题目内容
In her international bestselling Talk to the Hand, author Lynne Truss argues that common courtesies such as saying "Excuse me" are practically extinct. There are certainly plenty who would agree with her.
Is it really true？ We decided to find out by experiments. In dozens of American cities, our reporters performed two experiments: "door tests" (would anyone hold one open for them？); and "document drops" (who would help them retrieve a pile of "accidentally" dropped papers？). Along the way, the reporters encountered all types; men and women of different races, ages, professions, and income levels.
While 90 percent of the people passed the door test, only 55 percent passed the document drop. Are people less likely to help others when doing so takes extra effort or time？ Not always, the reporters found. Take the pregnant woman who thought nothing of bending down to help us with our papers. Or the woman named Liz who balanced two coffees, her keys and her wallet on a takeout tray with one hand, while picking up papers off the wet pavement with the other, her reason for helping？ "I was there," she said.
Overall, men were the most willing to help, especially when it came to document drops. In those, men offered aid 63 percent of the time, compared to 47 percent among women. Of course, men weren't entirely democratic about whom they'd help. All of them held the door for the female reporter, and were more than twice as likely to help her pick up fallen papers than they were to help our male reporter.
By far, the most common reason people cited for being willing to go out of their way to help others was their upbringing. "It's the way I was raised," said one young woman who held a door open despite struggling with her umbrella on a rainy day in Brooklyn.
We realize this isn't a rigorous scientific study, but we believe it is a reasonable real-world test of good manners around the globe. And it's comforting to know that in a place where millions of people push one another each day to get ahead, they're able to do it with a smile. Hey, if they can make nice here, they can make nice anywhere.
Which of the following is the best word to describe the experiments？
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If two scientists at Los Alamos National Laboratory are correct, People will still be driving gasoline-powered cars 50 years from now, giving out heat-trapping carbon dioxide into the atmosphere--and yet that carbon dioxide will not contribute to global warming. The scientists, F. Jeffrey Martin and William L. Kubic Jr., are proposing a concept, which they have patriotically named Green Freedom for removing carbon dioxide from the air and turning it back into gasoline.
The idea is simple. Air would be blown over a liquid solution which would absorb the carbon dioxide. The carbon dioxide would then be extracted and subjected to chemical reactions that would turn it into fuel. Although they have not yet built a fuel factory, or even a small prototype, the scientists say it is all based on existing technology. "Everything in the concept has been built, is operating or has a close cousin that is operating," Dr. Martin said. The proposal does not violate any laws of physics, and other scientists have independently suggested similar ideas.
In the efforts to reduce humanity's emissions of carbon dioxide, three solutions have been offered; hydrogen-powered cars, electric cars and biofuels. Biofuels are gasoline substitutes produced from plants like corn or sugar cane. Plants absorb carbon dioxide as they grow, but growing crops for fuel takes up wide strips of land. Hydrogen-powered cars emit no carbon dioxide, but producing hydrogen requires energy, and if that energy comes from coal-fired power plants, then the problem has not been solved. The problem with electric cars is that they have typically been limited to a range of tens of miles as opposed to the hundreds of miles that can be driven on a tank of gas.
Gasoline, it turns out, is an almost ideal fuel (except that it produces carbon dioxide). If it can be made out of carbon dioxide in the air, the Los Alamos concept may mean there is little reason to switch, after all.
"It's definitely worth pursuing," said Martin I. Hoffert, a professor of physics at New York University. "It has a couple of pieces to it that are interesting." Other scientists also said the proposal looked promising but could not evaluate it fully because the details had not been published.
What is most remarkable about the proposal made by the two scientists？
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