II. Cloze Test (10%)        Islands are considered natural laboratories to study evolutionary questions. One of the moststriking patterns described on islands is the __13__ for species to become giants or dwarfs incomparison with mainland relatives. Dwarf hippos and elephants in the Mediterranean islands, oreven our miniature relative Homo floresiensis on the Indonesian island of Flores, are examples ofdwarfism. __14__ , small mainland species may evolve into giants after colonizing islands, givingrise to such oddities as the St Kilda field mouse (twice the size of its mainland ancestor), theinfamous dodo of Mauritius (a giant pigeon), and the Komodo dragon. While this phenomenon wasfirst described by Foster back in 1964, it took a few years until Van Valen __15__ the term ‘islandrule’ in 1973. Yet, whether the island rule is a term to describe occasional evolutionary __16__ ora more general phenomenon has been a subject of much debate. Hundreds of studies in the last 40years either supported or rejected the rule, providing no clear __17__ . Perhaps most concerningly,a systematic review published in 2018 suggested there were strong author-related biases in the waythat the island rule was supported or rejected, with clusters of authors consistently supporting or notsupporting the hypothesis.
【題組】13.
(A) terrain
(B) textile
(C) thrust
(D) tendency