题型:阅读理解 题类:常考题 难易度:普通
河北省保定市2017-2018学年高二下学期英语期末考试试卷
Look and listen, and that concert poster just might be singing. Engineers have designed antennas(天线)that can turn everyday objects, from posters to clothing, into radio stations. Anyone walking or driving by can tune in and hear what's on. The devices use radio waves, but they don't generate their own. They hijack(劫持)the same waves that carry music and news to your smartphone.
Vikram Iyer co-led the project with Anran Wang, a graduate student in computer science and engineering. The two got the idea for their invention by paying attention to what was already around them. “It's the ideal way to minimize the power consumption for any kind of communication,” notes Iyer. Their research had focused on new types of wireless communications that won't require much energy. They wanted something that would work outdoors in a city. Then they realized the air is already filled with wireless communications in the form of radio stations.
Radio waves carry energy at the speed of light from tall transmission towers to radios in cars, phones and homes. These waves of the antennas take in existing radio waves and change them slightly. Those changes add new sound information. The changed waves are then sent back out into the world where people can listen in. So the device only needs enough power to change the waves, not to generate them.
The scientists tested their device with a poster. It advertised a Seattle concert by Simply Three. People standing almost 4 meters away from the poster could use FM receivers on smartphones to listen to all songs of the band's music. Those in cars as far as 18 meters away could use car radios to pick up some parts of the songs
The technology could even extend to clothes. Iyer, Wang and their team turned the shirt into an antenna. It let the shirt talk to the wearer's smartphone. If a sensor in the shirt tracked a person's heart rate during exercise, for instance, the antenna could transmit those data to the wearer's phone.
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