The passage discusses various potential future disasters that are predicted based on current trends and knowledge. It mentions that declining petroleum reserves may cause wars and famine, and that global warming caused by humans could lead to unimaginable climate change if not addressed. It also notes that earlier generations worried about nuclear war and total civilization destruction in the 1940s. The text acknowledges that in 5 billion years the sun will expand and destroy the Earth, but that is so far in the future that few worry about it now. It raises the question of how to weigh different potential future disasters based on their size, timing, and certainty to determine what is worth worrying about today, using disruption of ocean currents from global warming as a troubling example.
3. USO DEL FUTURO SIMPLE
El Futuro Simple es un tiempo verbal que se utiliza para describir acciones
que se van a desarrollar en el futuro sin necesidad de aclarar en que
momento se producir叩n. Su equivalente en el idioma espa単ol es el Futuro
Imperfecto.
10. Tambi辿n se puede usar en la afirmaci坦n la
contracci坦n de WILL colocando ll al
pronombre y en la negaci坦n en lugar
de WILL NOT se puede utilizar la forma
contra鱈da WONT.
Ejemplos
15. se puede usar
will/wont con
estas expresiones: I thinkI think
I believeI believe
I hopeI hope
I am sureI am sure
ProbablyProbably
MaybeMaybe
PerhapsPerhaps
16. - Im sure theyll help me.
- Hell probably pass his class.
- Perhaps shell talk to me.
- I think It will be sunny tomorrow.
- She believes she will win the lottery.
17. Exercise:
IS THE FUTURE AS SUCH?
INSTRUCTIONS:
Read the following text.
Copy the ideas that are in future
Paraphrase with your own words the idea of the sentence
18. Ghosts of the Future
by Loren Cobb
The news these days is filled with intimations of catastrophe. Will the approaching decline in worldwide
petroleum reserves cause wars and famine? Have we caused global warming, and if so, will we suffer
unimaginable climate change? These are just two of the ghosts that haunt our misty visions of the future.
Earlier generations had their own ghosts. Most of us can well remember the fear of nuclear holocaust, and
I have often thought about that dark period from about 1940 to 1942, when it must have seemed to any
rational observer that all of civilization was about to destroy itself.
Looking into the deep future, astrophysicists predict that our sun will someday turn into a red giant not
unlike Betelgeuse, the huge red star on Orion's left shoulder. When this happens its diameter will rapidly
expand out beyond the orbit of the Earth, utterly incinerating our entire planet. Fortunately this disaster lies
some five billion years in the future, so few people stay up at night worrying about it.
How can we weigh all of the factors describing an anticipated future disaster, to determine what is worth
worrying about? How do we balance the size of a potential disaster against its depth in the future and the
certainty of our knowledge? These are questions we can answer, concluding with a troubling example: the
potential disruption of the oceanic currents due to global warming.
Taken from: http://tqe.quaker.org/2006/TQE146-EN-Ghosts.html, for educative purposes