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  3. Is that Folgers coffee in your cup or Maxwell House? Now you no longer have to rely on your nose to tell. Researchers have devel

Is that Folgers coffee in your cup or Maxwell House? Now you no longer have to rely on your nose to tell. Researchers have devel

admin2013-09-07  70
问题     Is that Folgers coffee in your cup or Maxwell House? Now you no longer have to rely on your nose to tell. Researchers have developed an analyzer that can distinguish between 10 commercial brands of coffee and can even tell apart coffee beans roasted at various temperatures for different times. The advance could help growers determine within minutes whether a particular batch of coffee is just as good as the previous one or whether it’s undrinkable.
    Researchers have been trying for years to come up with a simple way to analyze coffee. But it’s no easy task. The challenge is that the pleasant smell of roasted coffee beans consists of more than 1,000 compounds that change with roasting temperatures and time. Traditional methods of chemical analysis generally have difficulty distinguishing between compounds that are very similar to one another. And "electronic noses," an array of dyes, and other devices that change color or chemical properties when they react with certain molecules suffer from the same drawback.
    Over the past decade, chemist Kenneth Suslick and colleagues at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, have refined the electronic nose approach. In the new study, they used dyes that interact strongly with other chemicals, making them more specific. They then put drops of 36 dyes on a polymer(聚合物)film the size of a nickel. The colors in the dyes belonged to a range of chemical classes, including pH indicators and molecules that change color with certain chemical vapors.
    The device produced a pattern of colors as each coffee’s mixture of volatile(易蒸发的)compounds interacted with the dyes. When the investigators pumped vapors from various coffees including Starbucks, Sumatra Roast and Folgers Grande Supreme Decaf-over the arrays, all generated unique color patterns, like a molecular "fingerprint," they report this month in Analytical Chemistry.
    The array doesn’t give any information about the individual compounds in the smell. "The important thing is that we can easily tell the difference between different roastings and coffees," notes Suslick. And that should help growers quickly and cheaply analyze problems with coffee, such as burnt flavors, during their initial screening process, says food scientist Felix Escher at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich.
    The applications for the kind of device created by Suslick’s team go beyond coffee, says chemist Pavel Anzenbacher at Bowling Green State University in Ohio. Similar arrays, he notes, could be used in everything from detecting explosives to spotting contaminants(污染物)in water.
Compared with the former electronic noses, the refined approach is intended to be _____.
选项 A、less time-consuming
B、more economical
C、less complicated
D、more accurate
答案D
解析 原文说新研究使电子鼻“更精确”，因此，本题应选D。
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