Question 15 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.

15. What do we learn about Texas’s oil industry boom?（关于德克萨斯州的石油工业大繁荣，我们了解到了什么？）

解析：A。录音最后提到，当时的得州几乎完全是农村，没有大城市，也几乎没有工业。棉花和牛肉是经济的基础。希金斯大大改变了这点。A项是对此内容的概括总结，因此选A。

错项排除：录音中说在美国某些地区石油过剩，油价暴跌，并非是在全球范围内石油过剩，B项夸大了范围，故排除。录音中只是说得州以前全是乡村，经济的基础是棉花和牛肉，并没有说石油破坏了乡村景观或者棉花和牛肉产业，故C、D项排除。