2022 年 12 月大学英语六级考试真题（第 2 套）

A)What do we lose when natural spaces and species disappear? Increasingly, research has shown that as species and ecosystems vanish, it also chips away at our ability to preserve what remains -- because we no longer understand what we're losing.

B)You probably see it all the time. The neighbor who puts pesticides on his lawn rather than deal with annoying bees. The politician who votes against wildlife protection because she's never seen a wolf in the wild. The corporation that wants to bulldoze (用推土机推平) the habitat of a rare frog.

C)At best this can be termed "the extinction of experience," where our cultural and natural histories fade from our memories and therefore our reality. At its worst it becomes something even more concerning: "biophobia," the fear of living things and a complete aversion to nature.

D)This isn't the fiction of living in a cold, empty dystopia (绝望的世界). Sadly, it's becoming a way of life for too many people—especially children. A recent study in Japan paints a striking portrait of this problem. A survey of more than 5, 300 school children in the Tochigi Prefecture examined their perception of 14 local insect species and one spider. The results? A collective "ew!" Most of the students saw the species as things to dislike or fear, or even as sources of danger. The less experience the students had with nature, the more negative their feelings.

E)The results were published earlier this year in the journal Biological Conservation. Lead researcher Masashi Soga with the University of Tokyo says the study stemmed from observations about today's nature-deficient children. "Humans inherently avoid dangerous organisms such as bees, but children these days avoid even harmless insects such as butterflies and dragonflies (蜻蜓),"he says. "I have long wondered why so many of today's children react like this."

F)Although the children's reactions were somewhat expected, the new study did contain an unexpected finding: Many of the surveyed children revealed that their parents also expressed fear or disgust of the same animals. In fact these parental emotions were strong enough to overwhelm any positive experiences the children might have gained from direct experiences in nature. As Soga and his coauthors wrote in their paper, "Our results suggest that there is likely a feedback loop in which an increase in people who have negative attitudes towards nature in one generation will lead to a further increase in people with similar attitudes in the next generation."

G)And that's possibly the greater threat posed by extinction of experience. Soga suggests the generational loss- a condition previously dubbed environmental generational amnesia (遗忘) -- could chip away at our societal ability to preserve what we're losing. "I believe that increased biophobia is a major, but invisible, threat to global biodiversity," Soga says. "As the number of children who have biophobia increases, public interest and support for biodiversity conservation will gradually decline. Although many conservation biologists still consider that preventing the loss of wildlife habitat is the most important way to conserve biodiversity, I think preventing increased biophobia is also important for conservation."

H)What's to be done about this? The paper makes several recommendations, the most obvious of which is that children should experience nature more often. The authors also suggest establishing policies to guide these natural experiences and increasing educational programs about the natural world.

I)Helping parents to see species around them in a new light would make a difference, too. And, of course, maintaining support for preserving the wild spaces where these "scary" creatures live is the most important thing of all. That's a point reinforced by another recent study, which found that wild spaces located within urban areas—and the plants and animals that thrive in them—are particularly important for human health and well-being.

J)Published in the journal Frontiers in Sustainable Cities, the study examined attitudes toward Discovery Park, the heavily forested 534-acre public park in Seattle, Washington. It found that the public had the most appreciation for -- and gained the most value from -- the wildest parts of the park. "I have seen whales, seals, fish, eagles, shorebirds and many other sea creatures in their natural habitat," one survey participant wrote. "Coming here with people has allowed me to connect and talk with them about conversation that simply does not happen in everyday life," wrote another.

K)The participants reported that their most valuable experiences in the park included encountering wildlife, walking through open spaces, exploring the beach and finding beautiful views. "We saw that a large majority of participants' interactions, especially their most meaningful interactions, depended on Discovery Park's relative wildness," says lead author Elizabeth Lev, a master's student in the University of Washington's Human Interaction with Nature Lab. This is only possible because the park is relatively wild. After all, you can't enjoy watching birds if there are no birds to follow? gaze at the sunset if it's obscured by skyscrapers; or stop and smell the flowers if they don't have room to grow.

L)And yet even this long-protected space could someday become less hospitable to nature. Over the past few years a lot of people and organizations have suggested developing parts of Discovery Park or the neighboring area. Most recently a plan proposed building 34 acres of much-needed affordable housing and parking spaces adjacent to the park, bringing with them noise, traffic and pollution.

M)If anything like that happened, both the park and the people of Seattle could lose something vital. And that would continue the trend of chipping away at Seattle's—and the world's—natural spaces, leaving just tiny pocket parks and green-but-empty spaces that offer little real value to wildlife, plants or people.

N)N) "It is true that any interaction with nature is better than none, but I don't want people to be satisfied with any small bit of grass and trees," Lev says. "We have been in this cycle of environmental generational amnesia for a long time, where the baseline keeps shifting and we don't even realize what we're losing until it's gone. If we can get people to understand how much meaning and value can come from having more experiences with more wild forms of nature, then maybe we can stop this cycle and move toward conserving and restoring what we have left."

O)O) Building this understanding in an ever-more fearful and disconnected world may be the biggest challenge. Peter Kahn, the senior author of Lev's paper and the director of the Human Interaction with Nature Lab, made several suggestions for bridging this gap in this 2011 book, Technological Nature. They echo the recommendation about getting children into nature, but also include telling stories of how things used to be, imagining what things might be like in the future, and developing a common language about nature, "a way of speaking about wild and domestic interaction patterns, and the meaningful, deep and often joyful feelings that they generate."

P)P) No matter what techniques we use, this growing field of research illustrates that saving nature requires encouraging people to experience it more often and more deeply. That calls for additional research -- Lev and her coauthors have published a toolkit that other municipalities can follow to study the value of their own wild spaces -- and clear communication of the results. "If we can continue to show people the benefits of these wild spaces," Lev says, "maybe people will begin to see more value in keeping these areas undeveloped- for the sake of our mutual benefit."

Some people in the US have asserted that forgiving student loan debt is one way to stimulate the economy and give assistance to those in need. One government proposition is to eliminate $ 10,000 of debt for 4 economically distressed? students. Some in US Congress have gone so far as to suggest forgiving up to $ 50,000 in debt per student borrower, but does forgiving student debt necessarily correlate to helping the economically disadvantaged? The answer is no. This policy is just giving money away to universities and the most affluent students in attendance. Federal Reserve data reveals that the highest-income 40 percent of households owe approximately 60 percent of outstanding student debt, while the lowest 40 percent owe just under 20 percent. This could be due to a combination of factors: students from high-income households are more likely to go to expensive colleges, less likely to receive financial aid, and more likely to have high incomes post-graduation. Plus, the majority of student debt is held by graduate degree earners, who earn approximately 25 percent more than their undergraduate counterparts. Clearly, giving free reign to banks to forgive student debt is a step in the wrong direction. Other proposals for broader, long-term student loan plans have some fundamental problems. One idea is to cancel student debt only for undergraduate degrees and for students making less than $125,000. This attempts to address the fact that Congress' previously mentioned student loan forgiveness plan largely helps out the wealthy, but is an adverse incentive for universities to keep raising tuition and for students to choose to major in low-earning degree programs. Colleges have no reason to make their programs more affordable if they believe students will just take out more debt. And, students will feel more comfortable making the irresponsible decision to go tens of thousands of dollars in debt to major in impractical or idealistic subjects if they know their loans will be forgiven. This is especially concerning given the pandemic (大流行病) has rendered a college education practically worthless. Students are paying tens of thousands of dollars per year to live at home and be lectured on the Internet. Do we really want to tell colleges that they can get away with providing below-average service for an outrageous cost? In the case of any of these student debt plans, working-class Americans who chose not to or could not afford to go to college will be subsidizing the education of the professional class. Plumbers and retail workers will be paying for the degrees of doctors and lawyers. The US government's effort to help those in debt is commendable but is this really the solution that will help the poor financially recover?

If there's one rule that most parents cling to in the confusing, fast-changing world of kids and media, it's "No screens before age 2 ." As of today, that rule has been thrown out the window. The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP), which first issued that recommendation back in 1999, has extensively updated and revised its guidelines for children and adolescents to reflect new research and new habits. The new guidelines, especially for very young children, shift the focus from WHAT is on the screen to WHO else is in the room. And in doing so, they raise some intriguing points about the future of learning from the media. For babies younger than 18 months, AAP still says no screens at all are the best idea—with one notable exception: Live video chat. Surveys indicate that families already popularly believe that "Face time doesn't count or at least that the benefit of virtual visits with grandparents or other relatives outweighs the potential cost of exposing babies to the laptop or smartphone. The AAP doesn't cite positive evidence that infants actually get something out of this kind of "conversation", the way that they clearly do from live social interaction. But there's some observational research that infants as young as six months old are emotionally engaged by playing live peekaboo (躲猫猫游戏) with Grandma online. For infants and toddlers (学步儿童), ages 15 months to 2 years old, there's limited evidence from a couple of very small studies that they can learn new words from educational media, if and only if parents are watching alongside them, repeating what the video says and/or drawing attention to what is on the screen. In other words, treating a video or an app like a picture book is the best bet. The flip side of this is that many studies have actually shown poorer language skills correlated with earlier solo viewing of "educational" videos. There's also research that shows language delays in children who watch more TV and start watching earlier. In both cases, the problem seems to be media replacing interaction with people. For this reason, the new AAP guideline has changed from "avoid all screens under age 2" to "avoid solo media use in this age group." For preschoolers ages 2 to 5, there's more evidence that they have the ability to transfer knowledge from screens to the real world, including early literacy and math. For this age group, AAP recommends no more than an hour a day of screen use. And, just as with younger children, they want care-givers to take part in screen time: "Co-view with your children, help children understand what they are seeing, and help them apply what they learn to the world around them."