题型:阅读理解 题类:常考题 难易度:普通
山东省泰安市东平高中2021届高三上学期英语第一次月考试卷
Pigeons in London have a bad reputation. Some people call them flying rats, and many blame them for causing pollution with their droppings, But now the birds are being used to fight another kind of pollution in this city of 8.5 million.
“The problem for air pollution is that it's been largely ignored as an issue for a long time,” says Andrea Lee, who works for the London-based environmental organization Client Earth. “People don t realize how bad it is, and how it actually affects their health. "London's poor air quality is linked to nearly 10, 000 early deaths a year. Lee says, citing (引用)a report released by the city manager last year. If people were better informed about the pollution they're breathing, she says, they could pressure the government to do something about it.
Nearby, on a windy hill in London's Regent's Park, an experiment is underway that could help -the first week of flights by the Pigeon Air Patrol. It all began when Pierre Duquesnoy, the director for Digitasl Bi, a marketing firm, won a London Design Festival contest last year to show how a world problem could be solved using Twitter. Duquesnoy, from France, chose the problem of air pollution.
“Basically, I realized how important the problem was, "he says. “But also I realized that most of the people around me didn't know anything about it." Duquesnoy says he wants to better measure pollution, while at the same time making the results accessible to the public through Twitter.
“So,” he wondered, "how could we go across the city quickly collecting as much data as possible? "Drones were his first thought. But it's illegal to fly them over London. "But pigeons can fly above London, right? "he says, "They live -actually, they are Londoners as well. So, yeah, I thought about using pigeons equipped with mobile apps. And we can use not just street pigeons, but racing pigeons, because they fly pretty quickly and pretty low
So it might be time for Londoners to have more respect for their pigeons. The birds may just be helping to improve the quality of the city s air .
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