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  3. Starting this month, roughly one quarter of the world’s population will lose sleep and gain sunlight as they set their clocks ah

Starting this month, roughly one quarter of the world’s population will lose sleep and gain sunlight as they set their clocks ah

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问题     Starting this month, roughly one quarter of the world’s population will lose sleep and gain sunlight as they set their clocks ahead for daylight saving. People may think that with the time shift, they are conserving electricity otherwise spent on lighting. But recent studies have cast doubt on the energy argument— some research has even found that it ultimately leads to greater power use.
    Benjamin Franklin is credited with conceiving the idea of daylight saving in 1784 to conserve candles, but the U.S. did not institute it until World War I as a way to preserve resources for the war effort. The first comprehensive study of its effectiveness occurred during the oil crisis of the 1970s, when the U.S. Department of Transportation found that daylight saving trimmed national electricity usage by roughly 1 percent compared with standard time.
    Scant research had been done since, during which time U.S. electricity usage patterns have changed as air conditioning and household electronics have become more pervasive, observes economist Matthew Kotchen of the University of California, Santa Barbara. But lately, changes to daylight saving policies on state and federal levels have presented investigators new chances to explore the before-and-after impacts of the clock shift.
    In 2006 Indiana instituted daylight saving statewide for the first time. Examining electricity usage and billing since the statewide change, Kotchen and his colleague Laura Grant unexpectedly found that daylight time led to a 1 percent overall rise in residential electricity use, costing the state an extra $9 million. Although daylight time reduces demand for household lighting, the researchers suggest that it increased demand for cooling on summer evenings and heating in early spring and late fall mornings.
    Not all recent analyses suggest that daylight saving is counterproductive. Instead of studying the impact daylight saving changes had on just one state, senior analyst Jeff Dowd and his colleagues at the U.S. Department of Energy investigated what effect it might have on national energy consumption, looking at 67 electric utilities across the country. In their report to Congress, they conclude that the four-week extension of daylight time saved about 0.5 percent of the nation’s electricity per day, or 1.3 trillion watt-hours in total. That amount could power 100,000 households for a year. The study did not just look at residential electricity use but commercial use as well, Dowd says. The disparities between regional and national results could reflect climate differences between states. "The effect we saw could be even worse in Florida, where air conditioning is used heavily," Kotchen suggests.
The study of the effectiveness of daylight saving
选项 A、was started by the U.S. Department of Transportation.
B、was initiated by Benjamin Franklin in 1784 to save electricity.
C、was rarely done as the electricity usage pattern changed.
D、needs to be done to help the government change its policies.
答案C
解析 根据题干定位到文章第二、三段。第三段提到，马修说“从那以后就很少有关于夏时制节能效果的研究了，那段时间美国的用电模式发生了变化”，故C项符合题意。第二段最后一句提到，关于夏时制节能效果的第一次全面的研究是由美国交通运输部发起的，这意味着之前可能有不全面的研究，因此A项错误；富兰克林在1784年提出夏时制的主意是为了节省蜡烛而不是省电，况且文中只是说这个主意由他提出，没有说做这方面的研究，故B项错误；根据第三段最后一句可知，夏时制政策的改变为研究人员提供了研究机会，而并非需要做关于夏时制节能效果的研究来帮助改变政策，由此可知D项混淆了因果关系。
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