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  3. Starting this month, roughly one quarter of the world’s population will lose sleep and gain sunlight as they set their clocks ah

Starting this month, roughly one quarter of the world’s population will lose sleep and gain sunlight as they set their clocks ah

admin2015-10-20  65
问题     Starting this month, roughly one quarter of the world’s population will lose sleep and gain sunlight as they set their clocks ahead for daylight saving. People may think that with the time shift, they are conserving electricity otherwise spent on lighting. But recent studies have cast doubt on the energy argument—some research has even found that it ultimately leads to greater power use.
    Benjamin Franklin is credited with conceiving the idea of daylight saving in 1784 to conserve candles, but the U.S. did not institute it until World War I as a way to preserve resources for the war effort. The first comprehensive study of its effectiveness occurred during the oil crisis of the 1970s, when the U.S. Department of Transportation found that daylight saving trimmed national electricity usage by roughly 1 percent compared with standard time.
    Scant research had been done since, during which time U.S. electricity usage patterns have changed as air conditioning and household electronics have become more pervasive, observes economist Matthew Kotchen of the University of California, Santa Barbara. But lately, changes to daylight saving policies on state and federal levels have presented investigators new chances to explore the before-and-after impacts of the clock shift.
    In 2006 Indiana instituted daylight saving statewide for the first time. Examining electricity usage and billing since the statewide change, Kotchen and his colleague Laura Grant unexpectedly found that daylight time led to a 1 percent overall rise in residential electricity use, costing the state an extra $9 million. Although daylight time reduces demand for household lighting, the researchers suggest that it increased demand for cooling on summer evenings and heating in early spring and late fall mornings.
    Not all recent analyses suggest that daylight saving is counterproductive. Instead of studying the impact daylight saving changes had on just one state, senior analyst Jeff Dowd and his colleagues at the U.S. Department of Energy investigated what effect it might have on national energy consumption, looking at 67 electric utilities across the country. In their report to Congress, they conclude that the four-week extension of daylight time saved about 0.5 percent of the nation’s electricity per day, or 1.3 trillion watt-hours in total. That amount could power 100,000 households for a year. The study did not just look at residential electricity use but commercial use as well, Dowd says. The disparities between regional and national results could reflect climate differences between states. "The effect we saw could be even worse in Florida, where air conditioning is used heavily," Kotchen suggests.
According to the first two paragraphs, daylight saving
选项 A、means to set the clock ahead worldwide.
B、was proposed to save materials for war effort.
C、leads to sleeplessness of millions of people.
D、trimmed electricity usage during the oil crisis of the 1970s.
答案D
解析 事实细节题。根据题干定位到文章开头两段。由第二段末句可知，20世纪70年代石油危机时实行夏时制导致用电量减少，故D项正确。
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