8.What would be the best title for the passage ?

 A.Pollution saying goodbye to the world.      B.Iceland becoming a country without oil

 C.Iceland planning to turn water into fuel      D.Man able to kick the oil habit

C

  All over the world , libraries have begun the Herculean task of making faithful digital copies of the books , images and recordings that preserve the intellectual effort of mankind. For armchair schools,the work promises to bring such a wealth of information to desktop that the present Internet may not match .

  Librarians see three clear benefits to going digital. First ,it helps them preserve rare and fragile objects without refusing the demands of those who wish to study them . The British Library, for example, holds the  only medieval manuscript(手稿)of Beowulf in London . Only qualified scholars were  allowed to see it sources and put the images up on the Internet for anyone to use.

A second benefit is convenience. Once books are changed to digital form, readers can find them in seconds rather than minutes. Several people can read the same book or view the  same picture at the same time . Clerks are spared the chore of reshelving . And libraries could use the Internet to lend their collections to those who are unable to visit in person.

The third advantage of electronic copies is that they occupy millimeters of space on a magnetic disk rather than meters on a shelf . The cost of library buildings is increasingly high. The University of California at Berkeley recently  spent $46 million on an underground addition to house 1.5 million books –an average cost of $30 per volume. The  price of disk storage on the contrary, has fallen to about $2 per 300-page publication and continues to drop.

4.Which of the following would follow the last paragraph?

  A. The environment for hibernating animals  B.The recent discovery about hibernation

  C.The process of hibernating     D. The recent discovery of space travel

B

  Iceland has energy to spare,and the small country has found a cutting-edge(尖端的)way to reduce its oil dependcy. Volcanoes formed the island nation out of ash and lava(熔岩),which heat huge underground lakes to the boiling point. The hot water is piped into cities providing heat for homes ,businesses and even swimming pools . The water runs through turbines(涡轮机), providing all the country’s electricity.

  Iceland wants t6o make plans to improve its cars ,buses and trucks to run on renewable energy. Iceland has already started by turning water into fuel --- hydrogen fuel. Here’s how it works :Electrodes(电极)change the water  into hydrogen and oxygen molecules. Hydrogen electrons pass through a conductor that creates the current to power an electric engine.

  Hydrogen fuel now costs two to three times as much as gasoline, but gets up to three  times the distance than gas, making the overall cost about the same . As an added benefit , there is no carbon ----only water steam.

  In the capital, Reykjavik, they are already testing three hydrogen-powered electric buses. The drivers are impressed. “I like these buses better because with hydrogen you get no pollution,” said bus driver Rognvaldur Jonatanison . By the middle of this century , all Icelanders will be required to run  their cars only on hydrogen fuel, meaning no more gasoline.

“ If we make hydrogen and use that as  a  fuel for transportation then we can run the whole society on our own local renewable energy sources,” said Marie Maack. Icelanders are showing the world that by making fuel from water,it is possible to kick the oil habit.

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