Instruction: answer questions 36 to 40 based on the following text.

Why 2023 could be the year of the superbloom

1. “Superblooms” of California and the U.S. Southwest are the stuff of (literal) legend.
2. For centuries, Indigenous communities have celebrated massive springtime blossomings of
3. chia, desert lilies, tarweeds, sunflowers, and other flowers with edible seeds or roots. “Fields
4. as verdant as they are flower-covered touch the very waters of the sea”, wrote Spanish
5. colonist Juan Bautista de Anza in 1774. Today, these floral explosions are confined to pockets
6. of relatively undisturbed habitats, mostly in the vast southwestern deserts of California,
7. Arizona, and Nevada, and pop up only after a good-rain year.
8. This winter, California has seen an abundance of rain, which has fallen relatively
9. consistently since late autumn. That’s setting the stage for an excellent bloom, says Abby
10. Wines, a ranger at Death Valley National Park in southern California. “Although it may not end
11. up being a superbloom, we’re predicting a well-above-average bloom”. But the glorious natural
12. events are under threat — from hundreds of thousands of flower tourists who sometimes
13. trample delicate blooms and soil; invasive species; ongoing development; and climate change,
14. which is already making the region drier and hotter.
15. Whether or not 2023 yields a superbloom, visiting spectacular flowers is a really
16. excellent way “to get excited and start thinking about plants”, says Evan Meyer, director of
17. the native plant-focused Theodore Payne Foundation. The “fragile, special, and in some ways
18. dwindling experiences” can inspire deep relationships with the landscapes around us, he says
19. — and get people involved in protecting them for the next bloom, some 10 years away.

Available at: https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/article/2023-year-of-the-superbloom-flowers-california