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探究：2021北京英语高考题阅读理解C篇
Intro. 引入
2021北京英语高考题阅读理解C篇是我做题这么久以来第一次就算大致看懂了文章讲什么也不会做题的阅读。老师讲的时候估计也不知道怎么让我们明白，最后让我们“自己感受”。
我真不相信京爷高考题这么糙，于是昨天晚上(2026/3/5)我花了一整个晚二(100min)（原本以为只要半个的），几乎彻底地搞懂了这道难度极高却又十分巧妙的阅读。同时我也发现了一些小问题——不影响它的质量。
Contents 目录
原稿我写了目录，网页版保留这个设定，尽管vitepress自己有目录。
- 文章(网页版附加)
- 词汇——探究时查的单词
- 文章讲了什么
- 解题
- 原文与选文的区别
- 原文（网页版附加）
- 总结
- 参考（网页版附加）
RContents 目录（自动生成）
Arti. 文章
如果你还没做过我建议你做一下，挺好的
C
Hundreds of scientists, writers and academics sounded a warning to humanity in an open letter published last December: Policymakers and the rest of us must engage openly with the risk of global collapse. Researchers in many areas have projected the widespread collapse as “a credible scenario (情景) this century”.
A survey of scientists found that extreme weather events, food insecurity, and freshwater shortages might create global collapse. Of course, if you are a non-human species, collapse is well underway.
The call for public engagement with the unthinkable is especially germane in this moment of still-uncontrolled pandemic and economic crises in the world’s most technologically advanced nations. Not very long ago, it was also unthinkable that a virus would shut down nations and that safety nets would be proven so disastrously lacking in flexibility.
The international scholars’ warning letter doesn’t say exactly what collapse will look like or when it might happen. Collapseology, the study of collapse, is more concerned with identifying trends and with them the dangers of everyday civilization. Among the signatories (签署者) of the warning was Bob Johnson, the originator of the “ecological footprint” concept, which measures the total amount of environmental input needed to maintain a given lifestyle. With the current footprint of humanity, “it seems that global collapse is certain to happen in some form, possibly within a decade, certainly within this century,” Johnson said in an email.
Only if we discuss the consequences of our biophysical limits, the December warning letter says, can we have the hope to reduce their “speed, severity and harm”. And yet messengers of the coming disturbance are likely to be ignored. We all want to hope things will turn out fine. As a poet wrote,
Man is a victim of dope (麻醉品)
In the incurable form of hope.
The hundreds of scholars who signed the letter are intent (执着) on quieting hope that ignores preparedness. “Let’s look directly into the issue of collapse,” they say, “and deal with the terrible possibilities of what we see there to make the best of a troubling future.”
1. What does the underlined word “germane” in Paragraph 3 probably mean?
A. Scientific. B. Credible. C. Original. D. Relevant.
1. As for the public awareness of global collapse, the author is ______.
A. worried B. puzzled C. surprised D. scared
1. What can we learn from this passage?
A. The signatories may change the biophysical limits.
B. The author agrees with the message of the poem.
C. The issue of collapse is being prioritized.
D. The global collapse is well underway.
答案（你真的做了吗）
Details
28.D 29.A 30.B
Voca. 词汇
Mainly adapted from Merriam-Webster Collegiate Dictionary
| 单词 | 英文意思 | 我的翻译 |
|---|---|---|
| credible | offering reasonable grounds for being believed or trusted | (有证据)可信的 |
| scenario | a sequence of events especially when imagined | 情景（想象的，推测的） |
| flexibility | characterized by a ready capability to adapt to new, different, or changing requirements | 适应力 |
| underway (From Oxford) | having started | 已经开始 |
| biophysical limits | At its core, the concept of Biophysical Limits refers to the finite nature of Earth’s resources and the planet’s capacity to absorb the impacts of human activities. In simple terms, it’s about recognizing that our planet has boundaries – ceilings and floors – that dictate what is ecologically possible and sustainable. | 环境承载力 |
| incurable | broadly : not likely to be changed or corrected | 难以改变，不可救药的 |
| preparedness | the quality or state of being prepared | 有准备 |
Pass. 文章讲了什么
内容均是我的自译，不一定完全正确
Paragraph 1
Hundreds of scientists, writers and academics sounded a warning to humanity in an open letter published last December: Policymakers and the rest of us must engage openly with the risk of global collapse. Researchers in many areas have projected the widespread collapse as “a credible scenario (情景) this century”.
学者、作家、科学家于12月公开信发出警告：政策制定者于与剩下的人必须公开地合作以对抗全球崩溃这一风险。多地地研究人员认为（推测）广泛的崩溃为“本世纪有证据的可信情景”。
这里类似导言。注意这里的credible指的是推测的未来——会发生崩溃，而非他们的公开信credible。
Paragraph 2
A survey of scientists found that extreme weather events, food insecurity, and freshwater shortages might create global collapse. Of course, if you are a non-human species, collapse is well underway.
极端条件导致全球崩溃。如果你并非人类，崩溃早已开始。
这段分析了崩溃的原因。你可能以为"Of course, if you are a non-human species, collapse is well underway"是个笑话从而认为作者“风格飘逸”，但事实并非如此。这里是我认为北京高考题出的不是很好的地方——引发了完全偏离文章的歧义，这个后面再讲。
Paragraph 3
The call for public engagement with the unthinkable is especially germane in this moment of still-uncontrolled pandemic and economic crises in the world’s most technologically advanced nations. Not very long ago, it was also unthinkable that a virus would shut down nations and that safety nets would be proven so disastrously lacking in flexibility.
呼吁公众参与的倡议在当今疫情尚未停息、经济仍然危机的时代尤为相关，尤其在那些科技最发达的国家。不久以前，谁也没想到一个病毒会让国家停摆以及证明安全网络如此缺乏适应能力。
注意这里的unthinkable，这并非surprised，更像是对现状的陈述，就像一个人说“谁有想得到那年竟然XXX呢？”也许那年他惊讶，但现在就像是在回忆在进行叙述。而这“unthinkable”恰恰说明了大众对于"collapse"的无知，因此我们能从这里间接地看出public awareness(大众意识)的缺乏。
Paragraph 4
The international scholars’ warning letter doesn’t say exactly what collapse will look like or when it might happen. Collapseology, the study of collapse, is more concerned with identifying trends and with them the dangers of everyday civilization. Among the signatories (签署者) of the warning was Bob Johnson, the originator of the “ecological footprint” concept, which measures the total amount of environmental input needed to maintain a given lifestyle. With the current footprint of humanity, “it seems that global collapse is certain to happen in some form, possibly within a decade, certainly within this century,” Johnson said in an email.
介绍崩溃学，引出发明生态足迹的科学家WilliamRees(高考选文改成了BobJhonson但是现实里甚至没有叫这个名字且出名的人)。用名言论证现在人类的生态足迹会让崩溃发生于本世纪，也许十年内发生。
⭐ Paragraph 5
Only if we discuss the consequences of our biophysical limits, the December warning letter says, can we have the hope to reduce their “speed, severity and harm”. And yet messengers of the coming disturbance are likely to be ignored. We all want to hope things will turn out fine. As a poet wrote,
Man is a victim of dope (麻醉品)
In the incurable form of hope.
“只有当我们讨论了（我们达到）环境承载力（极限）”，十二月警示说，“我们才能有希望降低它们（崩溃）的”速度，程度与损伤“。然而，那些传播即将到来的扰乱（原文[并非选文]为turmoils[骚乱])的信使（科学家，学者......）却很容易被忽视。我们都希望世界会变得更好。（但）正如一个诗人所写
人类一直都是不可救药（盲目）希望这股麻醉剂的受害者。
⭐ Paragraph 6
The hundreds of scholars who signed the letter are intent (执着) on quieting hope that ignores preparedness. “Let’s look directly into the issue of collapse,” they say, “and deal with the terrible possibilities of what we see there to make the best of a troubling future.”
成百上千的签署这封信的学者执着于消停这没有任何行动（准备）的希望。”让我们正视崩溃吧！“他们说，”并且处理我们回看到的可怕的各种可能来让这个让人担忧的未来更好。“
Solu. 解题
28
What does the underlined word “germane” in Paragraph 3 probably mean?
A. Scientific. B. Credible. C. Original. D. Relevant.
从第三段来看,前面是倡议后面是一个特殊时期，也就是：
倡议______特殊时期____
倡议十分学术在特殊时期？(scientific)这完全是风马牛不相干。
倡议十分可信在特殊时期？(credible)。乍一看很对，但是credible是”有证据证明被相信“，这个倡议是一个行动的呼吁而非证明什么东西又何谈可信呢？
倡议十分原创在特殊时期？(original)这也是一看就pass的选项。
倡议十分相关在特殊时期？（很有关系）(relevant)这样便说的通了。事实上，当你看到is especially __ in this moment时，你便可能会想到fit(合适)，suit等词语。而relevant与这些词语意思相近(并非近义词)。
在韦氏字典中，relevant与germane为近义词，而germane比relevant多了个”fitness“，强调更适合。
29
As for the public awareness of global collapse, the author is ______.
A. worried B. puzzled C. surprised D. scared
作者对于公众意识的态度，首先我们要知道公众对于崩溃的意识是什么。你可能找不到直接字眼，但文章处处在暗示：
- 开头的呼吁信，呼吁人们重视崩溃并处理崩溃
- Para3的unthinkable,人们没想到，本质上是人们没去想
- And yet messengers of the coming disturbance are likely to be ignored. 即使是那些带来崩溃消息的信使也被无视了，进一步体现了公共意识的缺乏
- Man is a victim of dope / In the incurable form of hope. 你理解这句话后便会发现它的意思为 "人类一直为希望所困，祈求着希望的到来，如同瘾君子渴求麻药（毒品，高考为了健康隐晦了点）一般"。我在quotation上找到的释义进一步证实了我的想法:
This quote suggests that human beings are often trapped or deceived by a particular type of addiction or craving, which is hope. Just like a drug addict who continually seeks their fix despite its negative consequences, humans inevitably fall prey to unrealistic expectations and aspirations. Hope, in its limitless nature, can manipulate and control individuals, leading them to unrealistically cling to possibilities and outcomes that may never materialize. It emphasizes how hope can become a relentless and incurable disease that consumes and victimizes the human mind.
这里的诗句结合"We all want to hope things will turn out fine."标明了人们一直沉湎于虚假的希望中，希望世界会变得更好而忽视了collapse本身。这便是为什么学者要"quieting hope that ignores preparedness"的原因，为什么要说"let's look directly into the issue of collapse"的原因。
从这里你也看出来了，作者对于大众的无知并不惊讶，反而援引大量的论据进行批判。可以说他对大众的无知十分清楚，并且想要告诉人们这种无知的后果。因此选择worried.surprised显然不对，如果是惊讶，什么”哎呀，我没想到大家这么无知“的感觉，那么作者就不会用这么多的论据来证明大众的无知了。那么作者苦口婆心地分析collapse又有什么情感呢？puzzle与scare就更不对了，这里不多赘述。
如果你仍对surprised与worry有疑义，释义如下：
surprised: feeling or showing surprise because of something unexpected
worried: feeling or showing concern or anxiety about what is happening or might happen
如果是surprise,那么unexpected在哪里体现了呢？前文只有untinkable像这么回事，但这是大众对于“崭露头角”的collapse的态度，而不是作者的态度。
30
What can we learn from this passage?
A. The signatories may change the biophysical limits.
B. The author agrees with the message of the poem.
C. The issue of collapse is being prioritized.
D. The global collapse is well underway.
A项：是discuss而不是change，而且这个讨论是为了减少崩溃的可能性，而不是改变环境承载力的极限。
C项：唯一的论据是"directly",但这并不代表prioritize，而是为了让大家更好地面对崩溃，这说明以前是indirect并且主体是大众。
D项：张冠李戴了，文章说的是如果你是非人类，崩溃早已开始，而不是全球崩溃早已开始。
B项：都引用诗句了，要么赞同要么反对，这里作者显然是赞同的。
Intre. 原文与选文的区别与小问题
我一直以为"Of course, if you are a nonhuman species, collapse is well underway."是一个无趣的冷笑话。但我又觉得这句话十分突兀，于是我搜了某个不存在的网站找到了原文。原文中这句话单独一段并且后面紧跟着论据：Ninety-nine percent of the tall grass prairie in North America is gone, by one estimate; 96% ...(见后面)......着根本就不是笑话而是事实——崩溃早已在非人群体（动植物）中发生，环境正在不断恶化。这是我认为高考题的一个小问题——太容易引起歧义了，我们班几乎100%的人都认为这是一个笑话。
其次在对比文章时我发现原来高考还会对人名进行模糊。原文中提到的生态足迹的创始人WilliamRees,一个教授，但是专家们改成了BobJohnson,一个不出名的人(网上找不到)。
此外还有一些贴合课标的改动，这里列出来一部分:
- lacking in flexibility (原文： resilience)
- the coming disturbance (原文： turmoils)
- reduce the "(原文还有: likelyhood),speed,severity and harm"
Summ. 总结
当我做完后，我的心久久不能平静。这篇阅读是真的难，也是真的有趣。只能说京爷不愧是京爷，这信息藏得太深了！要完全理解题目必须完全理解文章。中文网上的各种信息我也看了，要么假大空，要么便是自己也读不明白拿着一两点便说文章怎么怎么的，以及一些人自己也做错了29题的网络上的老师，因此我觉得我的探索意义还挺大。
Cheers!
2025/3/6
原文
在本网站查看文章——我只是负责收集
Collapseologists are warning humanity that business-as-usual will make the Earth uninhabitable
Smoke from wildfires darkens the sky over the mountains and freeway.
(Photo illustration by Nicole Vas/Los Angeles Times; John Antczak/Associated Press)
By Christopher Ketcham and Jeff Gibbs
Jan. 31, 2021 3 AM PT
Hundreds of scientists, writers and academics from 30 countries sounded a warning to humanity in an open letter published in the Guardian in December: Policymakers and the rest of us must “engage openly with the risk of disruption and even collapse of our societies.” “Damage to the climate and environment” will be the overarching cause, and “researchers in many areas” have projected widespread social collapse as “a credible scenario this century.”
It’s not hard to find the “collapseology” studies they are talking about. In a report for the sustainability group Future Earth, a survey of scientists found that extreme weather events, food insecurity, freshwater shortages and the broad degradation of life-sustaining ecosystems “have the potential to impact and amplify one another in ways that might cascade to create global systemic collapse.” A 2019 report from the Breakthrough National Center for Climate Restoration, a think tank in Australia, projected that a rapidly warming world of depleted resources and mounting pollution would lead to “a largely uninhabitable Earth” and a “breakdown of nations and the international order.” Analysts in the U.S. and British military over the past two years have issued similar warnings of climate- and environment-driven chaos.
Of course, if you are a nonhuman species, collapse is well underway. Ninety-nine percent of the tall grass prairie in North America is gone, by one estimate; 96% of the biomass of mammals — biomass is their weight on Earth — now consists of humans, our pets and our farm animals; nearly 90% of the fish stocks the U.N. monitors are either fully exploited, over exploited or depleted; a multiyear study in Germany showed a 76% decline in insect biomass.
The call for public engagement with the unthinkable is especially germane in this moment of still-uncontrolled pandemic, institutional failures and economic crises in the world’s most technologically advanced nations. Not very long ago, it was also unthinkable that a virus would shut down nations and that safety nets would be proven so disastrously lacking in resilience.
The international scholars’ warning doesn’t venture to say exactly what collapse will look like or when it might happen. Collapseology is more concerned with identifying trends and with them the dangers of everyday civilization: ever-expanding economic growth, rapacious consumption of resources and the saturation of the planet’s limited repositories for waste.
Among the signatories of the warning was William Rees, a population ecologist at the University of British Columbia best known as the originator of the “ecological footprint” concept, which measures the total amount of environmental input needed to maintain a given lifestyle. With the current footprint of humanity — most egregiously the footprint of the energy- and resource-entitled Global North — “it seems that some form of global societal collapse is inevitable, possibly within a decade, certainly within this century,” Rees said in an email.
The most pressing proximate cause of biophysical collapse is what he calls overshoot: humans exploiting natural systems faster than the systems can regenerate. The human enterprise is financing its growth and development by liquidating biophysical “capital” essential to its own existence. We are dumping waste at rates beyond nature’s assimilative capacity. Warming temperatures, plunging biodiversity, worldwide deforestation and ocean pollution, among other problems, are all important in their own right. But each is a mere symptom of overshoot, says Rees.
The message we should glean from the evidence is that all human enterprise is ultimately determined by biophysical limits. We are exceptional animals, but we are not exempt from the laws of nature.
Another of the signatories on the warning letter is Will Steffen, a retired Earth systems scientist from Australian National University. Steffen singles out the neoliberal economic growth paradigm — the pursuit of ever expanding GDP — as “incompatible with a well-functioning Earth system at the planetary level.” Collapse, he told an interviewer, “is the most likely outcome of the present trajectory of the current system, as prophetically modelled in ‘Limits to Growth. ‘ “
“Limits to Growth” is a 150-page bombshell of a book published in 1972. The authors, a team of MIT scientists, created a computerized system-dynamics model called World3, the first of its kind, to examine worldwide growth trends from 1900 to 1970. They extrapolated from the historical data to model 12 future scenarios projected to the year 2100.
The models showed that any system based on exponential economic and population growth crashed eventually. The gloomiest model was the one in which the “present growth trends in world population, industrialization, pollution, food production, and resource depletion continue unchanged.” In that “business as usual” scenario, collapse would begin slowly in the 2020s and accelerate thereafter. Updates to the “Limits” study have found that its projections, so far, have been spot-on.
Only if we discuss the consequences of our biophysical limits, the December warning letter says, can we reduce their “likelihood, speed, severity and harm.” And yet messengers of the coming turmoil are likely to be ignored — crowned doomers, collapseniks, marginal and therefore discountable. We all want to hope things will turn out fine. “Man is a victim of dope/In the incurable form of hope,” as poet Ogden Nash wrote.
The hundreds of scholars who signed the letter are intent on quieting hope that ignores preparedness. Let’s look directly into the abyss of collapse, they say, and deal with the terrible possibilities of what we see there “to make the best of a turbulent future.”
Christopher Ketcham is the author, most recently, of “This Land: How Cowboys, Capitalism, and Corruption Are Ruining the American West.” Jeff Gibbs is the writer and director of the documentary “Planet of the Humans.”
网页版制作后记
MD,累死我了，终于打完文字了。
Cheers!
2025/3/9