Module 5 - Section 3 段落填空 - Part 1 - Exercise 18

原文

Ferry and his team of scientists at PRS are the driving force behind Elche's spectacular resurrection as one of the world's most important date-palm centres, and the city is becoming famous as the seedbed for palm groves all over the world, The cloned palms are destined for countries such as Egypt and lran, where disease is slowly destroying these countries' existing palm groves. ‘We’ve even recently sent 500 trees to an experimental station in a desert in Peru in South America,’ says Ferry. "Dates have never been grown in this country before. but it's one in which palms should do well and we hope we can start a viable business that will earn a steady income for local people.

Nor are these any old palm trees, There are thousands of varieties of date, but the fruits of the cloned palms developed at PRS are already being talked about from Marrakech to Tehran as’super-dates’ or ‘jumbo-dates’, They are up to three times the size of normal dates, are sweeter and juicier, and -through technology developed at PRS -can be kept fresh for more than six months after harvest, Ferry believes that the centre's test-tube propagation system and the ‘super-date’ conservation process have the potential to save the struggling date-palm economies of north Africa and the Middle East.

The scientists at Elche are giving new life to agricultural practices that haven't changed in more than a thousand years; the palm workers’ methods and tools have remained the same throughout that period, When I visit one of the historical palm groves, I meet a team of workers, The heavy tools that they are using to prune old leaves are almost identical to those I had seen painted on pieces of ancient pottery in the Elche museum, yet very different from those used in other date regions, l watch one of them throw a length of rope (now nylon climbing rope but, to my untrained eye, almost identical to the woven cord that was traditionally used) around a trunk and start climbing up a swaying palm. The metal spikes on his boots bite into the wood and he strides up with apparent ease.

Elche's historical palms are no longer actually harvested for dates, The labour-intensive nature of the harvest means that it’s only feasible in countries where labour rates are cheap, but it is the biggest palm grove in Europe and remains one of the most important, historically, anywhere. It was declared a World Heritage site primarily because it represents a unique example of the transfer of a landscape that is representative of one culture to another - it is a magnificent North African oasis in western Europe.

There are about 200,000 palms in Elche's historical centre, but about 1.000,000 more in the surrounding area, It's quite a thing to see, and tourists, especially those from northern Europe, where palms are relatively rare, are often stunned by the sight of what seems to be an endless palm forest. In fact, it isn't a single forest but scores of gardens, parks and working orchards, spread throughout the old town, But the groves were traditionally far more than either gardens or mere date plantations: they were carefully nurtured areas where oranges, pomegranates, alfalfa, olives, almonds, grapes and figs were grown under the palms' shade, and watered by irrigation systems that had been refined into nothing less than a science.

As you wander around the groves and gardens, you follow narrow water-channels and pass cisterns full of water with cleverly designed gates that are opened and closed to distribute the meagre flow of the Vinalopo River to whichever areas most need it at any given time, These irrigation systems are the direct descendants of the acequia channels invented by the Moors"only a desert people could have really grasped the importance of every precious drop of the 200 millimetres of precipitation that the city has annually.