1、大学英语四级改革适用（阅读）模拟试卷 64及答案与解析 Section B 0 Seven Ways to Save the World A)Forget the old idea that conserving energy is a form of self-denial riding bicycles, dimming the lights, and taking fewer showers. These days conservation is all about efficiency: getting the same or better results from just a fr
2、action of the energy. When a slump in business travel forced Ulrich Ramer to cut costs at his family-owned hotel in Germany, he replaced hundreds of the hotels wasteful light bulbs, getting the same light for 80 percent less power. He bought a new water boiler with a digitally controlled pump, and w
3、rapped insulation around the pipes. Spending about 100,000 on these and other improvements, he slashed his 90,000 fuel and power bill by 60,000. As a bonus, the hotels lower energy needs have reduced its annual carbon emissions by more than 200 metric tons. “For us, saving energy has been very, very
4、 profitable,“ he says. “And most importantly, were not giving up a single comfort for our guests.“ B)Efficiency is also a great way to lower carbon emissions and help slow global warming. But the best argument for efficiency is its cost or, more precisely, its profitability. Thats because quickly gr
5、owing energy demand requires immense investment in new supply, not to mention the drain of rising energy prices. C)No wonder efficiency has moved to the top of the political agenda. On Jan. 10, the European Union unveiled a plan to cut energy use across the continent by 20 percent by 2020. Last Marc
6、h, China imposed a 20 percent increase in energy efficiency by 2020. Even George W. Bush, the Texas oilman, is expected to talk about energy conservation in his State of the Union speech this week. D)The good news is that the world is full of proven, cheap ways to save energy. Here are the seven tha
7、t could have the biggest impact. Insulate E)Space heating and cooling eats up 36 percent of all the world s energy. There s virtually no limit to how much of that can be saved, as prototype “zero-energy homes“ in Switzerland and Germany have shown. There s been a surge in new ways of keeping heat in
8、 and cold out(or vice versa). The most advanced insulation follows the law of increasing returns: if you add enough you can scale down or even eliminate heating and air-conditioning equipment, lowering costs even before you start saving on utility bills. Studies have shown that green workplaces(ones
9、 that don t constantly need to have the heat or air-conditioner running)have higher worker productivity and lower sick rates. Change Bulbs F)Lighting eats up 20 percent of the worlds electricity, or the equivalent of roughly 600,000 tons of coal a day. Forty percent of that powers old-fashioned inca
10、ndescent light bulbs a 19th-century technology that wastes most of the power it consumes on unwanted heat. G)Compact fluorescent lamps, or CFLS, not only use 75 to 80 percent less electricity than incandescent bulbs to generate the same amount of light, but they also last 10 times longer. Phasing ol
11、d bulbs out by 2030 would save the output of 650 power plants and avoid the release of 700 million tons of carbon into the atmosphere each year. Comfort Zone H)Water boilers, space heaters and air conditioners have been notoriously inefficient. The heat pump has altered that equation. It removes hea
12、t from the air outside or the ground below and uses it to supply heat to a building or its water supply. In the summer, the system can be reversed to cool buildings as well. I)Most new residential buildings in Sweden are already heated with ground-source heat pumps. Such systems consume almost no co
13、nventional fuel at all. Several countries have used subsidies to jump-start the market, including Japan, where almost 1 million heat pumps have been installed in the past two years to heat water for showers and hot tubs. Remake Factories J)From steel mills to paper factories, industry eats up about
14、a third of the worlds energy. The opportunities to save are vast. In Ludwigshafen, German chemicals giant BASF runs an interconnected complex of more than 200 chemical factories, where heat produced by one chemical process is used to power the next. At the Ludwigshafen site alone, such recycling of
15、heat and energy saves the company 200 million a year and almost half its CO2 emissions. Now BASF is doing the same for new plants in China. “Optimizing(优化 )energy efficiency is a decisive competitive advantage,“ says BASF CEO Jurgen Hambrecht. Green Driving K)A quarter of the worlds energy including
16、 two thirds of the annual production of oil is used for transportation. Some savings come free of charge: you can boost fuel efficiency by 6 percent simply by keeping your cars tires properly inflated(充气 ). Gasoline-electric hybrid(混合型的 )models like the Toyota Prius improve mileage by a further 20 p
17、ercent over conventional models. A Better Fridge L)More than half of all residential power goes into running household appliances, producing a fifth of the worlds carbon emissions. And thats true even though manufacturers have already hiked the efficiency of refrigerators and other white goods by as
18、 much as 70 percent since the 1980s. According to an International Energy Agency study, if consumers chose those models that would save them the most money over the life of the appliance, theyd cut global residential power consumption(and their utility bills)by 43 percent. Flexible Payment M)Who say
19、s you have to pay for all your conservation investments? “Energy service contractors“ will pay for retrofitting(翻新改造 )in return for a share of the clients annual utility-bill savings. In Beijing, Shenwu Thermal Energy Technology Co. specializes in retrofitting China s steel furnaces. Shenwu puts up
20、the initial investment to install a heat exchanger that preheats the air going into the furnace, slashing the client s fuel costs. Shenwu pockets a cut of those savings, so both Shenwu and the client profit. N)If saving energy is so easy and profitable, why isn t everyone doing it? It has to do with
21、 psychology and a lack of information. Most of us tend to look at today s price tag more than tomorrows potential saving. That holds double for the landlord or developer, who wont actually see a penny of the savings his investment in better insulation or a better heating system might generate. In ma
22、ny peoples minds, conservation is still associated with self-denial. Many environmentalists still push that view. O)Smart governments can help push the market in the right direction. The EUs 1994 law on labeling was such a success that it extended the same idea to entire buildings last year. To boos
23、t the market value of efficiency, all new buildings are required to have an “energy pass“ detailing power and heating consumption. Countries like Japan and Germany have successively tightened building codes, requiring an increase in insulation levels but leaving it up to builders to decide how to me
24、et them. P)The most powerful incentives, of course, will come from the market itself. Over the past year, sky-high fuel prices have focused minds on efficiency like never before. Ever-increasing pressure to cut costs has finally forced more companies to do some math on their energy use. Q)Will it be
25、 enough? With global demand and emissions rising so fast, we may not have any choice but to try. Efficient technology is here now, proven and cheap. Compared with all other options, its the biggest, easiest and most profitable bang for the buck. 1 25% of the world s energy is used for transportation
26、. 2 Increasing pressure in cutting costs has made more companies do some math on their usage of energy. 3 Saving energy is easy, but people don t have the information to do it. 4 The world is full of proven and cheap ways we can use to save energy. 5 Though manufacturers have already hiked the effic
27、iency of refrigerators by nearly 70% since the 1980s, more than 50% of residential power comes from household appliances. 6 The heat pump can remove heat from the air outside or the ground below, to supply heat to a building. 7 Ulrich Ramer cut the energy used in the hotel, which reduced the carbon
28、emissions by over 200 metric tons one year. 8 About 36% of the worlds energy is used in space heating and cooling. 9 Efficiency can save cost, that is more important than lower carbon emissions and help slow global warming for lots of people. 10 Studies show workplaces that dont have the heat or air
29、-conditioner running constantly have lower sick rates. 10 What Will the World Be like in Fifty Years? A)This week some top scientists, including Nobel Prize winners, gave their vision of how the world will look in 2056, from gas-powered cars to extraordinary health advances, John Ingham reports on w
30、hat the worlds finest minds believe our futures will be. B)For those of us lucky enough to live that long, 2056 will be a world of almost perpetual youth, where obesity is a remote memory and robots become our companions. We will be rubbing shoulders with aliens and colonizing outer space. Better st
31、ill, our descendants might at last live in a world at peace with itself. C)The prediction is that we will have found a source of inexhaustible, safe, green energy, and that science will have killed off religion. If they are right we will have removed two of the main causes of war our dependence on o
32、il and religious prejudice. Will we really, as todays scientists claim, be able to live forever or at least cheat the ageing process so that the average person lives to 150? D)Of course, all these predictions come with a scientific health warning. Harvard professor Steven Pinker says: “This is an in
33、vitation to look foolish, as with the predictions of domed cities and nuclear-powered vacuum cleaners that were made 50 year ago.“ Living longer E)Anthony Atala, director of the Wake Forest Institute in North Carolina, believes failing organs will be repaired by injecting cells into the body. They w
34、ill naturally to straight to the injury and help heal it. A system of injections without needles could also slow the ageing process by using the same process to “tune“ cells. F)Bruce Lahn, professor of human genetics at the University of Chicago, anticipates the ability to produce “unlimited supplie
35、s“ of transplantable human organs without the needed a new organ, such as kidney, the surgeon would contact a commercial organ producer, give him the patients immuno-logical profile and would then be sent a kidney with the correct tissue type. G)These organs would be entirely composed of human cells
36、, grown by introducing them into animal hosts, and allowing them to develop into and organ in place of the animals own. But Prof. Lahn believes that fanned brains would be “off limits“. He says: “Very few people would want to have their brains replaced by someone else s and we probably don t want to
37、 put a human braining an animal body.“ Aliens H)Collin Pillinger, professor of planetary sciences at the Open University, says: “I fancy that at least we will be able to show that life did start to evolve on Mars well as Earth.“ Within 50 years he hopes scientists will prove that alien life came her
38、e in Martian meteorites(陨石 ). I)Chris McKay, a planetary scientist at NASAs Ames Research Center, believes that in 50 years we may find evidence of alien life in ancient permanent frost of Mars or on other planets. He adds: “There is even a chance we will find alien life forms here on Earth. It migh
39、t be as different as English is to Chinese. J)Princeton professor Freeman Dyson thinks it “likely“ that life form outer space will be discovered before 2056 because the tools for finding it, such as optical and radio detection and data processing, are improving. He says: “As soon as the first eviden
40、ce is found, we will know what to look for and additional discoveries are likely to follow quickly. Such discoveries are likely to have revolutionary consequences for biology, astronomy and philosophy. They may change the way we look at ourselves and our place in the universe. Colonies in space K)Ri
41、chard Gott professor of astrophysics at Princeton, hopes man will set up a self-sufficient colony on Mars, which would be a “life insurance policy against whatever catastrophes, natural or otherwise, might occur on Earth. “The real space race is whether we will colonise off Earth on to other worlds
42、before money for the space program runs out.“ Spinal injuries L)Ellen Heber-Katz, a professor at the Wistar Institude in Philadelphia, foresees cures for injuries causing paralysis such as the one that afflicated Superman star Christopher Reeve. She says: “I believe that the day is not far off when
43、we will be able to prescribe drugs that cause severes(断裂的 )spinal cords to heal, hearts to regenerate and lost limbs to regrow. “People will come to expect that injured or diseased organs are meant to be repaired from within, in much the same way that we fix an appliance or automobile: by replacing
44、the damaged part with a manufacturer-certified new part.“ She predicts that within 5 to 10 years fingers and toes will be regrown and limbs will start to be regrown a few years later. Repairs to the nervous system will start with optic nerves and, in time, the spinal cord.“ Within 50 years whole bod
45、y replacement will be routine,“ Prof. Heber-Katz adds. Obesity M)Sydney Brenner, senior distinguished fellow of the Crick-Jacobs Center in California, won the 2002 Noble Prize for Medicine and says that if there is a global disaster some humans will survive-and evolution will favor small people with
46、 bodies large enough to support the required amount of brain power. “Obesity, he says,“ “will have been solved.“ Energy N)Bill Joy, green technology expert in California, says: “The most significant breaking through would be to have an inexhaustible source of safe, green energy that is substantially
47、 cheaper than any existing energy source.“ O)Ideally, such a source would be safe in that it could not be made into weapons and would not make hazardous or toxic waste or carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas blamed for global warming. 11 If an inexhaustible, safe and green energy can be found, th
48、e two main causes of war oil and religious prejudice will have been removed. 12 Richard Gott suggests man set up a self-sufficient colony on Mars to against catastrophes that might happen on earth. 13 In 2056, the world will be a place with almost perpetual youth, obesity will be hard to find. 14 Pr
49、ofessor Freeman Dyson thinks life in outer space might be discovered before 2056, as tools for finding it are improving. 15 Anthony Atala says, slowing the ageing process may be come true by injection some cells without needles. 16 Some top scientists gave their vision of how the world will be like in 2056 this week. 17 The green energy would be safe, because it could not be made into weapons. 18 Discoveries found in outer space will change the way we look at ourselves. 19 Collin Pillinger says, he imagines that we will be able to sh
