The Warranty Holdings Group, a European leader in mechanical breakdown insurance and a researcher and commentator on trends in m

admin2012-08-22  38

问题     The Warranty Holdings Group, a European leader in mechanical breakdown insurance and a researcher and commentator on trends in motoring, says that the motorists’ world 20 years from now will be marked by more cars, more choice and more technology. Built-in safety features will increase and will include night-vision and collision-avoidance system, and monitoring devices to stop drivers falling asleep at the wheel.
    A growth in tele-working and home shopping should cut the numbers of trips in a car made by most motorists and "fun" sports cars will become popular as private motoring becomes more recreational in nature.
    The survey results show that despite years of research into alternative fuel sources for vehicles, no clear winner has emerged for a replacement for the conventional petrol-engined car. Gas and electricity are the best possibilities, with Toyota’s design division in Japan claiming it already has an electric car that will drive up to 250km on a single charge.
    However, while electric and "hybrid" powered vehicles will be far more in evidence in the future, it will take a major technological breakthrough to steer the car industry away from its current path of gradual improvements to the petrol-driven internal combustion engine.
    Professor Garel Rhys, of the Cardiff Business School in Wales, says engine fuel injection systems of the future will be far more frugal than anything that exists at the moment. "It will be like putting a pipette of petrol into the cylinders, rather than just throwing it in by the bucket load, which is almost what we do at the moment when you compare it with what could be possible. "
    Some environmentalists point to the Twingo, the small car developed by France’s Renault company, to show that what could be achieved by the world’s car industry if it moved away from a trend towards bigger and more powerful cars and radically cut the fuel consumption of its products. Public opinion polls in many countries show motorists wanting access to this kind of environmentally-aware car.
    A prototype environmental car, the SmILE (smaller, intelligent, lighten, efficient) has been put together by the environmental group Greenpeace. The group hopes the concept will catch on. It depends heavily on supercharging or forcing fuel mixture into the cylinders at higher than normal pressure. Some experts say this is a good way to extract high performance and high fuel efficiency from small engines.
    Cutting the fuel consumption has had no negative effect on the handling or performance of the car, according to the designers. Top speed, flexibility and acceleration from the engine is as good or better than the original Twingo. They say the technology used to create the Twingo SmILE could just as easily be used on other brands of car.
    What remains to be seen is whether the enthusiasm of environmental designers catches on with the dollar-driven international car industry, and whether motorists back up with their chequebooks their desire for "greener" cars.
The phrase "catch on" (Line 2, Para. 7) most probably means______.

选项 A、become popular
B、draw attention
C、be formulated
D、be in trouble

答案B

解析 词汇题。根据第七段,环境保护组织“绿色和平”已经构想出一种环保型样车SmILE(体积小、智能化、重量轻、效率高四个英文单词的首字母组合)。从逻辑上分析,该组织当然是希望这一概念能流行起来,被人接受,所以A是正确答案。其他三个意思均不符合上下文逻辑。
转载请注明原文地址:https://kaotiyun.com/show/7TXO777K
0

最新回复(0)