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【阅读理解】Reading: The Grandmother Who Counts Trees
Maria Tun, sixty-one, lives in a stilt house in the village of Santa Rosa, on the edge of a territory that has lost 38 per cent of its tree cover since 2011.
Satellite data show the rate accelerating: 4,200 hectares cleared in 2022, then 6,800 in 2023.
Her husband, Elias, fifty-eight, was once a logger who earned good money cutting mahogany and cedar.
After a mudslide in 2018 buried four houses and killed two children, he stopped logging and now keeps twenty-two hives of stingless bees.
Maria, a former teacher, logs every tree cut within a two-kilometre radius, photographs trucks, and sends reports to a prosecutor in Belém, 310 kilometres away.
Her files have helped impose three fines, total value 1.2 million reais, though only 180,000 has been collected.
In 2021, a Chinese-owned meat company signed a supply contract with three ranches on the cleared land.
The company pledged to monitor deforestation, but the monitoring stops at the fence line.
Rainfall in the region has dropped 22 per cent in fifteen years, and the dry season is three weeks longer.
Elias wakes at night with a cough; the clinic says it is smoke inhalation.
Maria believes in the 47 saplings she has planted behind her house, each one wrapped in a cut plastic bottle.
On a Tuesday in March, she asked a bulldozer operator to leave one Brazil nut tree standing, maybe 300 years old.
He laughed at first, then stopped and said he would try.
Questions
1. How many hectares were cleared in 2023 according to satellite data?
A. 4,200 hectares B. 1.2 million hectares C. 6,800 hectares D. 22 per cent of the territory
2. What does Maria do to fight deforestation?
A. She organizes big meetings and seeks foreign donations. B. She logs tree cuts, photographs trucks, and sends reports to a prosecutor. C. She works as a journalist for a national newspaper. D. She joins a local union that cooperates with ranchers.
3. What does the word 'militant' most likely mean in the passage?
A. A person who uses weapons to fight B. A person who actively campaigns for a cause C. A person who works for the government D. A person who avoids conflict
4. What can be inferred about the Chinese-owned meat company's monitoring?
A. It has stopped all clearing in the area. B. It effectively prevents all deforestation. C. It ignores satellite images completely. D. It only monitors land within the ranches' fences.
5. What is the main purpose of the passage?
A. To argue that foreign companies should stop all business in Brazil. B. To show one woman's personal resistance to deforestation and its effects. C. To describe the history of logging in Santa Rosa. D. To explain why the local union split.