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TEXT K
First read the following questions.
37. When can the drought be expected to end?
A. In no time. B. In the summer.
C. In the fall. D. Beyond prediction.
38. The drought is predicted to cause to Texas agribusiness.
A. a US $2.4 billion loss B. a US $5 billion loss
C. a US $6. 5 billion loss D. an inestimable loss
Now go through TEXT K quickly and answer questions 37 and 38.
Drought
From its headwaters at San Ygnacio, Texas, to its giant hydroelectric dam 50 miles downstream. Falcon Lake covers some 87 000 acres along the Rio Grande and the US Mexican border. Created in the 1950's to improve flood control and irrigation, the lake is a water monument to the era of gigantic public works. But the worse drought since the Eisenhower years has lowered the water level by nearly 50 feet and bit by bit. Falcon Lake is revealing the secrets of its long-submerged past. On the Texas side of the lake, drowned border towns like Zapata and Lopeno, relocated when the dam was built, are reemerging from the flood. On the Mexican side, near the town of Benevidcs stone crosses in a once submerged old cemetery rise like eerie sentinels to the drought. The last time anybody saw these graves, segregation was the law of the land, the Dodgers were still in Brooklyn and Bill Clinton was in second grade.
The two-year drawdown of Falcon Lake is only one symptom of the Drought of '96 — a slowly gathering crisis that is putting a huge strain on the water supplies of the fast-growing cities of the Southwest and on the farm-and-cattle regions of the southern Plains as well. From Los Angeles to Corpus Christi. from Brownsville to Nebraska, the drought pits state against state, city dwellers against farmers and farmers against a global weather system that has turned suddenly hostile toward man. Severe to extreme drought conditions now prevail across the whole southwestern part of the United States, a region that includes southern California, southern Nevada, all of Arizona. New Mexico and Texas and most of Utah, Colorado and Oklahoma. The drought has afflicted some parts of the region for up to five years and other areas for as little as 10 months. But whatever its duration, climatologists agree there is no end in sight. "The expectation is that this thing is going to continue through the summer and into the fall," says Dr Don Wilhite of the National Drought Mitigation Center in Lincoln, Neb. "Beyond that, it's anybody's guess. "
What's going on here experts like Whilhite say, is a reverse El Nino effect. El Nino ("the Christ Child") is a huge weather system in the western Pacific that, in a good year spawns welcome winter rains in the southwestern states and the Plains. When El. Nino does not appear — and last year he didn't - the result is even less rainfall in a region that is naturally among the fries in the world. From August 1995 to May of this year, much of the Southwest and the southern Plains region recorded virtually no rainfall or snow. That dried out the soil and set the stage for a deepening drought.
In Texas, Oklahoma, Eastern Colorado and Western Kansas, the lack of rainfall fairly crushed the 1996 winter-wheat crop. It also led to a significant shortfall in the supply of cattle feed, which forced many ranchers to cut back their herds. "Cattle is a US $5 billion-a-year industry in Texas," says Texas agriculture commissioner Rick Perry. "The turmoil this industry is going through is causing a liquidation of historic proportions," Perry says the damage to Texas agribusiness has already reached US $2.4 billion and could rise to US $6. 5 billion — which would make the '96 drought the most costly natural disaster in the state's history.
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