According to National Renewable Energy Laboratory experts, air cooling is already responsible for 3.94% of yearly carbon emissions (排放) worldwide, which will only worsen as higher global temperatures continue to drive the growing need for air conditioning. Meanwhile, increased energy bills and a Jack of gas supply are other significant concerns. The climate change and energy issues call for serious efforts to carry out more effective projects to answer these challenges.
Heat pumps (泵) seem to be visible, and they are gaining attention — particularly in the US and UK. They function by transferring heat from the outside air to water while generating cold air, thereby keeping homes cool. According to a recent study, using heat pumps can help homeowners reduce greenhouse gas emissions, save money on energy, and improve their health. The findings, published in Environmental Research Letters, indicate that heat pumps will lower emissions for two-thirds of families while benefiting one-third of US homeowners financially.
Dalrada Corporation was established by Brian Bonar in 1982 with a vision to transform meaningful ideas into solutions to serve humanity. Since then, the organization has expanded its operations to serve plentiful business sectors. The company helps industrial, commercial, and consumer industries in various sections, such as science, health care, engineering and technology. Dalrada’s high-temperature CO2-based heat pump offers clean heating and cooling without requiring burning fossil (化石) fuels. The technology is promising, and the US government had selected Dalrada’s heat pump as a green building pioneer to inspire more energy transformation new technologies.
According to multiple studies focusing on the hotel industry, the most expensive bill is for electricity, followed by water and gas. Dalrada’s LikidoTM heat pump is the company’s flagship product. A low-carbon, heating and cooling pump design provides an extraordinary solution for reducing dependence on fossil fuels. Eventually, this creative technology has the potential to significantly reduce energy consumption and costs for hotels around the world.
1. What can we learn about air cooling?| A．It takes up about 1/25 of the world’s carbon emissions every year. |
| B．It drives the global temperature to go higher dramatically. |
| C．It is the biggest consumption of many households. |
| D．It is urgent to cut off the use of the air cooling system. |
| A．Heat pumps’ practical effectiveness. | B．Homeowner’s current concerns. |
| C．Families’ possible advantages. | D．Public’s different opinions. |
| A．To prove Dalrada’s heat pump technology has a bright future. |
| B．To show Dalrada Corporation has meaningful ideas. |
| C．To advertise the company’s various high-tech products. |
| D．To suggest the company has good relations with the government. |
| A．Air Cooling Problem to be Solved | B．The Climate Change and Gas Shortage |
| C．Hotels no more Depend on Fossil Fuels | D．Heat Pumps Save Money and Protect the Environment |
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【推荐1】Experts using a high-tech laser scanner (激光扫描仪) have discovered thousands of ancient Maya buildings hidden under the thick forests of northern Guatemala, officials said Thursday. Some 60, 000 buildings were found over the past two years in a scan of an area in the northern department of El Peten between Mexico and Belize, said Marcello Canuto, one of the projects’ lead researchers.
These findings are a “breakthrough in Maya archeology(考古),” Canuto said.
The new discoveries in this Central American country include city centers with sidewalks, homes, wide steps, farming facilities and so on, said Canuto, an archaeologist at Tulane University in the United States.
Among the finds was a 30-meter high pyramid (金字塔) that had been earlier recognized as a natural hill in Tikal. Also discovered in Tikal: a series of holes and a 14 kilometer-long wall.
The Maya development reached its height in what is present-day southern Mexico, Guatemala, and parts of Belize, El Salvador and Honduras between 250 and 950 CE. Researchers now believe that the Maya had a population of 10 million, which is “much higher” than previous judgment, Canuto said.
The project depended on a remote (远程的) sensing method known as LiDAR (Light Detection and Ranging). Aircraft with a LiDAR scanner produced 3D maps of the surface by using light in the form of laser linked to a GPS system.
The technology helped researchers discover sites much faster than using traditional archeological methods. “Now it is no longer necessary to cut through the jungle to see what’s under it,” said Canuto.
Details of the research will appear in a documentary to air on February 11 on the National Geographic TV channel, said Minister of Culture and Sports Jose Luis Chea.
1. What did Canuto think of the new discoveries in the past two years?| A．Leading. | B．Frightening. | C．Annoying. | D．Puzzling. |
| A．It saves time in discovering site. |
| B．It is more convenient for researchers to work in forest. |
| C．Explorers have to go deep into the jungle to research. |
| D．Research can be done at a distance. |
| A．that lay in Africa | B．that was less developed |
| C．whose pyramid was made of a hill | D．with a surprisingly large population |
| A．To inform readers of the new discoveries about Maya. |
| B．To introduce a new method used to discover Maya buildings. |
| C．To show Maya development was of great influence. |
| D．To tell us a new documentary will be launched on TV in Feb. |
【推荐2】Administrators of the Mogao Caves in Dunhuang, Gansu province, are striving to harmonize tourists’ exploration of the site with the need to safeguard murals and artifacts, through innovative measures such as digital presentations.
Sandstorms, rainfall and tourist visits constitute the most severe threats to the UNESCO World Heritage Site, said Wang Xiaowei, director of the Dunhuang Grottoes Monitoring Center at the Dunhuang Academy.
Since the Mogao Caves opened to the public in 1979, the number of visitors has been growing at an average annual rate of around 20 percent, reaching 2.15 million in 2019 before the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic. This year, the site is expected to receive a record 3 million visitors.
“If you enter the caves during the peak tourism months of July, August and September, you’ll find it hard to breathe,” Wang said. The carbon dioxide and moisture exhaled by visitors accumulate inside the caves and cause damage to the murals, Wang said.
To preserve the caves, the duration of visits is limited and sometimes stopped during rain or dust storms. To try and ensure visitors aren’t disappointed when restrictions are in place, the center provides a digital exhibition, he said.
Currently, the center is being expanded to cater for an additional 3,000 visitors on top of the existing capacity of 6,000.
The Dunhuang Academy began digitally recording and storing images of murals and painted sculptures over 30 years ago. The digitization project has successfully covered over 200 caves, with a dedicated team of 110 experts currently undertaking the work.
The Mogao Caves are immovable, and transporting them is impossible, according to Su Bomin, head of the Dunhuang Academy. And he added, “However, with digitization, we can perfectly replicate Dunhuang art and showcase it worldwide, introducing Eastern culture to the world.”
In 2016, the Digital Dunhuang repository went live, sharing high-definition images and panoramic tours of the most exquisite 30 caves globally. Currently, visitors from 78 countries have accessed the repository, totaling over 16.8 million visits.
Su said Dunhuang can provide diverse cultural exchanges through its cultural relics. “By digitizing these relics, we enable people worldwide to understand Dunhuang’s culture, thereby gaining a deeper appreciation for China’s historical commitment to diverse cultural exchanges — that is, an ethos of inclusivity, mutual learning and a shared future,” he said.
1. Which of the following is NOT the reason for providing a digital exhibition?| A．The factors related to COVID-19 put the caves in grave danger. |
| B．The increasing number of tourists visiting Dunhuang might harm the caves. |
| C．The authority is aimed to balance tourism and relics conservation. |
| D．The duration of visits is limited and sometimes stopped during rain or dust storms. |
| A．Copy. | B．Safeguard. | C．Access. | D．Transport. |
| A．It records and stores images of murals and painted sculptures. |
| B．It shares high definition and panoramic tours of the most exquisite caves. |
| C．It allows for an international exchange of cultures through the relics. |
| D．It enables people to appreciate the lasting beauty of the murals. |
| A．The Significance of the Mural Paintings |
| B．The Restoration in Mogao Caves |
| C．The Innovation on Mogao Caves’ Preservation |
| D．The Dunhuang Spirit in Chinese Culture |
【推荐3】
Video calls are a common occurrence, but have you imagined being able to touch the person on the other end of the line? Scientists are making this a reality.
Researchers at the University of new South Wales, Australia have invented a soft skin stretch device(SSD). A haptic device that can recreate the sense of touch. Haptic technology mimics the experience of touch by stimulating localized areas of the skin in ways that are similar to what is felt in the real world, through force, vibration or motion.
Vibration is the most common haptic technology today and has been built into many electronic devices such as one attached to the back of the trackpad(触摸板) in laptops, which simulates a button clicking. However, haptic feedback with vibration becomes less sensitive when used continuously. The existing technology also has great difficulty recreating the sense of touch with objects in virtual environments or located remotely. According to Mai Thanh Thai, lead author of the study.
The new technology overcomes issues with existing haptic devices. The research team introduced a novel method to recreate the sense of touch through a soft artificial “muscles”.
“Our three-way directional skin stretch device, built into the fingertips of the wearable glove we also created is like wearing a second skin-- its soft stretchable and mimics the sense of touch-- and will enable new forms of haptic communication to enhance everyday activities”said Thanh Nho Do, senior author of the study.
Imagine you are at home and you call your friend who is in Australia. You wear a haptic glove with the SSDs, and your friends also wears a glove with integrated 3D force sensors. If your friend picks up an object, it will physically press against your friend’s fingers. And their glove with 3D force sensors will measure with interactions. The force signals can be sent to your glove so your device will generate the same 3D forces. Making you experience the same sense of touch as your friend.
The haptic devices could be applied in various situations, allowing users to feel objects inside a virtual world or at a distance. It could also be used in medical practices. Doctors can feel a patient's organ tissues. With surgical tools without touching them.
1. What does the passage imply?| A．SSDs become less sensitive when used continuously. |
| B．SSDs can recreate the sense of touch without vibration. |
| C．SSDs have great advantages over existing haptic devices. |
| D．SSDs can help users touch the person through video calls. |
| A．How the device works. |
| B．Why the device is used |
| C．What the device creates |
| D．How the device is invented |
| A．hopeless | B．uncertain. |
| C．worrying. | D．cheerful. |
| A．A glove that can measure some interactions. |
| B．A sensor that can imitate touch at a distance. |
| C．A device that can recreate the sense of touch. |
| D．A tool could be applied in medical practices. |
【推荐1】Loneliness hurts. It is psychologically distressing and so physically unhealthy that being lonely increases the likelihood of an earlier death by 26 percent. But psychologists think it hurts so much because, like hunger and thirst, loneliness acts as a biological alarm bell.
On March 26, just as the COVID-19 pandemic gripped the world, researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology posted a report on bioRxiv. It is the first study in humans to show that both loneliness and hunger share signals deep in a part of the brain that governs very basic impulses for reward and motivation. So, our need to connect is apparently as fundamental as our need to eat.
The researchers used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to compare brain responses to loneliness and hunger. 40 adult participants underwent a 10-hour session depriving (剥夺) them of food and another 10-hour session denying them social contact. Both sessions served as a control (对照) condition for each other.
The social-isolation condition was challenging to arrange. Some people are lonely in a crowd, while others enjoy solitude To induce(l t)not just objective isolation but subjective feelings of loneliness, the researchers had the participants spend their time from 9 A.M. to 7 P.M. in a room at the laboratory without phones, laptops or even novels in case fictional characters provided some social support. Puzzles were allowed, as was preapproved nonfiction reading or writing.
Researchers then focused on a midbrain region called “the substantia nigra”, a center of dopamine (多巴胺) release involved with motivation and desire. The dopaminergic response shows a strong wanting. In the scanner, participants saw images of their preferred forms of social interaction and of their favorite foods, as well as a control image of flowers. It was then found that the substantia nigra responded only to cues of what they had been deprived of. The magnitude of the response correlated with the subjects’ self-reports of how hungry or lonely they were, though the feelings of hunger were consistently stronger.
Finally, the researchers used machine learning to confirm their findings. A software classifier trained to recognize neural patterns during fasting (斋戒) proved able to recognize similar neural patterns from the social-isolation condition even though it had never “seen” them. So there seems to be an underlying shared neural signature between the two states.
Even before the COVID-19 pandemic, an obvious next question for the work was whether different forms of social media could satisfy the need for social connection. Those researchers were never able to get funding for such a study. But now it seems they will.
1. The report posted on March 26 ________.| A．is based on the social-isolation condition during the pandemic |
| B．is the first study on the effect of loneliness on human beings |
| C．reflects the similarity between loneliness and hunger |
| D．shows human need for reward and motivation |
| A．Why inducing feelings of loneliness was challenging |
| B．How loneliness was created among participants |
| C．Why participants were denied access to phones |
| D．How researchers compared brain responses |
| A．little | B．various |
| C．strong | D．consistent |
| A．The neural signature. | B．Fasting. |
| C．Machine learning. | D．The classifier. |
【推荐2】Have you ever imagined what will happen in the ocean when an earthquake happens underground? If you’ve ever felt a big earthquake or seen one on television, you know that it has the power to shake the ground and move large buildings. When a great earthquake happens under the ocean floor, the earthquake’s large energy is transferred (转移) to the water above it, creating a series of water waves called a tsunami (海啸). The word comes from the Japanese words tsu (harbor) and nami (wave).
Normal ocean waves have an average wavelength (波长) of about 100 meters and an average height of about 2 meters, while a tsunami can have a wavelength of 193 kilometers or more. Travelling at up to about 800 kilometers per hour in the deep ocean, a tsunami might be at a height of as little as 0.9 meters, which makes it almost impossible to be noticed, even for a ship in the area.
As a tsunami approaches (靠近) a coastline, things begin to change greatly. As it approaches shallow (浅的) waters, the wave speed drops below about 80 kilometers per hour. The wavelength also decreases much, but amplitude—the height of the wave—increases greatly, leading to the huge wall of water along coastlines, which causes great damage to coastal areas.
About 80% of tsunamis happen in the Pacific Ocean. Tsunamis cannot be prevented, but areas that experience tsunamis regularly have developed tsunami warning systems to give as much advance warning as possible to people who live along the coastline. For example, there are tsunami warning signs and warning sirens (警报器) on the top of nearby hills along Japanese coastlines. And many Japanese coastal communities have built tsunami walls, floodgates and others to stop or change the direction of water from incoming tsunamis.
1. According to the passage, tsunamis are hard to find mainly because of ________.| A．their low sound | B．their low height |
| C．their fast speed | D．their short wavelength |
| A．Changes. | B．Develops. | C．Reduces. | D．Produces. |
| A．how to study tsunamis |
| B．where tsunamis always happen |
| C．what tsunami warning systems include |
| D．how to reduce damages caused by tsunamis |
| A．The word “tsunami” comes from Japanese. |
| B．An earthquake is sure to cause a tsunami. |
| C．About 80 percent of tsunamis happen in Japan. |
| D．Tsunamis can be stopped by warning systems. |
【推荐3】1 A few cookies in the afternoon might seem like a harmless pleasure, but they could have lasting influence on global biodiversity (生物多样性). Cookies often contain palm oil, the production of which is one of the fastest growing causes of deforestation. That in turn leads to reduced biodiversity according to a recently published study in Nature Ecology & Evolution.
2 Looking at data from 2000 to 2011, we found the number of bird species that became endangered due to land use activities increased by seven percent. We also studied the degree to which agriculture and forestry prevented carbon sequestration (封存) over the same period. We estimated (估计) that the opportunity costs, in terms of prevented carbon dioxide absorption on used lands, increased by six percent.
3 For both biodiversity influences and lost carbon sequestration, growth in international trade between world regions was a major driver, contributing 82% and 53% to the overall increases.
4 We found that global consumption (消费) trends are shifting from North America and Western Europe to Asia, the Middle East and Eastern Europe.
5 Another factor at play was that developed nations often effectively reduced the environmental damage caused by land-use activities through the purchase of raw materials from abroad.
6 Just as certain choices carry negative consequences, unintended though they may be, other choices carry positive ones. The public can make a difference — they can change the world with their choices. For example, we know that cattle farming is one of the largest drivers of biodiversity loss, and so reducing meat consumption will have a positive effect. Similarly, reducing the use of short-lived forestry products can reduce the growth of industrial wood farms, which often replace diverse forests with more homogeneous (同类的) plantations.
7 The findings will also help inform policy makers, particularly those involved in international environmental talks. Our paper shows clearly that this is a global phenomenon, and we need to treat it as such.
1. Why does the author mention cookies in the beginning?| A．To prove its effect on biodiversity. |
| B．To introduce the topic of the passage. |
| C．To present the causes of deforestation. |
| D．To arouse readers' sympathy about the pleasure. |
| A．By listing data. | B．By giving examples. |
| C．By making comparisons. | D．By using sayings. |
| A．promote the change of consuming habits |
| B．introduce the findings of certain researches |
| C．analyze the reasons behind the phenomenon |
| D．expose the relationship between cookies and biodiversity |
| A．Cookies and food consumption |
| B．International efforts to save species |
| C．Food consumption and biodiversity |
| D．Rise in consumption to answer for species loss |
