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  3. What do you do on days when the air doesn’t smell right? Soon, you might just check Google Maps. Google has teamed up with S

What do you do on days when the air doesn’t smell right? Soon, you might just check Google Maps. Google has teamed up with S

admin2021-12-15  38
问题                                 What do you do on days when the air doesn’t smell right? Soon, you might just check Google Maps.
    Google has teamed up with San Francisco-based sensor company Aclima and the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to fit its Street View cars with environmental sensors. The cars will be used to produce up-to-the-minute neighbourhood pollution maps that could prove a lifesaver for people who suffer from asthma or other conditions that put them at risk when the air is bad. Air pollution kills an estimated 55,000 people every year in the US and 3.3 million worldwide.
    Air quality is typically measured by stationary equipment scattered throughout a city: New York City, for example, has 17 monitoring stations. But widely spaced sensors have a limited capacity to model the dynamic processes at work in an urban area, especially with wind, sunlight, humidity and traffic patterns shifting continuously.
    The Google-Aclima project, by contrast, will move the sensors on to the streets. Cars fitted with mobile sensing equipment will criss-cross city neighbourhoods throughout the day to collect data about air quality. Algorithms will distil millions of readings for pollutants and greenhouse gases, including carbon monoxide, ozone and fine particulates, into colour-coded maps for the city.
    These real-time pollution maps will go live for residents in the San Francisco Bay area on Google Earth Engine, a geospatial analysis platform, early next year. Website visitors will be able to see which pollutants are moving through their neighbourhoods or heading their way. California’s Central Valley and Los Angeles will get their own maps later in the year.
    Epidemiologists will be able to use the data generated to correlate, for example, the timing of asthma attacks or admission into hospital emergency rooms with air quality in a particular location at a given time, says Melissa Lunden, director of research at Aclima. " The health community is very interested," she says. " The data should also help meteorologists model how air moves and diffuses through the concrete canyons of cities. "
    " Projects like these are going to help people make personal decisions," says Dan Costa, director of the EPA’s air, climate and energy research programme. "Do I walk down Acorn Street or Elm Street? Am I going to let my kids play outside today?"
    "The revolution in low-cost portable pollution sensors will also prompt agencies such as the EPA to up their game," he says. "It’s going to move the government to provide information in a different way— information that is in real time, locally based and that people can actually use. "
What is the passage mainly about?
选项 A、The real-time Google pollution maps.
B、Innovative ways to monitor air quality.
C、The working principle of Street View cars.
D、The usage of the new Google Earth Engine.
答案A
解析 由题干及各选项定位至全文。主旨大意题。文章用一个设问引出话题，指出谷歌的新污染地图可以帮助人们获得更加即时和准确的污染分布信息，随后比较了谷歌新技术中信息收集手段与传统方式的区别，第五段和第六段介绍了新污染地图的用途，最后作者还引用项目负责人的话强调了这个项目的优越性。纵观全文，都是围绕谷歌的实时污染地图展开的，故答案为A)。
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