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  3. Telecommuting, Internet shopping and online meetings may save energy as compared with in-person alternatives, but as the digital

Telecommuting, Internet shopping and online meetings may save energy as compared with in-person alternatives, but as the digital

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问题    Telecommuting, Internet shopping and online meetings may save energy as compared with in-person alternatives, but as the digital age moves on, its green reputation is turning a lot browner. Last year, E-mailing consumed as much as 1.5 percent of the nation’s electricity—half of which comes from coal.
   In 2005 the computers of the world ate up 123 billion kilo-watt hours of energy. As a result, the power bill to run a computer over its lifetime will surpass the cost of buying the machine in the first place—giving Internet and computer companies a business reason to cut energy costs, as well as an environmental one. One of the biggest energy sinks comes not from the computers themselves but from the air-conditioning needed to keep them from overheating. For every kilowatt-hour of energy used for computing in a data center, another kilowatt-hour is required to cool the furnace like racks of servers.
   For Internet giant Google, this reality has driven efforts such as the installation of a solar array that can provide 30 percent of the peak power needs of its headquarters as well as increasing purchases of renewable energy. But to deliver Web pages within seconds, the firm must maintain hundreds of thousands of computer servers in cavernous buildings. "We are actively working to maximize the efficiency of our data centers, which account for most of the energy Google consumes worldwide." remarks Google’s green energy czar Bill Weihl. Google will funnel some of its profits into a new effort, dubbed RE   In the meantime, the industry as a whole has employed a few tricks to save watts. Efforts include rearranging the stacks of servers and the mechanics of their cooling, and using software to create multiple "virtual" computers, rather than having to deploy several real ones. Such virtualization has allowed computer maker Hewlett-Packard to consolidate 86 data centers spread throughout the world to just three, with three backups, says Pat Tiernan, the firm’s vice president of social and environmental responsibility.
   The industry is also tackling the energy issue at the computer-chip level. Chipmakers such as Intel and AMD have shifted to so-called multi-core technology, which packs multiple processors into one circuit rather than separating them. "When we moved to multi-core, and throttled down microprocessors, the energy savings were pretty substantial," says Allyson Klein, Intel’s marketing manager. Chipmakers continue to shrink circuits on the nanoscale as well, which "means a chip needs less electricity" to deliver the same performance, she adds.
One of the biggest energy sinks comes from the air-conditioning in that _____.
选项 A、one kilowatt-hour is needed by air-conditioning to cool the computers
B、air-conditioning costs a large sum of money
C、air-conditioning is needed to prevent computers from overheating
D、a data center needs air-conditioning desperately
答案C
解析 事实细节题。该段第三句提出最大的能量消耗不是来自电脑本身而是来自于为防止电脑过热而使用的空调，第四句的举例形象地说明了此原因，故C项正确。
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