organizations such as the World Conservation Union (IUCN) and the Secretariat to the CITES agreement are heavily biased toward birds, mammals and flowering plants, to the detriment of less charismatic species such as insects and fungi. If no one tackles the problem, Burgman believes we will unwittingly focus our conservation efforts in the wrong places, and fail to stop the biggest mass extinction since dinosaurs. Rare species lists contain fewer threatened insects than birds, although we know of nearly a milion insect species and fewer than 10,000 birds. That’s because most insects are poorly studied, says Burgman. For most, all that we have is a specimen in a museum and a brief formal description, he says. Generally, little or nothing is known about their habitat and abundance, and no one may have looked for them since their discovery. ―We assume all’s well because we don’t have any evidence, and we don’t have evidence because we haven’t looked‖, Burgman says. Georgina Mace, director of science athe Zoological Society of London and chair of the Species Survival Comittee, thinks Burgman has identified real problems. Yet she says that groups like the IUCN are adressing them. Starting with amphibians, it has begun assessing the global health of whole groups of related animals, species by species. Putting a species on the Red List is like assessing people coming into a hospital emergency room, she says. It’s not a robust prediction of what will happen, but it’s a quick way to pick out the sickest. But Burgman says that the criteria for assessing whether a species will go extinct vary from country to country and from study to study. He has compared a range of studies and found that different methods produce very inconsisitent results. He says conservation scientists ―need to get our act together‖ and develop a uniform set of tools that everyone can test and agree upon. Even ―extinction‖ can be hard to define, he points out. A surprising number of species have been declared extinct, only to resurface later after people had given up looking for them.



VOCABULARY:

Struggle – effort; fight Flaw – fault; error

Draw up – compose; design

Threatened – at risk, endangered

Biased – inclined; to be disposed to a certain preference

Tackle (v) – confront, attack

Unwittingly – unintentionally

Brief – short

Pick out (v) – select, choose

Range – variety

Tool – instrument

Resurface (v) – reappear

Choose the correct answer to complete the sentence:

Carol is _________ economist. She used to work in _________ investment department of Loyds bank. Now she works for ______ American bank in ________ United States.

a) a – an – the – the

b) an – a – an – Ø

c) a – an – an – Ø

d) an – the – an – the

e) an – the – Ø – the

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Answer 1

alternativa correta letra a)