Directions: Some sentences have been removed in the following text. Choose the most suitable one from the list A-G to fit into each of the blanks. There are two extra choices which do not fit in any of the blanks.
You already know it’s bad. 1. ____________________ You already know that your children, and your children’s children, if they are reckless or brave enough to reproduce, face a vista of rising seas, vanishing coastal cities, storms, wildfires, biblical floods. As someone who reads the news and is sensitive to the general mood of the times, you have a general sense of what we’re looking at. 2. ____________________ David Wallace-Wells, author of the distressingly titled The Uninhabitable Earth, is here to tell you that you do not. “It is,” as he puts it in the book’s first line, “worse, much worse, than you think.”
The book expands on a viral article, also titled The Uninhabitable Earth, which Wallace-Wells published in the summer of 2017, and which frightened the life out of everyone who read it. 3. ____________________ The book’s longest section, entitled Elements of Chaos, is composed of 12 short and brutal chapters, each of which foretells a specific dimension of our forecast doom, and whose titles alone—Heat Death; Dying Oceans; Unbreathable Air; Plagues of Warming—are enough to induce an honest-to-God panic attack.
Wallace-Wells identifies a tendency, even among those of us who think we are already sufficiently terrified of the future, to be strangely complacent about the figures. 4. ____________________ “That so many feel already acclimated to the prospect of a near-future world with dramatically higher oceans,” he writes, “should be as dispiriting and disconcerting as if we’d already come to accept the inevitability of extended nuclear war—because that is the scale of devastation the rising oceans will bring.”
The book is extremely effective in shaking the reader out of that complacency. 5. ____________________ The margins of my review copy of the book are scrawled with expressions of terror and despair, declining in articulacy as the pages proceed, until it’s all just cartoon sad faces and swear words.
A. There is a widespread inclination to think of climate change as a form of compound payback for two centuries of industrial capitalism.
B. Some things I did not want to learn, but learned anyway: every return flight from London to New York costs the Arctic three square metres of ice; for every half degree of warming, societies see between a 10 and 20% increase in the likelihood of armed conflict; global plastic production is expected to triple by 2050, by which point there will be more plastic than fish in the planet’s oceans.
C. Yes, we know that climate change will cause sea level rises of between four to eight feet before the end of this century, but then again what’s a few feet if you happen to live a couple of miles inland?
D. There’s also a temptation, when thinking about climate change, to focus on denialism as the villain of the piece.
E. You already know the weather has gone weird, the ice caps are melting, the insects are disappearing from the Earth.
F. Writing at length, he is even more remorseless in his delineation of what the not nearly distant enough future probably holds for us.
G. But do you truly understand the scale of the tribulations we face?
