1、大学英语六级改革适用（阅读）模拟试卷 14及答案与解析 Section B 0 Startup Nuclear Energy Companies Augur Safer, Cheaper Atomic Power A)Nothing captures how fashionable the startup has become quite like crowdfunding. The craze for raising contributions via websites like Kickstarter and Indiegogo is helping to launch companies
2、 from scooter manufacturers to lightbulb vendors to filmmakers. Now, even nuclear fusion is game. B)Yes, the Holy Grail of cheap, clean, safe, plentiful, low-carbon energy that has remained 40 years in the future since scientists proposed it over half a century ago has entered the crowd sourcing era
3、. International government projects like ITER in France and the National Ignition Facility in California may have spent billions of dollars in pursuit of the technology, but that doesnt mean there cant be a little grassroots action, too. C)LPP Fusion, a tiny company based in Middlesex, N.J., launche
4、d in May an Indiegogo campaign to raise $200,000 loose change in this business that it believes will help it reach a major fusion development milestone in a year and commercialize fusion reactors by 2020. D)LPP(it stands for “Lawrenceville Plasma Physics“)is representative of a new class of companie
5、s emerging to address the worlds energy crisis: Nuclear startups. Dozens of small new reactor companies are either chasing the elusive fusion dream or pursuing fission designs that trump those on the market today. All are promising to deliver a knock-out blow to the carbon-intensive fossil fuels tha
6、t bedevil the world with environmental impact and volatile geopolitics and economics. Many of these innovative firms are positioning their reactors not just for electricity, but also to provide clean heat for high temperature industrial processes and for water desalination. E)While LPP might be the
7、only crowdfunded member of the group, it is determined like its young peers to shake up the staid nuclear industry. Reactor designs have not fundamentally changed since utilities first connected fission machines to the grid in the 1950s, marking a conservatism that has mired nuclear in the era of bl
8、ack-and-white television while colourful possibilities abound. The startups aim to brighten the palette. F)For LPP, that would mean not only delivering fusion melding atoms together rather than fission s waste-creating process of splitting them apart but it would also eliminate the time-honoured nee
9、d for costly turbines and generators. Nuclear power, including most fusion concepts, functions mechanically the same way fossil fuel plants do by creating heat to produce steam to drive a turbine. LPP is working on a type of fusion called “aneutronic“ that emits charged particles for electricity. G)
10、“The nuclear industry is stuck using the same method for making electricity that utilities have used since the days of Thomas Edison generate heat to make steam to drive a turbine and generator,“ says Eric Lerner, president of LPP Fusion. “We can change all that. We can convert energy directly into
11、electricity and slash costs.“ H)First, hell need the $200,000 he seeks on Indiegogo(he has until July 5 to raise it), which would buy him some fancy new beryllium electrodes that would withstand rigors far better than the copper variety that LPP has been using. He hopes to install them by the end of
12、 this year in his experimental fusion reactor, which Lerner operates at the Friendly Storage premises in Middlesex, a place otherwise full of surplus boxes and furniture. I)Lerner is boldly confident that the beryllium would by the middle of next year enable his lab to overcome the problem that has
13、vexed fusion projects forever: It would harness more energy out of its reactor than what goes into it. Additional financing might then rush in. LPP will need $50 million in total, virtually nothing next to the nearly $18 billion that ITER has budgeted for only the next 10 years of an expected 30 yea
14、rs of construction and development of a 20-story “tokamak“ facility. J)With the financing, Lerner believes that by 2020 he could license the mass-production of small $300,000-to- $500,000 fusion machines each the size of a one-car garagewith a capacity of 5 megawatts, enough to power 3,000 houses. K
15、)If only he had the wherewithal of rival fusion startup Tri-Alpha Energy, which has rounded up over $140 million from Goldman Sachs, Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, and Russian state-owned company Rusnano, among others. Like LPP, Irvine, Calif.-based Tri-Alpha hopes to develop an aneutronic machine
16、 that delivers electricity without using turbines. L)ITER and NIF, the government groups, are taking a more “conventional“ fusion approach, aspiring to drive turbines with heat released by fusing isotopes of hydrogen.(In contrast, an aneutronic process tends to fuse standard hydrogen and boron.)So,
17、too, are a number of startups that believe they can crack fusion long before the big science projects do by developing smaller machines(NIF s facility is 3 football fields long and 10 stories tall)and deploying different technologies. M)“We liken it to the Human Genome Project or SpaceX, where large
18、 government programs were ultimately outrun by more nimble and more practical innovation in the private sector,“ notes Nathan Gilliland, CEO of General Fusion near Vancouver, Canada. General Fusion has raised $32 million from sources including the Canadian oil company Cenovus and Jeff Bezos, Amazon
19、s chief executive. N)As intriguing as fusion is, there is probably more startup activity in fission, where novel approaches promise great improvements over the industrys addiction to fissioning solid uranium fuel rods then cooling and moderating them with water. O)A host of startups are experimentin
20、g with different approaches including the use of liquid fuel, the use of solid fuel with different shapes(such as bricks or pebbles), and the use of alternative coolants and moderators such as salts and gases. Many of the designs draw on ideas that politics suppressed decades ago. Some, like Bill Ga
21、tes-chaired TerraPower in Bellevue, Wash., are designing “fast reactors“ that dont moderate neutrons. Some envision using the element thorium instead of uranium. P)Between them, they portend leaps in safety, cut way down on nuclear waste, use “waste“ as fuel, and minimize weapons proliferation risks
22、, slash costs and tremendously boost efficiencies. Many fit the “small modular“ forms that enables mass production and affordable incremental power.(Oregon startup NuScale Power recently secured $217 million in federal funds to develop a small but comparatively conventional reactor.) Q)“There is a g
23、rowing market pull for innovation in the nuclear space, so you re beginning to see a blossoming of startup companies doing different things in nuclear,“ says Simon Irish, CEO of startup Terrestrial Energy, Mississauga, Canada, which is developing a “molten salt“ reactor(MSR)based on liquid fuel. In
24、the U.S., Russ Wilcox, CEO of Cambridge, Mass.-based MSR developer Transatomic Power, implores the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission to broaden its focus beyond conventional reactor safety, which he says “freezes progress“. R)Many observers believe that countries other than the U.S., such as Canada
25、 and China, will deploy first. Beijing is funding innovative Chinese fission projects, with collaboration from the U.S. DOE. Meanwhile, Western companies seek funds. Like Cenovus at General Fusion, more oil companies might pony up, because they want clean heat to process petroleum. As Fortune report
26、ed last month, a lack of industry funding appears to have slowed progress in DOE s mission to develop an advanced reactor. LPP Fusion doesn t seem to be worried. For the young company, the next financing stage could simply be a matter of warming up the crowd. 1 The aneutronic machine can generate el
27、ectricity without the support of turbines. 2 In the 1950s, scientists first connected fission machines to the grid. 3 A lack of industry funding seems to hold back DOEs progress to develop an advanced reactor. 4 Crowd funding is the best way to account for the popularity level of doing pioneering wo
28、rk. 5 The beryllium electrodes have better capacity in extreme conditions than copper electrodes. 6 Russ Wilcox put forward that the restrictions of conventional reactor safety have quite adverse effect on the progress of nuclear reactor. 7 All the reactor companies are devoted to figure out the new
29、 energy which can replace the carbon-intensive fossil fuels. 8 Now, nuclear energy is no longer our dream and now some nuclear companies emerge by crowed funding. 9 Nuclear power has the same function procedure with fossil fuel plants to create heat first, then produce steam which is used to drive a
30、 turbine. 10 5 megawatts generating capacity can provide enough electricity power for 3,000 families. 10 Its Hard to Clean Big Data A)Karim Keshayjee, a Toronto physician and digital health consultant, crunches mountains of data from 500 doctors to figure out how to improve patient treatment. But it
31、 s a frustrating slog to get a computer to decipher all the misspellings, abbreviations, and notes written in unintelligible medical shorthand. B)For example, “smoking information is very hard to parse,“ Keshayjee said. “If you read the records, you understand right away what the doctor meant. But g
32、ood luck is trying to make a computer understand. Theres never smoked and smoking = 0. How many cigarettes does a patient smoke? That s impossible to figure out.“ C)The hype around slicing and dicing massive amounts of data, or big data, makes it sound so easy: Just plug a library s worth of informa
33、tion into a computer and wait for valuable insights to pour out about how to speed up an auto assembly line, get online shoppers to buy more sneakers, or fight cancer. The reality is much more complicated. Data is inevitably “dirty“ thanks to obsolete, inaccurate, and missing information. Cleaning i
34、t up is an increasingly important and overlooked job that can help prevent costly mistakes. D)Although techniques are improving all the time, scrubbing data can only accomplish so much. Even when dealing with a relatively tidy set of information, getting useful results can be arduous and time-consum
35、ing. “I tell my clients that the world is messy and dirty,“ said Josh Sullivan, a vice president at business consulting firm Booz Allen who handles data crunching for clients. “There are no clean data sets.“ E)Data analysts start by looking for information that s out of the norm. Because the volume
36、of data is so huge, they typically hand the job over to software that automatically sifts through numbers and text to look for anything unusual that needs further review. Over time, computers can improve their accuracy in spotting what s belongs and what doesnt. They can also better understand what
37、words and phrases mean by clustering similar examples together and then grading their interpretations for accuracy. “The approach is easy and straightforward, but training your models can take weeks and weeks,“ Sullivan said. F)A constellation of companies offer software and services for cleaning da
38、ta. They range from technology giants like IBM IBM -0.24% and SAP SAP 0.12% to big data and analytics specialists like Cloudera and Talend Open Studio. A legion of start-ups is also trying to get a toehold as data janitors including Trifacta, Tamr, and Paxata. G)Healthcare, with all its dirty data,
39、is one of the toughest industries for big data technology. Electronic health records make medical information increasingly easy to dump into computers, but there s still a lot room for improvement before researchers, pharmaceutical companies and hospital business analysts can slice and dice all the
40、information they want. H)Keshavjee, the doctor and CEO of InfoClin, a health data consulting firm, spends his days trying to tease out ways to improve patient treatment by sifting through tens of thousands of electronic medical records. Obstacles pop up all the time. I)Many doctors neglect to note a
41、 patient s blood pressure in their medical records, something that no amount of data cleaning can fix. Simply determining what ails patients based on what s in their files is surprisingly difficult for computers. Doctors may enter the proper code for diabetes without clearly indicating whether it s
42、the patient who has the disease or a family member. Or they may just enter “insulin“ without mentioning the underlying diagnosis because, to them, it s obvious. J)Physicians also use a lot of idiosyncratic shorthand for medications, illnesses and basic patient details. Deciphering it takes a lot of
43、head scratching for humans and is nearly impossible for a computer. For example, Keshavjee came across one doctor who used the abbreviation“gpa.“ Only after coming across a variation, “gma,“ did he finally solve the puzzle they were shorthand for “grandpa“ and “grandma.“?“It took a while to figure t
44、hat one out,“ he said. K)Ultimately, Keshavjee said one of the only ways to solve the problem of dirty data in medical records is “data discipline.“ Doctors need to be trained to enter information correctly so that cleaning up after them is less of a chore. Incorporating something like Google s help
45、ful tool that suggests how to spell words as users type them would be a great addition for electronic medical records, he said. Computers can learn to pick out spelling errors, but minimizing the need is a step in the right direction. L)Another of Keshavjee s suggestions is to create medical records
46、 with more standardized fields. A computer would then know where to look for specific information, reducing the chance of error. Of course, doing so is not as easy as it sounds because many patients suffer from multiple illnesses, he said. A standard form would have to be flexible enough to take suc
47、h complications into account. M)Still, doctors would need to be able to jot down more free-form electronic notes that could never fit in a small box. Nuance like why a patient fell, for example, and not just the injury suffered, is critical for research. But software is hit and misses in understandi
48、ng free-form writing without context. Humans searching by keyword may do a better job, but they still inevitably miss many relevant records. N)Of course, in some cases, what appears to be dirty data, really isnt. Sullivan, from Booz Allen, gave the example the time his team was analyzing demographic
49、 information about customers for a luxury hotel chain and came across data showing that teens from a wealthy Middle Eastern country were frequent guests. “There were a whole group of 17 year-olds staying at the properties worldwide, Sullivan said. “We thought, That can t be true. “ O)But after some digging, they found that the information was, in fact, correct. The hotel had legions of young customers that it didnt even realize were there, and had never done anything to market to them. All guests under 22 were automatically logge
