1 / 48 句0 词已学
【完形填空】Cloze: The Woman Who Planted Trees
Lin Yue knelt in the red dust, holding a tiny pine that had cost her 1.5 yuan, and understood that the drought had taken it (1)______.
She was a former accountant (2)______ had quit a stable job to plant trees on 300 hectares of degraded hillside.
For forty years, loggers had stripped the slopes; erosion had followed; the soil was acid and thin.
When Lin arrived in 2009, only 12 percent of the hillside (3)______ ground cover.
Two of her first three planting seasons produced fewer than 400 surviving trees out of 20,000.
She had budgeted 80,000 yuan, but she (4)______ 260,000.
She sold her apartment and moved into a tin-roofed shed (5)______ a wood stove and a bucket for washing.
The locals did not maltreat her exactly, (6)______ they laughed.
A woman alone, planting pines for no fee? That was not an economic plan.
Her breakthrough came from a botanist named Chen Weiguo, who had spent two decades (7)______ how forests evolve after fire.
He walked her slope in 2012 and told her, bluntly, that she was planting the wrong things.
Monoculture pines were fragile; they invited pests; they dried the soil.
Instead, he recommended a mix of native oak, alder, and shrub species that could coexist and enrich the ground.
"You are not building a plantation," he said, kneeling to scoop a handful of dirt.
"You are rebuilding an architecture." Lin listened.
She diversified. She stopped chasing yield and started chasing resilience.
By 2016, survival rates had climbed to 71 percent, and the first wild birds had returned.
Something else returned too: a strange, stubborn hope.
Not everything grew. In 2017 a wildfire, likely set by a rival land claimant, burned 40 hectares of her four-year work in eleven hours.
The loss was 380,000 yuan and roughly 60,000 trees.
Lin stood in the black ash and wept, then went back to the nursery the next morning.
Chen had warned her that exposure to such chaos was part of the undertaking.
She agreed. She also grieved. The two are not necessarily opposites.
By 2020 her surviving forest covered 210 hectares and had begun to propagate itself; seeds from her oaks were sprouting on slopes she had never touched.
She hired four local women, paid them 4,200 yuan a month, and taught them to record every seedling in a ledger.
The ledger became a kind of diary. It became a kind of proof.
Today, at forty-nine, Lin runs a small research station and a seed bank of 1,800 species samples.
Her annual budget is 1.4 million yuan, mostly from a Shenzhen foundation, and her forest absorbs an estimated 9,600 tons of carbon dioxide each year.
Schoolchildren hike the ridge on weekends. Birdwatchers come from as far as Chengdu.
The village that once laughed now sells tea and honey at the trailhead, and Lin's father, eighty-one, sits on a bench near the nursery, watching.
But the work is not complete, and she resists the word.
A new highway is planned 9 kilometers to the north; the hills are becoming valuable; developers have begun to circle.
Last month a land agent offered her 6 million yuan for the slope. She refused.
Then she walked up to the oldest oak she had planted, a tree now 14 meters high, and pressed her palm against the bark.
Somewhere above her, a bird she could not name began to sing.
Choices
(1) A. down B. away C. over D. out
(2) A. whom B. which C. who D. whose
(3) A. holds B. held C. was holding D. had held
(4) A. spent B. cost C. paid D. took
(5) A. with B. by C. in D. on
(6) A. or B. but C. and D. so
(7) A. study B. studied C. studying D. to study
(8) A. in B. on C. at D. for
(9) A. Moreover B. However C. Otherwise D. Therefore
(10) A. had refused B. refused C. refuses D. has refused