Learning Lessons From The Past Reading Passage
Learning Lessons From The Past Reading Passage
Paragraph A
Many past societies caved in or disappeared, leaving behind huge disintegration, such as those that the poet Shelley visualised in his ballad, Ozymandias. By cave-in, I mean an extreme lesson in human population size and/or political/economic/social complication over a sizable area for an extended time; by those qualities, most people would consider the following past societies to have been well-known sufferers of full-fledged tumble rather than of just minor diminish: the Anasazi and Cahokia within the frontier of the modern US, the Maya cities in Central America, Moche and Tiwanaku societies in South America, Norse Greenland, Mycenaean Greece and Minoan Crete in Europe, Great Zimbabwe in Africa, Angkor Wat and the Harappan Indus Valley cities in Asia, and Easter Island in the Pacific Ocean.
Paragraph B
The huge ruins left behind by those past societies hold an interest for all of us. We wonder about them when, as children, we first learn of them through pictures. When we grow up, many of us plan to quit in order to experience them first-hand. We feel worn by their frequent striking and evocative beauty and also by the puzzle that they pose. The scales of the ruins testify to the former wealth and power of their builders. Yet these builders disappear, relinquishing the great structures that they had created with such effort. How could a society that was once so mighty end up caving in?
Paragraph C
It has long been felt that many of those puzzling desertions were at least partly activated by ecological problems: people inadvertently demolishing the ecological resources on which their societies depended. This doubtful inadvertent environmental suicide(ecocide) has been confirmed by findings made in recent decades by palaeontologists, weathercasters, chroniclers, excavators, and palaeoecologists (pollen scientists). The procedure through which past communities have undermined themselves by damaging their environments falls into eight groups, whose relative significance differs from case to case: erosion and environment destruction, soil issues, water management issues, overhunting, overfishing, sequel of introduced species on native species, human population growth, and increased collision of people.
Paragraph D
Those past collapses ministered to follow somewhat alike courses form variations on theme writers find it tempting to draw a resemblance between the course of human communities and the course of individual human loves- to talk of a community’s birth, growth, peak, old age and final death. But that trope manifests mistakes for many past communities: they reduce fast after reaching high numbers and power, and those fast falls must have come as a surprise and shock to their citizens. Evidently, too, this course is not that all past communities followed even to completion: various communities collapsed to various degrees and in somewhat various ways, while many communities did not collapse at all.
Paragraph E
Today, many people feel that ecological issues darken all the other warnings about world civilisation. These ecological issues comprise the same eight that erode past communities plus four new ones: human-caused climate swap, build-up of poison chemicals in the habitat, energy scarcity, and full human usage of the Earth’s chemosynthesis capacity. However, the solemnity of these current ecological issues is strenuously debated. Are the risks greatly overstated, or again, are they underrated? Will modern automation solve our issues, or is it creating new issues quicker than it solves old ones? When we exhaust one resource(e.g. Wood oil or ocean fish), can we count on being able to replace some new resource(e.g. Plastics, wind and solar energy, or farmed fish)? Isn’t the rate of human population growth reduced, such that we’re formerly on course for the world’s population to level off at some achievable number of people?
Paragraph F
Questions like this adorn why those popular collapses of past civilisations have taken on more meaning than just that of an amorous enigma. Maybe there are some particle lessons that we could learn from all those past collapses. However, there are also variations between the modern world and its issues, as well as those past communities and their issues. We shouldn't be so innocent as to think that studying the past will surrender simple solutions that are straight transportable to our communities today. We differ from past communities in some esteem that put us at lower risk than them; some of those respects frequently noted encompass our powerful automation(i.e. Its advantageous effects), proliferation, modern medicine, and greater knowledge of past communities and distant modern communities. We also differ from pat communities in some esteem that put us at greater risk than them: once more, our potent automation(i.e., its accidental devastating effects), globalisation (such that now an issue in one part of the world affects all the rest), the dependence of millions of us on modern medicine for our existence, and our much greater human population. Maybe we can still learn from the past, but only if we think carefully about its lessons.
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