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Unit 5 The power of nature

Ⅰ.阅读理解

A

We all know the feeling of walking into an air-conditioned office building on a hot summer

day. It’s 94℉ outside. It’s 64℉ inside. Suddenly, you need a knit sweater just to sit at your desk. I know someone who used to bring a space heater to work—in August.

Aside from being uncomfortable, this is horrifically inefficient. The low hum of the air

conditioner is the sound of coal being burned and money being spent to make you miserable at work. BuildingIQ is trying to change that. Their secret weapon? Machine learning.

The company has developed cloud-based software that gathers information about a building and

uses it to build a thermal model (热模型). That model can predict how much or how little energy is needed to keep the people inside comfortable by analyzing factors like indoor temperature and pressure, electricity consumption, the weather forecast, the price of electricity, and therefore tailors heating and air conditioning for maximum energy efficiency.

Thanks to a recent cooperation, BuildingIQ will soon take human preferences into account.

Changes to heating and air conditioning are always influenced by the limits of human comfort, and those limits vary from person to person. This data will be added into the thermal model. Imagine a retirement home where the occupants are always too cold. If the system knows this, it will reduce the air conditioning in the summer to keep grandma and grandpa nice and warm.

How well does it work? BuildingIQ says it regularly saves between 10 and 25 percent on heating

and air conditioning, the two items that make up 50 or 60 percent of a building’s total energy use. The software will help cut energy bills and improve comfort all while reducing our reliance on fossil fuels. It won’t be long before you can leave your space heater at home. 1. In Paragraph 1, the author intends to .

A. complain about the coldness in air-conditioned offices B. describe the harmful effects of an unhealthy lifestyle C. criticize some people’s unawareness to save energy

D. indicate the low efficiency of the old way of air conditioning

2. According to the article, what does the “thermal model” do?

A. Gathering information about a building’s history. B. Learning about machines that heat a building. C. Predicting the amount of air conditioning needed. D. Analyzing the physical fitness of people inside.

3. The underlined word “tailor” can be best replaced by .

A. limit

B. adjust

C. expand

D. prevent

4. What is the main idea of Paragraph 4?

A. BuildingIQ is going to be experimented at retirement homes. B. BuildingIQ will also analyze human temperature preferences. C. People have different preferences for temperature and comfort. D. The limits of human comfort vary and change at different ages.

B

Rainforests, it turns out, are not created equal. Take the Amazon rainforest, an area that

covers about 7 million square kilometers. But within that huge expanse are all kinds of ecological zones, and some of these zones, says Greg Asner, are a lot more crowded than others.

“Some forests have many species of trees,” he said, “others have few. Many forests are

unique from others in terms of their overall species composition…” And all of these different small areas of forest exist within the giant space that is the Amazon Rainforest.

So Asner, using the signature technique called airborne laser-guided imaging spectroscopy,

began to map these different zones from the air. “By mapping the traits of tropical forests from above,” he explains, “we are, for the first time, able to understand how forest composition varies geographically.”

The results show up in multicolored maps, with each color representing different kinds of

species, different kinds of trees, the different kinds of chemical they are producing and using, and even the amount of biodiversity, the animal and plant species that live within each zone.

Armed with this information, Asner says decision-makers now have “a first-time way to decide

whether any given forest geography is protected well enough or not. If not, then new protections can be put in place to save a given forest from destruction.”

Asner says the information is a great way for decision-makers to develop a “cost-benefit

ratio type analysis.” Conservation efforts can be expensive, so armed with this information,

government leaders can ensure they are making the most of their conservation dollars by focusing on areas that are the most biologically diverse or unique.

The next step, Asner says, is to take his project global, and to put his eyes even higher

in the sky, on orbital satellites. “The technique we developed and applied to map Peru is ready to go global.” Asner said. “We want to put the required instrumentation on an Earth-orbiting satellite, to map the planet every month, which will give the best possible view of how the world’s biodiversity is changing, and where to put much needed protections. 5. Unequally-created rainforests refer to the fact______.

A. how crowded they are B. where they are located C. when they came into being

D. what kinds of species they have

6. What can government leaders learn from Asner’s mapping?

A. The cost to conserve forests

B. The chemicals needing for certain forests C. The forest areas needing special protection D. The number of animals living in a forest

7. What is Asner planning to do now?

A. To send a satellite to map the world

B. To track the change of biodiversity in the world C. To develop technology for mapping the globe D. To advertise his project around the world

8. What does the passage mainly talk about?

A. Using eyes in the sky to map biodiversity B. Making a map of big forests in the world C. Learning about the biodiversity of Amazon forest D. Protecting the forest from being destructed.

Ⅱ.完形填空