题型：阅读理解 题类：常考题 难易度：普通
江西省南昌市第二中学2018-2019学年高二上学期英语期末考试试卷（含小段音频）
Environmentalists said our planet was bound to die. Now one man says they are wrong. “Everyone knows the planet is in bad shape,” thundered a magazine article last year. “Species are being driven to die out at record rates, and the rivers are so poisonous that fish are floating on the surface, dead.”
But there's growing belief that what everyone takes for granted is wrong: Things are actually getting better. A new book is about to overturn our most basic assumptions about the world's environment. Rivers, seas, rain and the atmosphere are all getting better.
The total amount of forests in the world is not declining. The Skeptical Environmentalist by Bjorn Lomborg, professor of statistics at the University of Aarhus in Denmark, is an attack on the misleading claims of environmental groups, and the “bad news” culture that makes people believe everything is getting worse.
Now the attacks are increasingly coming from left-wing environmentalists such as Lomborg, a former member of Greenpeace. The accusation is that, although the environment is improving, green groups — with profits of hundreds of millions of pounds a year — are using scare tactics (战术) to gain donations. Lomborg's book doesn't deny global warming — probably the biggest environmental threat — but destroys almost every other environmental claim with many official statistics.
The Worldwatch Institute claims that deforestation(采伐森林) has been speeding over the last 30 years. Buy Lomborg says that is simply rubbish. Since the dawn of agriculture the world has lost about 20% of its forest cover, but in recent decades the forest area's depleting has come to a stop. According to UN figures, the area of forests has remained almost steady, at about 30% of total land area, since 1940s. Forests in countries such as the US, UK and Canada have actually been expanding over the past 40 years. Despite all the warnings the Amazon rainforest has only shrunk by about 15%.
Nor are all our species dying out. Some campaigners claim that 50% of all species will have died out within 50 years. But other studies show only 0.08% of species are dying out each year. Conservation efforts have been successful. Whales are no longer threatened and the bald eagle is off the endangered list.
Environmental groups claim that many of the improvements are the results of their campaigns. Stephen Tindale, director of Greenpeace UK, said, “There are important examples, such as acid rain and ozone, where things weren't as bad as predicted, and that's because our behavior changed.”
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