2014考研英语复习：模拟试题之阅读理解专项练习(四十七)
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In the warm enclosed waters of farm ponds, conditions are very likely to be lethal for fish when insecticides are applied in the vicinity. As many examples show, the poison is carried in by rains and runoff from surrounding lands. Sometimes the ponds receive not only contaminated runoff but also a direct dose as rop dusting pilots neglect to shut off the duster in passing over a pond. Even without such complications, normal agricultural use subjects fish to far heavier concentrations of chemicals than would be require to kill them. In other words a marked reduction in the enclosure nets used would hardly change the lethal situation, for applications of over 0.1 pound per acre to the pond itself are generally considered hazardous. And the poison, once introduced is hard to get rid of. One pond that has been treated with DDT (杀虫剂) to remove unwanted shiners remained poisonous through repeated drainings and flushings that it killed 94 percent of the sun fish with which it was later stocked. Apparently the chemical remained in the mud of the pond bottom.
Conditions are evidently no better now than when the modern insecticides first came into use. The Oklahoma Wildlife Conservation Department stated in 1961 that reports of fish losses in farm ponds and small lakes had been coming in at the rate of at least one a week, and that such reports were increasing. The conditions usually responsible for these losses in Oklahoma were those made familiar by repetition over the years: the application of insecticides to crops, heavy rain, and poison washed into the ponds.
In some parts of the world the cultivation of fish in ponds provides an in dispensable source of food. In such places the use of insecticides without regard for the effects of fish creates immediate problems. In Rhodesia, for example, the young of an important African food fish are killed by exposure to only 0.04 parts per million of DDT in shallow pools. Even smaller doses of many other insecticides would be lethal. The shallow waters in which these fish live are favorable mosquito-breeding places. The problem of controlling mosquitoes and at the same time conserving a fish important in the Central African diet has obviously not been solved satisfactorily.
