Question 12 is based on the passage you have just heard.

Passage Two 

听力原文

        At the beginning of the twentieth century, on the Gulf Coast in the US state of Texas, there was a hill where gas leakage was so noticeable that schoolboys would sometimes set the hill on fire.

        (12) [Pattillo Higgins, a disreputable local businessman, became convinced that there was oil below the gassy hill.] Oil wells weren’t drilled back then. They were essentially dug. (13) [The sand under the hill defeated several attempts by Higgins’s workers to make a proper hole.] Higgins had forecast oil at 1,000 feet, a totally made-up figure. Higgins subsequently hired a mining engineer, Captain Anthony Lucas. (14) [After encountering several setbacks, Captain Lucas decided to use a drill, and his innovations created the modern oil drilling industry.] In January 1901, at 1,020 feet, almost precisely the depth predicted by Higgins’s wild guess, the well-roared and suddenly ejected mud and six tons of drilling pipe out of the ground, terrifying those present. For the next nine days until the well was capped, the well poured out more oil than all the wells in America combined.

        (15) [In those days, Texas was almost entirely rural, with no large cities and practically no industry. Cotton and beef were the foundation of the economy. Higgins’s well changed that.] The boom made some prospectors millionaires, but the sudden surplus of petroleum was not entirely a blessing for Texas. In the 1930s, prices crashed, to the point that, in some parts of the country, oil was cheaper than water. That would become a familiar pattern of the boom-or-bust Texas economy.

12. What did Texas businessman Pattillo Higgins believe?（得州商人帕蒂洛·希金斯确信什么？）

解析：D。录音开始提到，帕蒂洛·希金斯是一个商人，他确信充满天然气的山下面有石油。D项是对录音中there was oil below the gassy hill的同义替换，因此选D。

错项排除：A、B项利用录音中提到的fire和leakage进行干扰，但录音中是说，有一座山丘上的天然气泄漏（gas leakage）非常明显，以至于小学童一不小心就能把山点着（set the hill on fire），这些只是对小山丘的介绍，都与帕蒂洛无关，故A、B项排除。录音中说到，学童会把山点着，泥浆和六吨重的钻井管道从地下喷射出来，C项利用ejected和schoolboys进行细节拼凑，故C项排除。