Across a steep canyon, a ghost floats in the darkness- a phantom in this redwoodforest, somewhere in California’s Santa Cruz Country. 
       We slip-slide into the ___1.___, landing in spongy piles of discarded needles,ferns, and poison oak, and then we___2.__other slope. A great horned owl hootsonce, twice, three times. Dawn is just beginning to___3.___the treetops, but downhere, beneath the forest canopy, it’s still chilly twilight.        A few feet away, the astonishingly white tree ___4.___like an otherworldlyapparition, its crown high above our heads. It’s an albino redwood. An enigma. Abiological ___5.___- an organism that shouldn’t exist.“       My guess is that this thing is probably a hundred years old, or more,” saysgraduate student Zane Moore, who studies redwood genomes at the University ofCalifornia, Davis. “It’s one of the tallest in the country.”       Rather than being evergreen, the tree is everwhite, its needles soft and waxy.Normally Sequoia semper-virens, the coast redwood, ___6.___by harvesting sunlightand turning it into food-but this___7.___is missing a crucial component of the basiccellular machinery it needs to feed itself. Instead, it taps into the root system ofits___8.___ parent and steals sugars and nutrients.        Although rare on Earth, albinos grow naturally within the fog-drenched coastredwood range. They’re a scientific puzzle- ___9.___ trees that are somehow allowedto survive, even as parent trees discard other shoots. A few are tall like the tree we’revisiting, but most are shorter and shrubbier. Others have sprouted high up in theirparent trees. Maybe 50 or so are naturally occurring white-and-green chimeras,organisms with two ___10.___ sets of genetic instructions. One of these trees, whichwas growing near a right-of-way in Sonoma County, is so beloved that when railwaybuilders threatened to cut it down in 2014, local residents forced the company to digit up, load it onto a truck, and relocate it. (by NADIA DRAKE adapted article from NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC)
【題組】1. (AB) tickle (AC) distinct (AD) mutated (AE) gully (BC) scale (BD) hovers (BE) albino (CD) survives (CE) improbability (DE) pigmented