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当我那杞人忧天的丈夫提出在家里囤积净水药片、脱水食品和急救抗生素以防大难临头时，我感到荒谬可笑。但如今，看到特朗普和金正恩互放狠话、世界各地不时出现的极端天气，以及科学家对地磁暴的预测，我突然意识到，活命主义者的担忧并不是没有道理的。
测试中可能遇到的词汇和知识：
doomsday['duːmzdeɪ] n.世界末日
antibiotic [ˌæntibaɪ'ɒtɪk] n.抗生素
apocalyptic [əˌpɒkə'lɪptɪk/ adj. 预示灾祸的
bunker['bʌŋkə(r)] n.煤仓，掩体
stockpile['stɒkpaɪl] vt.储备，储存
roaming['rəʊmɪŋ] n.漫游的
preposterous[prɪ'pɒstərəs] adj.荒谬的
peril['perəl] n. 危险，冒险
perishable ['perɪʃəb(ə)l] adj. 易腐烂的
unwieldy [ʌn'wiːldɪ] adj.笨重的，笨拙的
intractable[ɪn'træktəbl] adj.倔强的，棘手的
unobtrusive[ˌʌnəb'truːsɪv] adj.不显眼的
paranoia [ˌpærə'nɔɪə] n. 妄想狂，偏执狂
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A year ago I made a compromise with my husband. He could buy a single packet of water purification tablets, but that had to be it. He couldn’t start bulk ordering freeze-dried food or emergency antibiotics. We were not going to descend into full-blown disaster preparedness.
My husband has mild prepper tendencies. He spent much of his childhood living on a boat in Florida, with an annual hurricane season that prompted his family to literally batten down the hatches on numerous occasions. Add to this years of playing apocalyptic computer games and it’s little wonder he has a vivid picture of what the end of the world will look like.
Before I met him, I’d never heard of prepping. Now, it feels like part of the culture — from the viral New Yorker feature on tech billionaires buying remote luxury bunkers to the advice a US friend shared on Facebook last week, entitled “Where to Hide If a Nuclear Bomb Goes Off in Your Area” (“I live in a primary target so it doesn’t matter,” one person replied).
Lying awake in the early hours in our flat in Hackney, I have occasionally found a tiny, stupid sense of comfort in those water purification tablets. Not that they’d last long, my husband tells me, when I decline his suggestion that we stockpile more. At which point he starts talking about the baseball bat we keep by the bed in case of burglars, and whether this would achieve much when roaming gangs desperate to steal our precious clean water reach the flat.
It can feel preposterous to engage in this play-acting at disaster, when so many people around the world — in Iraq or Syria, say — face imminent danger. Yet as Donald Trump and Kim Jong Un have traded threats, it’s been hard to keep a sense of perspective on how close we are to civilisational peril.
Apocalyptic thinking has always been with us, but its power waxes and wanes. “We live in an extremely unstable and insecure time,” says Ash Amin, a Cambridge University geography professor who studies urban culture. “Risks are much bigger and globally integrated.”
The psychology of prepping rests on this sense of chaos, of needing to assert some control — any control — over an unpredictable reality. There is solace in practical, orderly steps you can tick off a list. Buy a three-day supply of non-perishable food, a few gallons of water, a torch, a multi-tool. Identify your family meeting place, evacuation route, shelter. These are achievable aims.
Many everyday catastrophes, in contrast, are unwieldy and intractable. Rather than arriving with the sudden bloom of a mushroom cloud, they unfold slowly, in quiet, unobtrusive ways. Some 52,000 people died of drug overdoses in the US in 2015, more than from guns or cars, or from HIV/Aids in the year the epidemic reached its height. Mothers, fathers, teenagers collapsing in shopping aisles and sports pitches is its own kind of Armageddon; most of us feel helpless in its wake.
Of course, calamities do occur. One morning in September 1859, British astronomer Richard Carrington was in his observatory when he saw a white-light solar flare — a huge magnetic explosion on the sun. It was followed by the largest geomagnetic storm ever recorded on Earth. Telegraphs were disrupted across Europe and the US. My husband’s fear is of a repeat Carrington event — a severe geomagnetic storm that this time would take down the electrical grid, GPS and satellites. In 2012, scientists suggested that the likelihood of such a storm within a decade was as high as 12 per cent. Worst-case scenario: millions of people, hospitals, businesses without power for months.
Perhaps it’s worth preparing for this one-in-eight possibility of chaos. So when is prepping not paranoia — but planning? Tom Martin, founder of the American Preppers Network, which has 35,000 forum members and 230,000 fans on Facebook, tells me: “The definition of a prepper is quite simply ‘one who prepares’. So if someone stores extra food and emergency supplies in case of a disaster, then by definition they are a prepper …It’s all varying degrees.”
Amin points out that the emphasis on individual prepping may be misplaced. “Where you find really resilient populations, they often share responsibility with their families and communities. And the history of managing for apocalypse is the history of governmental and infrastructure preparedness.”
I take this to mean that instead of building up supplies, we should invite the neighbours round for cake and pressure the government to invest in things such as transport and back-up energy. That’s the kind of prepping I can get behind. But I might buy a wind-up radio as well, just in case.
请根据你所读到的文章内容，完成以下自测题目：
1.According to the author, what did her husband buy in preparation for possible disaster？
A. A packet of water purification tablets.
B. A packet of water purification tablets and a baseball bat.
C. A packet of water purification tablets and freeze-dried food.
D. A packet of water purification tablets and emergency antibiotics.
答案 (1)
A. Apocalyptic thinking has became increasingly popular in modern times.
B. In today's world people are facing bigger risks than we used to.
C. In most parts of the world, people face imminent danger in their everyday lives.
D. Most people have no idea how close we are to civilisational peril.
答案 (2)
3.What happened in in September 1859？
A. Astronomer Richard Carrington observed the largest geomagnetic storm ever recorded on Earth.
B. A geomagnetic storm caused an month-long electricity black-out across Europe and the US.
C. A huge magnetic explosion on the sun took down electrical grids across Europe and the US.
D. A magnetic explosion on the sun caused the largest geomagnetic storm ever recorded on Earth.
答案 (3)
4.Which of the following is true according to the article？
A. Drug overdose is one of the leading causes of accidental death in the US in 2015.
B. The psychology of prepping rests on the sense of insecurity over upcoming disasters.
C. Tom Martin believes everyone who prepares for possible emergencies can be called a prepper.
D. Amin urges that individual prepping is the most important part of disaster preparedness.
答案 (4)
(1) 答案：A解释：一年前我向丈夫作出妥协，他可以买一包净水药片，但要适可而止，不能在家里囤积冷冻脱水食品和急救抗生素。
(2) 答案：B解释：剑桥大学地理学教授Ash Amin表示，我们生活在一个极其不稳定、不安全的时代。全世界人都要面对大得多的风险。
(3) 答案：D解释：1859年，英国天文学家Richard Carrington观测到了一次巨大的太阳风暴，随后地球遭遇了有史以来最为严重的一次地磁暴。
(4) 答案：C解释：Tom Martin认为，“准备者”的定义非常简单，就是这事先最准备的人。如果一个人准备好多余的食物和应急用品以防灾难降临，他就是准备者。