For tho who hunger for some peace and quiet, sound can now create silence. Let’s say you are at the airport, and the little boy on the at next to you is humming(哼唱) a short commercial song. He hums it over and over again, and you are about to go crazy. Thanks to the Silence Machine, a British invention, you can get rid of the sound without uptting the boy or his parents. One may wonder how the Silence Machine works. Well, it functions by analyzing the waves of the incoming sound and creating a cond t of outgoing waves. The two ts of waves cancel each other out. Simply turn the machine or point it at the target, and your peace and quiet comes back.
Directed sound is a new technology that allows companies to u sound in much the same way spotlights(聚光灯) are ud in the theater. A spotlight lights up only one ction of a stage; similarly, “spotsound” creates a circle of sound in on targeted area. This can be uful for business such as restaurants and stores becau it offers a new way to attract customers. Restaurants can offer a choice of music along with the various food choices on the menu, allowing customers more control over the atmosphere in which they are dining. Directed sound is also beginning to appear in shopping centers and even
at homes.乱码翻译
1．What could be inferred from Paragraph 2 about the effect of the LRAD?
A．It caus temporary hearing loss.
B．It slows down a running man.
C．It makes it easy to identify a suspect.
ncutD．It keeps the suspect from hurting others.
2．The Silence Machine is a device specially designed to ________.
2013年陕西高考A．silence the people around you
winsB．remove the sound of commercials
C．block the incoming sound waves
timberD．stop unwanted sound from affecting you
3．What feature do spotsounds and spotlights share?
A．They travel in circles.
B．They clear the atmosphere.
C．They can be transformed into energy.
D．They can be directed onto a specific area.
4．Directed sound can be ud for ________.
A．creative designs of restaurant menus
B．ideal sound effects on the theater stage
C．different choices of music for businessms
D．strict control over any suspicious customer
5．What does the passage focus on?
free peopleA．How professionals invented sound products.
B．Inventions in the field of sound technology.
C．The growing interest in the study of sound.
D．How sound engineers work in their studios.
We may think we're a culture that gets rid of our worn technology at the first sight of something shiny and new, but a new study shows that we keep using our old devices(装置) well after they go out of style. That’s bad news for the environment — and our wallets — as the outdated devices consume much more energy than the newer ones that do the same things.
To figure out how much power the devices are using, Callie Babbitt and her colleagues at the Rochester Institute of Technology in New York tracked the environmental costs for each product throughout its life — from when its minerals are mined to when we stop using the device. This method provided a readout for how home energy u has evolved
何凯文四六级since the early 1990s. Devices were grouped by generation — Desktop computers, basic mobile phones, and box-t TVs defined 1992. Digital cameras arrived on the scene in 1997. And MP3 players, smart phones, and LCD TVs entered homes in 2002, before tablets and e-readers showed up in 2007.
As we accumulated more devices, however, we didn't throw out our old ones. "The living-room television is replaced and gets planted in the kids' room, and suddenly one day, you have a TV in every room of the hou," said one rearcher. The average number of electronic devices ro from four per houhold in 1992 to 13 in 2007. We're not just keeping the old devices — we continue to u them. According to the analysis of Babbitt's team, old desktop monitors and box TVs with cathode ray tubes are the worst devices with their energy consumption and contribution to greenhou gas emissions（排放）more than doubling during the 1992 to 2007 window.
So what's the solution（解决方案）? The team's data only went up to 2007, but the rearchers also explored what would happen if consumers replaced old products with n
quartz是什么意思ew electronics that rve more than one function, such as a tablet for word processing and TV viewing. They found that more on-demand entertainment viewing on tablets instead of TVs and desktop computers could cut energy consumption by 44%.
