2. 考研
  3. A If humans were truly at home under the light of the moon and stars, we would go in darkness happily, the midnight world as vis

A If humans were truly at home under the light of the moon and stars, we would go in darkness happily, the midnight world as vis

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问题     A If humans were truly at home under the light of the moon and stars, we would go in darkness happily, the midnight world as visible to us as it is to the vast number of nocturnal species on this planet. Instead, we are diurnal creatures, with eyes adapted to living in the sun’s light. This is a basic evolutionary fact, even though most of us don’t think of ourselves as diurnal beings any more than we think of ourselves as primates or mammals or Earthlings. Yet it’s the only way to explain what we’ve done to the night; We’ve engineered it to receive us by filling it with light.
    B This kind of engineering is no different than damming a river. Its benefits come with consequences — called light pollution — whose effects scientists are only now beginning to study. Light pollution — the artificial light that illuminates more than its intended target area— has become a problem of increasing concern across the country over the past 15 years. In the suburbs, where over-lit shopping mall parking lots are the norm, only 200 of the Milky Way’s 2, 500 stars are visible on a clear night. Even fewer can be seen from large cities. In almost every town, big and small, street lights beam just as much light up and out as they do down, illuminating much more than just the street. Almost 50 percent of the light emanating from street lamps misses its intended target, and billboards, shopping centers, private homes and skyscrapers are similarly over-illuminated.
    C For most of human history, the phrase "light pollution" would have made no sense. Imagine walking toward London on a moonlit night around 1800, when it was Earth’s most populous city. Nearly a million people lived there, making do, as they always had, with candles and rushlights and torches and lanterns. Only a few houses were lit by gas, and there would be no public gaslights in the streets or squares for another seven years. From a few miles away, you would have been as likely to smell London as to see its dim collective glow.
    D Now most of humanity lives under intersecting domes of reflected, refracted light, of scattering rays from over lit cities and suburbs, from light-flooded highways and factories. Nearly all of nighttime Europe is a nebula of light, as is most of the United States and all of Japan. In the south Atlantic the glow from a single fishing fleet—squid fishermen luring their prey with metal halide lamps—can be seen from space, burning brighter, in fact, than Buenos Aires or Rio de Janeiro. America has become so bright that in a satellite image of the United States at night, the outline of the country is visible from its lights alone. The major cities are all there in bright clusters; New York, Boston, Miami, Houston, Los Angeles, Seattle, Chicago— and, of course, Las Vegas. Mark Adams, superintendent of the McDonald Observatory in west Texas, says that the very fact that city lights are visible from on high is proof of their wastefulness. "When you’re up in an airplane, all that light you see on the ground from the city is wasted. It’s going up into the night sky. That’s why you can see it. "
    E But don’t we need all those lights to ensure our safety? The answer from light engineers, light pollution control advocates and astronomers is an emphatic "no. " Elizabeth Alvarez of the International Dark Sky Association (IDA), a nonprofit organization in Tucson, Arizona, says that overly bright security lights can actually force neighbors to close the shutters, which means that if any criminal activity does occur on the street, no one will see it. And the old assumption that bright lights deter crime appears to have been a false one: A new Department of Justice report concludes that there is no documented correlation between the level of lighting and the level of crime in an area. And contrary to popular belief, more crimes occur in broad daylight than at night.
    F Light pollution is largely the result of bad lighting design, which allows artificial light to shine outward and upward into the sky, where it’s not wanted, instead of focusing it downward, where it is. Ill-designed lighting washes out the darkness of night and radically alters the light levels and light rhythms to which many forms of life, including ourselves, have adapted. Wherever human light spills into the natural world, some aspect of life migration, reproduction, feeding is affected. For drivers, light can actually create a safety hazard. Glaring lights can temporarily blind drivers, increasing the likelihood of an accident. To help prevent such accidents, some cities and states prohibit the use of lights that impair nighttime vision. For instance, New Hampshire law forbids the use of " any light along a highway so positioned as to blind or dazzle the vision of travelers on the adjacent highway. "
    G Badly designed lighting can pose a threat to wildlife as well as people. Light is a powerful biological force, and on many species it acts as a magnet, a process being studied by researchers such as Travis Longcore and Catherine Rich, co-founders of the Los Angeles-based Urban Wildlands Group. The effect is so powerful that scientists speak of songbirds and seabirds being "captured" by searchlights on land or by the light from gas flares on marine oil platforms, circling and circling in the thousands until they drop. Migrating at night, birds are apt to collide with brightly lit tall buildings; immature birds on their first journey suffer disproportionately. Insects, of course, cluster around streetlights, and feeding at those insect clusters is now ingrained in the lives of many bat species. In some Swiss valleys the European lesser horseshoe bat began to vanish after streetlights were installed, perhaps because those valleys were suddenly filled with light-feeding pipistrelle bats. Other nocturnal mammals — including desert rodents, fruit bats, opossums, and badgers— forage more cautiously under the permanent full moon of light pollution because they’ve become easier targets for predators.
    H Some birds— blackbirds and nightingales, among others—sing at unnatural hours in the presence of artificial light. Scientists have determined that long artificial days—and artificially short nights—induce early breeding in a wide range of birds. And because a longer day allows for longer feeding, it can also affect migration schedules. One population of Bewick’s swans wintering in England put on fat more rapidly than usual, priming them to begin their Siberian migration early. The problem, of course, is that migration, like most other aspects of bird behavior, is a precisely timed biological behavior. Leaving early may mean arriving too soon for nesting conditions to be right.
    I So what can be done? Tucson, Arizona, is taking back the night. The city has one of the best lighting ordinances in the country, and, not coincidentally, the highest concentration of observatories in the world. Kitt Peak National Optical Astronomy Observatory has 24 telescopes aimed skyward around the city’s perimeter, and its cadre of astronomers needs a dark sky to work with. For a while, that darkness was threatened. " We were totally losing the night sky," Jim Singleton of Tucson’s Lighting Committee told Tulsa, Oklahoma’s KOTV last March. Now, after retrofitting inefficient mercury lighting with low-sodium lights that block light from " trespassing" into unwanted areas like bedroom windows, and by doing away with some unnecessary lights altogether, the city is softly glowing rather than brightly beaming. The same thing is happening in a handful of other states, including Texas, which just passed a light pollution bill last summer. " Astronomers can get what they need at the same time that citizens get what they need: safety, security and good visibility at night," says McDonald Observatory’s Mark Adams, who provided testimony at the hearings for the bill.
    J And in the long run, everyone benefits from reduced energy costs. Wasted energy from inefficient lighting costs us between $1 and $2 billion a year, according to IDA. The city of San Diego, which installed new, high-efficiency street lights after passing a light pollution law in 1985, now saves about $3 million a year in energy costs. Legislation isn’t the only answer to light pollution problems. Brian Greer, Central Ohio representative for the Ohio Light Pollution Advisory Council, says that education is just as important, if not more so. "There are some special situations where regulation is the only fix," he says. "But the vast majority of bad lighting is simply the result of not knowing any better. " Simple actions like replacing old bulbs and fixtures with more efficient and better-designed ones can make a big difference in preserving the night sky.
    The reading passage has ten paragraphs A—J. Choose the most suitable headings for paragraphs B—F from the list of headings below.
    List of Headings
    i Introduction
    ii People at Risk from Bright Lights
    iii Illuminating Space on Earth
    iv Meaninglessness of the Term "Light Pollution" in History
    v Solution to Light Pollution
    vi Relationship between Lights and Security
    vii Legislation on Light Control
    viii The Environmental Dangers
    ix More Light than Is Necessary
    x A Problem Lights Do not Solve
    xi Light Permeation in Human Life
    xii Negative Effects on Wild Animals
选项
答案iv
解析 paragraph C第一句便点明主题：在大部分人类历史上短语“光污染 (light pollution) ”是没有任何意义的。
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