By saying that the British are famously outward looking, the Evening Standard means that they are

Directions: Read the following passsage and answer the given question.

That's the way it is with explorers: any reason will do. They are, after all, no ordinary mortals. They are obsessed, fiercely competitive, driving themselves to reach beyond the last barrier into the untravelled world, or to do their predecessors one better, to live to tell the world what they have seen, and not incidentally, to enjoy triumph and glory.
Hardly any place on the surface of the earth remains to be discovered, let alone mapped, prodded, examined and analysed, yet explorers persist in pushing at frontiers. Italy's Reinhold Messner, 48, the first man ever to climb all 14 of the world's 8,000-plus-metre peaks - he did it without using oxygen equipment - also made the first solo oxygen-free ascent of Mount Everest and walked across Antarctica. Germany's Arved Fuchs, 39, hiked to both Poles in a single year, rounded Cape Horn in a collapsible boat, explored Greenland and the Canadian Arctic - to name only a few of his exploits.
France's Philippe Frey, 35, courted death when he travelled 9,000 km across the Sahara from the Red Sea to the Atlantic Ocean in 1991. Working from outdated maps (which eventually got blown away by the wind), he plowed through the desert for nine agonising months. One after another, the wells that were marked on the map turned out dry. He had two camels; his water supply was down to five litres. Just as he was preparing to slit a camel's throat to drink its blood and stomach juices, two nomads appeared and directed him to an unmarked well 20 km away. Last year, the Club des Explorateurs et Voyageurs awarded Frey its Prix Liotard for exploration.
Among Americans, the leading explorer is Will Steger, 48, for whom happiness is going into an area that's never been visited before, an area where the sounds and the sights are foreign to human eyes. In 1986 Steger led the first confirmed expedition to reach the North Pole by traveling across the ice, and in 1989-90 made the first dogsled crossing of Antarctica. Typically, he is almost blasé when he described adversity. People are side-tracked by the suffering, by the cold, he says. it's fascinating for them the idea of going to the bathroom outdoors at 500 below zero. They imagine the hardships of cold, but it's not really much. It's just physical, temporary. But if you make a mistake, you die.
A fellow Minneston, schoolteacher Ann Bancroft, 37, is the first woman ever to reach the North Pole by dogsled (with Steger in 1986). Last November she set out with three other women to ski across Antarctica, reached the South Pole, then had to withdraw in mid-January when weather delays upset their schedule.
Californian Sylvia Earle, 57, prefers to study the last truly unexplored region on earth: the bottom of the sea. A marine biologist, she has clocked 6,000 hours underwater (That doesn't include time in the shower, she jokes) and holds the record for reaching the greatest depth - 381 m - ever attained by an untethered diver.
She has swum in the Indian Ocean with thousands of bioluminescent fish, dived in water so clear that from 30 m below the surface she could see the moon and stars; in the Pacific she has felt her body resonate with the vibrations of communicating whales- like being in a cathedral with otherworldly music. Most of the planet, she says, has yet to be explored. In the deep sea, less than one-tenth of 1% has even been looked at, and much of it has been mapped only in the most general way. Earle hopes to build a high-tech underwater craft that will take her to 11,000 m, the ocean's deepest depths.
It is the British, following centuries of tradition, who hold a special place in the chronicles of spectacular explorations. In a half-serious lexicon of Great British Things We Can Be Proud Of, London's Evening Standard recently listed Outwardness. From Sloaney grannies batting through the Hindu Kush in hire cars to lone seafarers circumnavigating the globe in sherry casks, the British are famously outward-looking.
Five hundred expeditions of dazzling variety and frequently exotic destinations, in fact, leave Britain's shores every year. Some are supported by public or private subscription, some by the Royal Geographical Society, others by sympathetic corporations.
They are costly investments and usually lose money. Britain's Robert Swan, who raised $3.5 million for a journey to the South Pole in 1984, retraced Robert Scott's 1911-12, 1,450-km route unassisted and in 1989 walked the 750-km from Ellesmere Island to the North Pole. Swan is still more than $ 100,000 in debt; his only consolation is that some of his famous predecessors - notably Sir Ernest Shackleton - died penniless.