(2017·辽宁六校模拟)Environmentalists said our planet was doomed to die. Now one man says they are wrong.

　　“Everyone knows the planet is in bad shape，”thundered a magazine article last year. Species (物种) 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 a 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 cleaner.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 left­wing 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 (谋略) 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 has been accelerating over the last 30 years”．But Lomborg says that is simply rubbish. Since the dawn of agriculture the world has lost about 20 per cent 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 per cent of total land area, since the 1940s. Forests in countries such as the US, the UK and Canada have actually been expanding over the past 40 years. Despite all the warnings the Amazon rainforest has only shrunk (缩小) by about 15 per cent.

【2017届高考英语一轮总复习精选测试题北师大版选修八Unit 23 B卷】相关文章：

★ 北京市2014高考英语一轮复习 练习手册（40）选修8 Unit 5 Meeting your ancestors（含解析）新人教版

★ 2017年高考英语二轮复习精品资料：专题15 完形填空（押题专练）（原卷版）

★ 天津市武清区杨村第四中学2016届高考英语一轮复习语法专题八《情态动词用法详解》课件外研版

★ 2017年高考英语二轮复习精品资料：专题14 阅读理解（教学案）（原卷版）

★ 四川省2016届高考英语一轮复习课时作业（25） Module 1 British and American English 外研版必修5

★ 湖南省汝城二中2014届高考英语一轮复习阅读训练 (76)

★ 2014届高考英语一轮复习课时作业(二十八)必修5Module 4《Carnival》（外研版）

★ 【北师大版】2014届高考英语一轮复习指导课时作业：Unit 6 B卷 Word版含解析

★ 【三维设计】2017届高考英语（江苏专用）二轮复习课件：必修3 Unit 1《The world of our senses》

★ 四川省2016届高考英语一轮复习课时作业（28） Module 4 Carnival 外研版必修5