专题04 说明文（阅读理解）-五年（2019-2023）北京高考英语真题+两年模拟题分项汇编

专题 04 说明文（北京卷） 01 2023年北京卷真题 02 2022年北京卷真题 03 2021年北京卷真题 04 2021年北京卷真题 05 2020年北京卷真题 06 2019年北京卷真题 07 最新北京名校模拟试题 【2023年北京卷】 In recent years, researchers from diverse fields have agreed that short-termism is now a significant problem in industrialised societies. The inability to engage with longer-term causes and consequences leads to some of the world’s most serious problems: climate change, biodiversity collapse, and more. The historian Francis Cole argues that the West has entered a period where “only the present exists, a present characterised at once by the cruelty of the instant and by the boredom of an unending now”. It has been proved that people have a bias (偏向) towards the present, focusing on loud attractions in the moment at the expense of the health, well-being and financial stability of their future selves or community. In business, this bias surfaces as short-sighted decisions. And on slow-burning problems like climate change, it translates into the unwillingness to make small sacrifices (牺牲) today that could make a major difference tomorrow. Instead, all that matters is next quarter’s profit, or satisfying some other near-term desires. These biased perspectives cannot be blamed on one single cause. It is fair to say, though, that our psychological biases play a major role. People’s hesitancy to delay satisfaction is the most obvious example, but there are others.One of them is about how the most accessible information in the present affects decisions about the future. For instance, you might hear someone say: “It’s cold this winter, so I needn’t worry about global warming.”Another is that loud and urgent matters are given too much importance, making people ignore longer-term trends that arguably matter more. This is when a pop star draws far more attention than, say, gradual biodiversity decline. As a psychologist once joked, if aliens (外星人) wanted to weaken humanity, they wouldn’t send ships; they would invent