2020年6月英语四级模拟题：长篇阅读匹配
李天慧-
2020
年
6
月英语四级模拟题：长篇阅读匹配
2020
年
6
月英语四级模拟题：长篇阅读匹配
Being Objective on Climate
Change
week
，
Craig
Rucker,a climate-change skeptic and
the
executive director of a nonprofit organization
called the
Committee for a Constructive
Tomorrow(CFACT)
，
tweeted a
quotation supposedly taken from a 1922
edition of the
Washington
Post
：“Within a few
years it
is predicted due to
ice melt the sea
will rise
＆
make most coastal
cities
uninhabitable
．”The
intent，
of
course
，
was to poke fun at
current headlines about climate
change
．
’s organization is a member
ofthe Cooler Heads
Coalition
，
an
umbrella organization operated by the
Competitive Enterprise
Institute
，
a nonprofit that
prides
itself on its opposition to
environmental ists
．
Rucker
himself is part of a network of
bloggers
，
op-cd
writers
，
and
policy-shop executives who argue that
climate change is
either a hoax or all
example of left-wing
hysteria
．
Surfacing
old newspaper clips is one of their
favorite games
．
They also
make substantive arguments about
climate policy,but the
sniping may be
more effective
．
There is no
stronger
rhetorical tool than
ridicule
．
this
case
，Ruckcr’s ridicule seems
misplaced．
After
spending a
few minutes poking around
online
，
1 was able to
find both the Washington Post article
and the longer SourCe
material that it
came from
—
a weather report
issued by the
U
．
S
．
consul in
Bergen
，
Norway,and sent to
the State
Department on october 1
0
，
1 922
．The
report didn’t say
anything about coasts being
inundated
．This isn’t
surpris
ing
．
Scientists wete smart
back then
，
too,and they
knew that melting sea ice wouldn’t
appreciably raise sea
levels
．
any more
than a melting ice cube raises the level of
water in a glass
．
ultimately corrected his tweet once commenters
pointed out the
misquote
．
Through Twitter,he
informed me that
he had taken the line
from a Washington Times
op
—
ed by
Richard
Rahn
，
a senior fellow at the
Cato Institute
．
When I
contacted Rahn’s office．
a
press representative acknowledged
that
Rahn had copied the quote from other bloggers and
columnists
；
the
fabricated sentence appears in articles at
reason
．
corn and t
exasgopvote
．
corn
．
The fabricated line
seems to
have been inserted around
2020
．
but the original
article has been circulating online
since 2007
．
E. The
statement about rising sea levels
aside
，
1 922
really was a strange period in the
Svalbard archipelago
．
the
area described by the weather
report
．
The islands lie
halfway
between Norway and the North
Pole,at a latitude that puts
them
several hundred miles farther north than
Barrow,alaska
．“The Arctic
seems to be warming up．”the
report
read
．
In August of that
year,a geologist near the
island of
Spitsbergen sailed as far north as eighty-one
degrees
．
twenty
．
nine minutes in ice-free
water
．
This was
highly
unusual
．
The previous several
summers had likewise
been
warrn
．
Seal populations had
moved farther north
，
and
formerly unseen stretches of coast were
now accessible
．
are we to take
from this historical evidence?A
central
tenet for Rucker and his colleagues is mat today’s
sea
．
ice
retreat
。
warming surface
temperatures
，
and similar
observations are short-lived anomalies
of a kind that often
happened in the
past
—
and that overzealous
scientists and
gullible media are quick
to drum up crises where none
exist
．
Favorite
examples include numerous newspaper articles
from the
nineteen
．
seventies that
predicted the advent of a
new ice
age
．
In
fact
．
it's possible to find
articles from
nearly every decade of
the past century that seem to imply
information about the climate that
turned out to be premature
or
wrong
．
1922 article
has been quoted repeatedly by
Rucker’s
comrades
-in-arms since its 2007 rebirth
in the
Washington
Times
．
For nearly that
long
，
scientists have been
objecting
．
Gavin
Schmidt
，
a climate modeler
and the deputy
director of the NASA
Goddard Institute for Space
Studies
，
points out that what
was an anomaly in 1922 is now the
norm
：
the waters near
Spitsbergen are clear of ice at the end of
every summer
．
More
important
，
long-term
temperature and sea-
ice records
indicate that the dramatic sea-ice retreat in the
early
nineteen
．
twenties was short-
lived
．
It also occurred
locally around
svalbard
—
the
u
nusual conditions didn’t even
encompass the whole Norwegian
Sea
，
let alone the rest of
the
Arctic
．
H.
0ver the weekend
，
after
retracting his previous
tweet
，
Rucker posted a link
to a blog item about a different
article
．
this one
a 1932 New York Times
story
．
The
eighty-
year-old headline
reads
，“The Next Great Deluge Forecast
By
Science
：
Melting
Polar Ice Caps to Raise the Level of the
Seas and Flood the
Continents
．”That one sounded juicy,and，
indeed
，
this time
the text was correct
：
that
really is what