E-Scooters

Over the past two years, electric scooters have become ever-present in many of Europe and America’s biggest cities. Britain is the last major western European country to hold out against the     1     . E-scooters are not allowed on public roads, though people do ride them on cycle     2     and pavements . But where they are permitted, the number of e-scooter sharing companies soars     3     . To their     4     , e-scooters are revolutionary: the “iPhone Of urban transport”. To their critics, they are dangerous, anti-social and very annoying.

As with a dock less(无桩) bike, scooters are fitted with GPS trackers and wireless     5     . Customers download an app and scan a QR code on the scooter to unlock it. They are then     6     a small amount. Bird, which launched its e-scooter in Santa Monica, California in September 2017 charges $l plus 15 cents per minute, on average, in the US-to travel where they want to go, at a maximum speed of around 15mph. At night, the scooters are rounded up, charged and returned to popularity.

E-Scooters have the potential to solve some of the worlds biggest transport problems. Most cities are already dangerously polluted and heavily congested, and it is simply not an option to put more cars and taxis on the streets. Scooters are efficient; one kilowatt hour of energy carries a car     7     by petrol less than a mile, and an e-scooter 80 miles.

Scooters are clean, cheap, and they require little new infrastructure. For a country like car-     8     America, they could genuinely transform an     9     60% of US journeys under six miles. Even in European cities, which     10     have good public transport systems, they are very useful for travelling the“final mile”. According to Bird, 40% of taxi-riding journeys in London are under two miles, so e-scooters could help take a lot of cars off the streets.

The New York subway system is one of the largest in the world, ferrying nearly eight and a half million people around the city every week. Riders find more than    1    below the streets; among the dirt and the screech of the trains,there is also music.The subway system is like a free    2    hall,offering almost every kind of music.

You never know what you might    3    ,depending on the day of the week and the particular station.At a subway platform below Pennsylvania station one afternoon recently,Rawl Mitchell, an immigrant from Trinidad and Tobago,was playing the steel drums. He said he's been performing in the subway since the mid-1990s. “The people do    4    the music,"he said."They stand around listening and if it pleases them,they applaud and put their money in the case or whatever.They    5    clap and say things like 'It's nice.' They offer me some positive feedback.”

Singer-songwriter Rosateresa, who often sings on a station at 14th Street, has been at it almost as long.She moved from Puerto Rico to study classical voice several decades ago."My    6    is to sing like the jilguero,a Puerto Rican bird, which wakes up the sun,” said Rosateresa.

Mitchell and Rosateresa both perform    7    ,outside the transit authority's official "Music Under New York” program, which sponsor 150 performances each week, by more than 200 individuals and groups.

Like Rosateresa and Mitchell,Musicians who participate in “Music Under New York"    8    only whatever people choose to give.Opera singers Tom McNichols and Patricia Vital,part of a group called“Opera Collective",said they    9    performing in the subways, though it isn't lucrative. "Music in general is not about money, and 'Music Under New York' is definitely more about making opera     10     than it is about making a living,"McNichols said.

Attitudes toward new technologies often fall along generational lines. That is, generally, younger people tend to     1     older people on the front end of a technological shift.

It is not always the case, though. When you look at attitudes toward driverless cars, there doesn't seem to be a clear     2     divide. The public overall is split on whether they'd like to use a driverless car. In a study last year, of all people surveyed, 48 percent said they wanted to ride in one, while 50 percent did not.

The fact that attitudes toward self-driving cars appear to be so     3     across generations suggests how transformative the shift to driverless cars could be. Not everyone wants a driverless car now-and no one can get one vet-but among those who are open to them, every age group is     4     engaged.

Actually, this isn't surprising. Whereas older generations are sometimes reluctant to adopt new technologies, driverless cars     5     real value to these age groups, especially to those with     6     mobility or difficulty driving on their own.

This is especially interesting when you consider that younger people are generally more interested in travel-related     7     than older ones.

When it comes to driverless cars, differences in attitude are more     8     based on factors not related to age. College graduates, for example, are particularly interested in driverless cars compared with those who have less education：59 percent of college graduates said they would like to use a driverless car compared with 38 percent of those with a high-school diploma or less.

Where a person lives     9     too. More people who lived in cities and suburbs said they wanted to try driverless cars than those who lived in rural areas.

While there's reason to believe that interest in self-driving cars is going up across the board, a person's age will have little to do with how self-driving cars can become     10    . Once driverless cars are actually available for sale, the early adopters will be the people who can afford to buy them.

Have you ever imagined that your simple T-shirt could cool you down by up to 5℃ on these hot summer days? Thanks to a recent discovery, the possibility is getting closer. While there are     1     that manage to keep the body warm, this amazing invention aims to offer real relief for those who are eager to feel comfortable and fresh in the outdoors on extremely hot days.

Its inventors, engineers Ma Yaoguang of Zhejiang University and Tao Guangming of Huazhong University of Science and Technology in China, took a completely     2     approach. They designed a special textile（纺织物）that can     3     body heat and re-emit（重发出）its energy into space as mid-infrared radiation（MIR）. This textile cools both the objects and their surroundings through a     4     that is known as radiative cooling, Science reveals. This means that even when it looks like you are wearing a regular shirt, you are     5     wearing a device that works like a mirror.

Research conducted at Stanford University in 2017 had already managed to cool the wearer by 3℃, but this     6     trial was limited. So researchers still need to test the new approach to determine how effectively the new fabric cools while the wearers are standing or walking, and not directly facing the sky, like in their trials. They also need to examine and     7     how well it works when T-shirts are not in close contact with the skin.

Inventors Yaoguang and Guangming are now looking out for textile manufacturers（制造商）and clothing brands that are interested in using their fabric. They estimate that the new material will     8     clothing manufacturing costs by just 10 percent. “We can make it with mass production, which means everybody can got a T-shirt and the cost is     9     the same as their old stuff,” Yaoguang said.

So if you are an athlete or simply someone that has to deal with the extremely high temperatures, be patient because your days of feeling hot and     10     may be coming to an end!

There are many    1     about what the future will be like, but no one really knows for sure. We do know that there will be many new     2    in technology, though. These new advances will make thousands of new products    3     that no one has yet even thought about. With this, however, there is a     4    new problem which we do not have now: the gap between the technologically rich and the technologically poor. Not everyone may have the money to    5     new technology into their lives, and some people living in    6     areas may not have access to     7    new technology. In light of such    8    , many people are already working hard to make new technology cheaper and easier to buy so that everyone might benefit from it.