托福阅读TPO3(试题+答案+译文)第3篇-TheLong-TermStabilityofEcosy.docxVIP

第 第 PAGE 1 页 共 NUMPAGES 1 页 托福阅读TPO3(试题+答案+译文)第3篇:TheLong-TermStabilityofEcosystems 为了关心大家备考托福。提高阅读成果，打有预备的仗，下面我给大家带来托福阅读TPO3(试题+答案+译文)第3篇:The Long-Term Stability of Ecosystems，盼望大家喜爱。  托福阅读原文  Plant communities assemble themselvesflexibly, and their particular structure depends on the specific history of thearea. Ecologists use the term “succession” to refer to the changes that happenin plant communities and ecosystems over time. The first community in asuccession is called a pioneer community, while the long-lived community at theend of succession is called a climax community. Pioneer and successional plantcommunities are said to change over periods from 1 to 500 years. Thesechanges—in plant numbers and the mix of species—are cumulative. Climaxcommunities themselves change but over periods of time greater than about 500years.  An ecologist who studies a pond today maywell find it relatively unchanged in a year’s time. Individual fish may bereplaced, but the number of fish will tend to be the same from one year to thenext. We can say that the properties of an ecosystem are more stable than theindividual organisms that compose the ecosystem.  At one time, ecologists believed that speciesdiversity made ecosystems stable. They believed that the greater the diversitythe more stable the ecosystem. Support for this idea came from the observationthat long-lasting climax communities usually have more complex food webs andmore species diversity than pioneer communities. Ecologists concluded that theapparent stability of climax ecosystems depended on their complexity. To takean extreme example, farmlands dominated by a single crop are so unstable thatone year of bad weather or the invasion of a single pest can destroy the entirecrop. In contrast, a complex climax community, such as a temperate forest, willtolerate considerable damage from weather to pests.  The question of ecosystem stability iscomplicated, however. The first problem is that eco