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  3. The (Non) Risks of Mobile Phones Do mobile phones cause explosions at petrol stations? That question has just been exhaustiv

The (Non) Risks of Mobile Phones Do mobile phones cause explosions at petrol stations? That question has just been exhaustiv

admin2013-07-11  63
问题                     The (Non) Risks of Mobile Phones
    Do mobile phones cause explosions at petrol stations? That question has just been exhaustively answered by Adam Burgess, a researcher at the University of Kent, in England. Oddly, however, Dr.Burgess is not a physicist, but a sociologist. For the concern rests not on scientific evidence of any danger, but is instead the result of sociological factors: it is an urban myth, supported and propagated by official sources, but no less a myth for that. Dr. Burgess presented his findings this week at the annual conference of the British Sociological Association.
    Mobile phones started to become widespread in the late 1980s, when the oil industry was in the middle of a concerted safety drive, Dr. Burgess notes. This was, in large part, a response to the Piper Alpha disaster in 1988, when 167 people died in an explosion on an Oil platform off the Scottish coast. The safety drive did not apply merely to offshore operations, employees at some British oil-company offices are now required to use handrails while walking up and down stairs, for example. So nobody questioned the precautionary ban on the use of mobile phones at petrol stations. The worry was that an electrical spark might ignite explosive fumes.
    By the late 1990s, however, phone makers having conducted their own research realised that there was no danger of phones causing explosions since they could not generate the required sparks. But it was too late. The myth had taken hold.
    One problem, says Dr. Burgess, is that the number of petrol-station fires increased in the late 1990s, just as mobile phones were proliferating. Richard Coates, BP’s fire-safety adviser, investigated many of the 243 such fires that occurred around the world between 1993 and 2004. He concluded that most were indeed caused by sparks igniting petrol vapour, but the sparks themselves were the result of static electricity, not electrical equipment. Most drivers will have experienced a mild electric shock when climbing out of their vehicles. It is caused by friction between driver and seat, with the result that both end up electrically charged. When the driver touches the metal frame of the vehicle, the result is sometimes a spark.
    A further complication was the rise of the internet, where hoax memos, many claiming to originate from oil companies, warned of the danger of using mobile phones in petrol stations. Such memos generally explain static fires quite accurately, but mistakenly attribute them to mobile phones. Official denials, says Dr. Burgess, simply inflame the suspicions of conspiracy theorists.
    Despite the lack of evidence that mobile phones can cause explosions, bans remain in place around the world, though the rules vary widely. For Dr. Burgess, such concerns are part of a broader pattern of unease about mobile phones. There is a curious discrepancy, he notes, between the way that such phones have become indispensable, and the fact that they are also vaguely considered to be dangerous. The safety of mobile phones would appear to be not so much the province of the hard science of physics, as of the soft science of sociology.
The author writes about the Piper Alpha disaster to explain______.
选项 A、when mobile phones became widely-used
B、how the myth of cell phone causing explosion was formed
C、why oil industry develop strict safety requirements
D、what is usually responsible for oil explosion
答案C
解析 本题考查写作目的。由第二段第一句可知，手机开始普及与石油行业的安全运动恰好同时进行。第二句紧接上文指出，这场安全运动很大程度上是由帕珀阿尔法恶性事故引发的。这里作者提到“帕珀阿尔法恶性事故”是为了说明石油行业开展安全运动的原因，因此[C]正确。第三、四句指出，由于这场安全运动波及范围广，制定了非常严格的安全规定，因此关于在加油站禁止使用手机的安全性规定也就很容易地被人们接受了。因此“石油行业的安全运动”才是“手机爆炸传言”得以传播的历史背景，[B]和该事故没有直接的联系，应排除。[A]、[D]是第二段涉及的细节，但它们和帕珀阿尔法事故无关，也应排除。
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