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【完形填空】Cloze: A Race to Save the Reef
When the dive boat (1) suddenly, Mira Chen, a marine biologist, checked her tank with the calm of someone who had dived over 600 times.
"If the water is murky, we go by touch," she told her student, Dev, who nodded (2).
The Indian Ocean was not supposed to be so (3) in June.
When they descended 18 metres, the reef came into view — or rather, what (4) of it.
Where a cathedral of staghorn coral once (5) the seabed, now only rubble and a faint smell of decay remained.
Mira had first dived here in 2009, when live coral (6) 54 percent of this 3-kilometre stretch.
Last year, the figure was 11 percent.
"This is not natural variability," she said afterward.
"It is a collapse." Her colleague at the marine park, Hassan, had warned her, and he was right.
The phenomenon (7) early surveys; now it has a name and a cause.
Mira's team had won a modest grant of $47,000 in 2021 to catalogue the damage and devise a restoration plan.
The work was not glamorous.
They had to scrub algal mats off surviving fragments, attach them to frames, and suspend them in nurseries for 14 months.
Coral is slow; it buds, secretes calcium, and enlarges by millimetres a year.
Dev once asked whether they were merely treating a symptom.
"Both," Mira said.
"We minimise loss, but we cannot (8) the damage."
Then came the 2022 bleaching.
A marine heatwave — 6 weeks above 31°C — struck the southern hemisphere.
Virtually every nursery bleached.
Mira watched 4 years of work turn white in 9 days.
The immediate horror was not the death but the silence: no snapping shrimp, no grunts.
She had to instruct Dev to record the losses; he could (9) hold the clipboard.
"I feel like a cheat," he said.
"We unveil these maps, and the coral is gone before the ink dries."
Hassan secured emergency funding of $12,500 from a commonwealth grant.
It was meagre.
The team shifted priority to 3 cooler sites near a deep artery of upwelling.
Their superior criticised them for abandoning the main reef.
"You cannot afford sentiment," she said.
Mira disagreed, but did not (10) her.
Instead, the team explored a controversial option: assisted migration, moving heat-tolerant strains 220 kilometres south.
Some colleagues called it a distraction; others called it the only sensible route.
The debate grew explosive.
By 2024, survival at the cooler sites reached 39 percent — better than 4 percent on the main reef.
It was a bonus, not a victory.
Mira published a paper that was deliberately cautious.
She refused to ascribe the success to their methods alone; currents, depth, and luck mattered.
Dev left for a job in a high-tech lab, tired of the physical toll.
His departure left a hole.
Mira missed his questions, his stubborn honour.
She hired a local fisherman, Ali, 51, who knew the foreland better than any map.
He taught her to read the water by its fragrance and its colour.
Today, Mira is 41, and the reef is still shrinking at 2.3 percent a year.
She no longer promises recovery; she speaks of acceptable loss.
Hassan has retired.
Ali still takes her out.
On a calm morning, she rolls into the water alone.
At 15 metres, a single table coral, the size of a dinner plate, glows faintly.
She stays until her air runs low.
Then she ascends.
Choices
(1) A. lurched B. rocked C. swayed D. rolled
(2) A. calmly B. nervously C. eagerly D. slowly
(3) A. warm B. bright C. bleak D. clear
(4) A. left B. remained C. stayed D. rested
(5) A. covered B. overlaid C. lay D. overlie
(6) A. composed B. made up C. comprised D. covered
(7) A. puzzled B. baffled C. confused D. bewildered
(8) A. do B. undo C. redo D. misdo
(9) A. scarcely B. hardly C. rarely D. barely
(10) A. accuse B. blame C. slander D. criticise