34.High School English Listening

In 1859, an unassuming Australian landowner named Thomas Austin got the hunting bug.
Eager for something to shoot, he released twenty-four wild rabbits onto his property and had a jolly time tracking them down.
Unfortunately, some of the rabbits managed to escape and, as rabbits are known to do, began to breed like…well, rabbits.
By 1900, Austin was dead but his unwanted legacy lived on in the form of a rabbit infestation that spread throughout the entire Australian continent.
Desperate landowners scrambled to captureover two million rabbits per year, but this hardly made a dent in the rabbit population.
Rabbits, it seemed, had taken up permanent residence down under.
With its long ears, twitching nose, and adorable hopping ability, the individual rabbit is fairly cute.
Multiply that bunny by millions, however, and they begin to seem entirely sinister.
The greatAustralian rabbit infestation was ecologically devastating.
The buck-toothed creatures helpedextinguish nearly one-eighth of Australia's native mammal species and led to the extinction ofcountless numbers of plants, leading to wide spread soil erosion.
The Australian government tried to corral the rabbits by building so-called rabbit-proof fences across vast stretches of land.
Undaunted, the rabbits burrowed under.
Finally, in the 1950s, theAustralians resorted to chemical warfare, injecting several rabbits with myxoma, an experimental virus known to target and kill rabbits.
The virus spread, and the rabbit population dropped from six-hundred million to one-hundred million.
But that's still a lot of rabbits, and those with a natural resistance to the virus began breeding with a fury.
And so, the rabbit wars carry on still.
译文：
1859年，一位名叫托马斯-奥斯汀的不起眼的澳大利亚地主得到了打猎的机会。
他急于寻找可以射杀的东西，将24只野兔放进了他的庄园，并在追踪它们的过程中度过了一段快乐的时光。
不幸的是，一些兔子设法逃脱了，而且，正如兔子所知道的那样，开始像......嗯，兔子一样繁殖。
到1900年，奥斯汀已经死了，但他留下的不受欢迎的遗产以兔灾的形式继续存在，并蔓延到整个澳大利亚大陆。
绝望的地主们争先恐后地每年捕捉200多万只兔子，但这对兔子的数量几乎没有任何影响。
兔子，似乎已经在下面永久居住了。
长长的耳朵，抽动的鼻子，以及可爱的跳跃能力，单个兔子是相当可爱的。
然而，将这种兔子乘以数百万，它们就开始显得完全邪恶了。
澳大利亚的兔灾在生态上是毁灭性的。
这些长着龅牙的生物帮助消灭了澳大利亚近八分之一的本地哺乳动物物种，并导致了无数植物的灭绝，导致了广泛的水土流失。
澳大利亚政府试图通过在大片土地上建造所谓的防兔栅栏来驱赶兔子。
兔子们毫不畏惧，纷纷钻到下面去了。
最后，在20世纪50年代，澳大利亚人采用了化学战，给几只兔子注射了肌瘤，这是一种实验性的病毒，专门针对并杀死兔子。
这种病毒蔓延开来，兔子的数量从六亿只下降到一亿只。
但这仍然是大量的兔子，那些对病毒有天然抵抗力的兔子开始疯狂地繁殖。
于是，兔子的战争仍在继续。
重点词汇：
some of 中的一些 ; 其中一些 ; 其中的一些
known to 已知的
in the form of 用…的形式