雅思阅读 71: Fighting Fire with Fire（以火攻火）

改编参考 UC Berkeley News / Stanford Science（2025年）。雅思阅读 Section 3 难度，约 1050 词。 素材来源：https://news.berkeley.edu/2025/11/17/prescribed-burning-helps-store-forest-carbon-in-big-fire-resistant-trees/

Reading Passage

A. For a century, the default response to wildfire in the American West was simple: put it out, immediately, completely. Every spark was fought, every flame suppressed, and the forests that resulted grew dense with small trees, brush and deadwood — fuel that had accumulated for decades without ever being consumed. Then, in the summer of 2020, a season of catastrophic blazes swept across California and Oregon, and the old strategy collapsed. The fires were too large, too hot and too fast to be stopped by a few fire trucks, and they exposed a brutal truth: a century of extinguishing every small fire had not made the forests safe. It had loaded them with fuel, so that when a fire finally arrived it was bigger, hotter and more destructive than anything the landscape had evolved to withstand. Whole stands of trees that would once have survived a light underburn were incinerated from the ground up, because the ladder of brush between forest floor and crown had been left in place for a century. The moment forced fire scientists back to an idea that Indigenous communities had practised for thousands of years — deliberately setting small, controlled burns. Those communities understood what the twentieth century forgot: fire is not the enemy of a healthy forest, it is one of its instruments.

B. The logic is counter-intuitive but sound. A low-intensity, planned burn consumes the accumulated underbrush, the dead needles and the small trees, leaving the large, fire-resistant mature trees standing. Without this fuel on the forest floor, a later wildfire cannot easily ladder up into the canopy; it stops at the ground, where it burns cool and fast and moves on, rather than exploding into a crown fire that kills every tree. A two-decade experiment at the Blodgett Forest Research Station in the Sierra Nevada, reported in 2025, found exactly this. Regular prescribed burns did not simply reduce hazard; they actually promoted carbon storage in the big live trees and plants above ground, because the remaining large trees grew faster and lived longer without competing with dense undergrowth. Far from sacrificing carbon, the practice turned out to maintain the forest's long-term capacity to store it, while lowering the risk that a single megafire would release everything at once. This finding cut against a common assumption: that any fire, even a small one, must be bad for a forest trying to lock carbon away.

C. The broader evidence is now converging. A 2025 study published in Science, led by Stanford researchers analysing two decades of satellite data on fire severity and smoke across California, confirmed what fire ecologists had argued for generations: low-severity, controlled burning is among the most effective strategies for preventing extreme wildfires and actually improves long-term air quality. The reasoning is that catastrophic fires release enormous pulses of smoke and particulates in a single, choking event, whereas a gentle prescribed burn produces modest smoke over many small, planned occasions. Reducing fuel also means that when a wildfire does break out, it burns through prepared ground more slowly, giving firefighters room to contain it. Real-world cases in South Australia in 2025 underscored the point: a major bushfire that ran straight into a previously burned area overnight was stopped cold, giving crews the chance to hold a line that would otherwise have overrun a quarter of the park. In each case, the earlier burn had behaved like a firebreak the forest had grown into itself, slowing the blaze long enough for people to act.

D. Yet prescribed burning is neither simple nor universally popular, and its opponents raise serious points. A planned fire can escape. The weather can shift, wind can pick up, and a burn intended to be gentle can become the very catastrophe it was meant to prevent — as the infamous 2023 escape in New Mexico demonstrated when a controlled blaze grew into one of the state's largest fires. Smoke from planned burns also falls on towns and farms, irritating the very public that is being protected, and in a warming world the narrow window of cool, damp weather in which a burn can safely be set is shrinking. In Australia, debate stretches back to a 1939 royal commission that enshrined broad fuel-reduction burning as dogma, and critics now argue that decades of burning may itself have changed some ecosystems in ways that are not fully understood. The practice is therefore caught between scientists who insist it is essential and communities who want certainty that their town will not be the one that goes wrong. This is not a trivial objection: a single high-profile escape can sour public support for a decade, even if the broader balance of burns has been overwhelmingly successful.

E. The emerging resolution is not to choose between burning and not burning, but to burn more intelligently. That means mapping which stands of trees actually need fuel reduction, timing burns to days when the smoke disperses away from populated valleys, and combining fire with the mechanical thinning of the most dangerous fuel. It also means respecting the seasons: burning when the air is damp and the wind gentle, rather than in the dry heat that invites disaster. It also means recognising that the "no fire at all" option has already failed — the century of suppression proved that leaving a forest untouched does not keep it safe, it merely postpones a worse fire. What scientists now recommend is a return, in cautious and measured form, to the relationship with fire that the land itself evolved with. The lesson of the last twenty years is not that fire is good or bad in itself. It is that a forest which never experiences fire is a forest waiting for the wrong fire, and that learning to coexist with flame — rather than to outlaw it — may be the hardest but most necessary adjustment of all.

Questions 1-4

Choose the correct heading for paragraphs B, C, D and E from the list of headings below.

List of Headings i. Why putting every fire out backfired ii. How a controlled burn protects the big trees iii. The wider evidence — including smoke and real cases iv. Why prescribed burning is contested v. Burning smarter, not more vi. The history of the 2023 New Mexico fire vii. How satellites measure carbon

1. Paragraph B: ____
2. Paragraph C: ____
3. Paragraph D: ____
4. Paragraph E: ____

Questions 5-8

Choose the correct letter, A, B, C or D.

5. Why did a century of fire suppression make forests more dangerous? A. It stopped all rainfall. B. It left deadwood and small trees accumulating as fuel. C. It removed all the large trees. D. It introduced foreign species.

6. What did the Blodgett Forest experiment find? A. Prescribed burns killed all the mature trees. B. Regular burns promoted carbon storage in large live trees. C. Carbon storage fell by half. D. The forest became more flammable.

7. How does prescribed burning improve long-term air quality? A. It eliminates all smoke. B. It replaces one huge smoke event with many small, planned burns. C. It stops all wildfires permanently. D. It filters the air with trees.

8. What serious objection do opponents raise? A. Planned fires can escape and become disasters. B. Fire has no effect on fuel. C. Prescribed burns are illegal everywhere. D. Smoke improves asthma.

Questions 9-13

Do the following statements agree with the claims of the writer?

Write:

• TRUE if the statement agrees with the information
• FALSE if the statement contradicts the information
• NOT GIVEN if there is no information on this

9. Indigenous communities have used controlled burns for thousands of years.
10. The 2025 Science study found that prescribed burning worsens long-term air quality.
11. In South Australia in 2025, a bushfire was halted by a previously burned area.
12. The window of safe weather for prescribed burns is now growing longer.
13. Prescribed burning is cheaper than mechanical thinning.

Questions 14-15

Complete the summary below using NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS from the passage.

A planned burn consumes the (14) ________ on the forest floor so that a later wildfire cannot climb into the canopy; however, if the weather shifts, the burn can (15) ________ and become a catastrophe.

答案与解析

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