2. 外语
  3. (1)Yu Zhuoping hasn’t taken a vacation in two years, nor does the 44-year-old take many weekends off. Instead he logs 12-hour da

(1)Yu Zhuoping hasn’t taken a vacation in two years, nor does the 44-year-old take many weekends off. Instead he logs 12-hour da

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问题     (1)Yu Zhuoping hasn’t taken a vacation in two years, nor does the 44-year-old take many weekends off. Instead he logs 12-hour days in a soccer-pitch-size laboratory filled with flashing computer screens and disemboweled electric motors. He’s trying to build me future—in the form of hydrogen-powered cars that can not only work, but can sell. Since Yu’s team of 28 Ph.D.-level scientists and 200 students at Shanghai’s Tongji University began the work in 2002, they’ve come out with two generations of cars—built with Chinese technology. "That’s something that nobody thought we could do," he says, glancing out from under the silver hood of Start II, the project’s newest prototype. "Now people say we won’t be able to make mem marketable. So we’ll just keep working."
    (2)In China such optimism is par for the course. Beijing is undaunted in its ambitions to become a world leader in hydrogen-fuel-cell-powered cars. The dream is not far-fetched. Making hydrogen cars a reality is only partly a matter of coming up with technological breakthroughs. It also involves replacing gasoline filling stations, refineries and internal-combustion engines with hydrogen equivalents. China’s relative lack of development may thus be a virtue; the country’s leadership has a relatively clean slate upon which to build a hydrogen-car industry, should it choose to do so.
    (3)If the technology could be made cost-competitive with fossil fuels—which many analysts predict will happen in the next two decades—hydrogen cars would make sense as a national strategy. By marketing China the world’s biggest market for hydrogen cars, Beijing could attract investment in the latest technology and bootstrap a world-class Chinese auto industry, reducing China’s demand for imported oil in the bargain. Of course, there’s a sizable industry that is pushing the country in the opposite direction, toward fast growth using quick and dirty conventional technology and fuels—and even fighting against tighter emissions controls than in the West.
    (4)Which strategy China chooses stands to have a huge impact on the country—and on the rest of the world. At present, the Middle Kingdom is traversed by relatively few cars—only about 20 million. That amounts to barely eight cars per 1,000 people, which is a far cry from the 100 in Brazil or the 940 in the United States. China is catching up quickly, however. At its current rate of growth, the country will surpass Japan and become the world’s second largest auto market by 2011, with annual sales of 5 million cars, says Yale Zhang, a research director for the consulting firm GSM worldwide. China, already the world’s second largest importer of oil, would have to double import every 7 or 8 years to keep all these wheels spinning, says James Brock, an energy consultant in Beijing. By steering China toward more fuel-efficient hybrid cars as a precursor to a hydrogen-based auto industry, Beijing would take a giant step toward curbing green-house-gas emissions and reducing the worldwide demand of oil. It would also give the big carmakers an incentive to develop similar vehicles for the China market.
    (5)Beijing has already begun to create an alternative-energy-vehicle fleet of buses. The central Yangtze port city of Wuhan runs several hybrid buses and, Wang Gang, the chief scientist in charge of China’s electric-vehicles project, says, city officials are planning to buy more. Beijing’s public transportation armada includes 120 pure-battery buses. Beijing and Shanghai plan to build hydrogen-fueling stations. That will help them when it comes time to convert the country’s 190,000 natural-gas taxis and buses, one of the world’s biggest natural-gas fleets, to hydrogen.
    (6)State-funded R&D centers are also spinning off for-profit companies that would export hydrogen-technology-based products. Ouyang Minggao, director of China’s National Laboratory of Automotive Safety and Energy, also heads the start-up company SinoHytec, launched by Tsinghua University, China’s MIT. SinoHytec plans to start building fuel-cell buses, with a plan to sell them by 2010.
    (7)If companies like SinoHytec are profitable, they could create a big enough market to drop the price of fuel cells and to finance an infrastructure of hydrogen fueling stations. That, Tongji’s Yu says, would make a fuel-cell-vehicle market possible by pushing the price of domestically produced fuel-cell cars down to about $42,000 per automobile. The government, he says, would help out by creating a "favorable marketplace" with incentives for fuel-cell-car buyers. Tongji’s for-profit start-up, Shanghai FCV Powertrain, expects to sell 250,000 fuel-cell cars by 2020.
The point of the fourth paragraph is that _____.
选项 A、China is catching up quickly in the amount of cars
B、China’s car market has enormous potential
C、China’s oil consumption will still increase in the future
D、China would take measures to protect the environment
答案B
解析 第4段提到，中国汽车的数量不断增长，汽车耗油量也随之上升，发展新型汽车工业不仅能控制温室气体排放，还能减少对汽油的需求，进而促使汽车制造商制造出类似的新型汽车。据此可知，中国汽车市场具有极大潜力，因此选B。A、C是该段中的细节，是中国汽车拥有巨大市场潜力的两个方面；D无原文依据，故不选。
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