专题07 阅读表达-2024年高考英语新名校联考试题分类汇编（北京专用）

专题07 阅读 ( 培优版 )表达 （1） （2023秋·北京·高三校联考开学考试）阅读下面短文，根据题目要求用英文回答问题。 “What if…?” thinking is anytime you try to guess the future outcome of an action you take. For example, “I want to ask for a pay raise but what if…?” Your mind then fills in the blank with many alternate scenarios, almost all of them negative. It’s a powerful combination of focusing on the negative and the unrealistic. It causes you to suffer through events that may not even happen as you try to predict the future and work out how you’ll cope with all these possible(yet unlikely)scenarios. But the absolute worst thing about “what if…” thinking though, is that it tries to convince you it’s helping. You tell yourself that you’re just preparing yourself, you’re protecting yourself. But “what if…” thinking rarely leads to taking practical, preventative actions. Instead, you torture yourself by imagining all sorts of terrible outcomes, all in the name of being “prepared”, the idea of which is captured beautifully by this quote: “Do not be fooled by ‘what if…’ thinking! You are not a fortune teller. Even if you were, mentally rehearsing how you’ll cope with a negative outcome has limited usefulness. You’re much better off just coping with the situation once when it happens.” By torturing yourself imagining all the possible bad things that could happen, you end up living through all these horrible possibilities that you don’t have to. Even if you do get it right, and one of the negative scenarios is the outcome, you’re unlikely to remember your well-rehearsed comeback or safety strategy in the heat of the moment. Another separate problem with “what if…?” thinking is that it makes you so fearful of all these potentially hideous outcomes that it stops you from actually living through the situation, if you can at all avoid it. By stopping yourself from acting, not only do you cut off the potential benefits of actually asking, but you also cut off the opportunity to see that your predictions were wrong—because y