2023届高考英语外刊阅读模拟强化训练：阅读理解专题二十二

高考英语外刊阅读模拟强化训练 阅读理解专题二十二 ① The end of the world is nigh, again. And as usual, it’s being greeted largely with a shrug. Perhaps you felt a prick of unease as you scrolled the headlines, or half -listened over breakfast to some radio debate about the fact that some time in the next four years the planet is likely to breach the 1.5C rise in global temperature that we have long been told is the tipping point to avoid. Perhaps you even felt rage or frustration that it’s taking everyone else so long to wake up. But the chances are that most people will have forgotten it by lunchtime. If swing voters were as viscerally scared of flood, fire and catastrophic crop failure as they seem to be of people leaving Calais in dinghies, governments would be turning themselves inside out battling the rising temperature. Imagine if Westminster pounced on every global heating forecast like it will on next week’s immigration figures, expected to show another rise to record levels; imagine if green issues stirred the same primal emotions as Brexiters’ blue passports. A psychologist would argue that the brain’s natural defences against anxiety are strong, and in this case unhelpfully so. We’re hard wired to respond to imminent physical threats rather than abstract or distant ones and, crucially, to run away from anything too big to fight. These survival instincts served humans well in conflict with charging mammoths, but not so much against the kind of abstract but existential risks potentially posed by the climate crisis. No doubt the media could do more to shove this particular crisis in everyone’s faces. It’s not too late yet. The lesson from the pandemic is that people can be surprisingly willing to make sacrifices for the public good, if we think that everyone else is doing it and if the rewards are clear. Staying at home to save the NHS was the noble thing to do, but it also made you much less likely to die of Covid, and within weeks it was gratifyingly obvious that it was workin