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【人文科学-建筑】 The house made of wood （684字 精读 必做篇）
The second little pig was unlucky. He built his house from sticks. It was blown away by a huffing, puffing wolf, which promptly gobbled him up. His brother, by contrast, built a wolf-proof house from bricks. The fairy tale could have been written by a flack for the construction industry, which strongly favours brick, concrete and steel. However, in the real world it would help reduce pollution and slow global warming if more builders copied the wood-loving second pig.
In 2015 world leaders meeting in Paris agreed to move towards zero net greenhouse-gas emissions in the second half of this century. That is a tall order, and the building industry makes it even taller. Cement-making alone produces 6% of the world’s carbon emissions. Steel, half of which goes into buildings, accounts for another 8%. If you factor in all of the energy that goes into lighting, heating and cooling homes and offices, the world’s buildings start to look like a giant environmental problem.
Governments in the rich world are now trying to promote greener behaviour by obliging developers to build new projects to “zero carbon” standards. From January 1st 2019 all new public-sector buildings in the European Union must be built to “nearly zero-energy” standards. All other types of buildings will follow in January 2021. Governments in eight further countries are being lobbied to introduce a similar policy.
These standards are less green than they seem. Wind turbines and solar panels on top of buildings look good but are much less productive than wind and solar farms. And the standards only count the emissions from running a building, not those belched out when it was made. Those are thought to account for between 30% and 60% of the total over a structure’s lifetime.
Buildings can become greener. They can use more recycled steel and can be prefabricated in off-site factories, greatly reducing lorry journeys. But no other building material has environmental credentials as exciting and overlooked as wood.
The energy required to produce a laminated wooden beam is one-sixth of that required for a steel one of comparable strength. As trees take carbon out of the atmosphere when growing, wooden buildings contribute to negative emissions by storing the stuff. When a mature tree is cut down, a new one can be planted to replace it, capturing more carbon. After buildings are demolished, old beams and panels are easy to recycle into new structures. And for retrofitting older buildings to be more energy efficient, wood is a good insulator. A softwood window frame provides nearly 400 times as much insulation as a plain steel one of the same thickness and over a thousand times as much as an aluminium equivalent.
A race is on to build the world’s tallest fully wooden skyscraper. But such edifices are still uncommon. Industry fragmentation, vicious competition for contracts and low profit margins mean that most building firms have little money to invest in greener construction methods beyond what regulation dictates.
Governments can help nudge the industry to use more wood, particularly in the public sector—the construction industry’s biggest client. That would help wood-building specialists achieve greater scale and lower costs. Zero-carbon building regulations should be altered to take account of the emissions that are embodied in materials. This would favour wood as well as innovative ways of producing other materials.
Construction codes could be tweaked to make building with wood easier. Here the direction of travel is wrong. Britain, for instance, is banning the use of timber on the outside of tall buildings after 72 people died in a tower fire in London in 2017. That is a nonsense. Grenfell Tower was covered in aluminium and plastic, not wood. Modern cross-laminated timber panels perform better in fire tests than steel ones do.
Carpentry alone will not bring the environmental cost of the world’s buildings into line. But using wood can do much more than is appreciated. The second little pig was not wrong, just before his time.
Source: The Economist
【人文科学-考古】 Bird Fossil Shared Earth with T. rex （367字 2分41秒 精听 必做篇）
先做精听再核对原文哦~
Who’s your favorite superhero? Captain Marvel? Superman? Well, in a minute, you might just change your answer to the Wonderchicken.
“Yes, the Wonderchicken: Strange visitor from this planet. A 67-million-year-old fossil that’s helping researchers piece together the bird family tree.”
An amateur fossil hunter dug up this specimen 20 years ago in Belgium. But it wasn’t much to look at—just some damaged broken rocks with a few limb bones poking out—that is, until researchers recently decided to peer inside.
“We took these not very promising looking in rocks and CT scanned them. And when we did that, we were amazed to discover that inside the rock was a beautiful, nearly complete, three-dimensionally preserved bird skull.”
Paleobiologist Daniel Field of the University of Cambridge in the U.K.
The result was so striking that coming up with a nickname for this newly discovered species was easy.
“The combination of the shock and the chickeny nature of the fossil resulted in the name Wonderchicken.”
And the specimen isn’t just special because of the incredibly preserved skull. The Wonderchicken is actually a record breaker.
“So this is actually the oldest fossil ever found that’s clearly a representative of the group of modern birds.”
The Wonderchicken walked the earth less than a million years before the asteroid impact that wiped out dinosaurs. In fact, this approximately 400-gram—or about seven eighths of a pound—bird would have been a contemporary of many of the best-known dinosaur species, like Tyrannosaurus rex and Triceratops.
Even though great amounts of evolutionary history can now be deduced by studying the genomes of living species, fossils like this one can still play a valuable role. For example, they can help pin down the date of branches in a family tree. The Wonderchicken fits into the bird family tree right around the split between chickenlike birds and ducklike birds.
“So fossils provide irreplaceable information for evolutionary studies, because they provide the only direct evidence we’ll ever have of how evolution has actually taken place.”
And given the incredible detail in this specimen, the team are hoping that there’s still plenty to learn from this fossil fowl.
“So I think there’s still a number of mysteries that this fossil is going to shed light on.”
Source: Scientific American
【人文科学-建筑】 Knowing Paris by Its Bridges （661字 精读 选做篇）
Sometimes, when sleep eludes me in the dark hour before dawn, I make my way to the Pont de la Tournelle, the 400-foot bridge that links the Île Saint-Louis to Paris’s Left Bank. I plant myself at its midpoint, face west and wait. Before me is the skeletal back of Notre-Dame, shrouded in darkness.
I watch as the sky moves from blue-black to deep blue velvet to soft gray, then light blue. The delicate architectural details of the cathedral gradually reveal themselves, until finally, the early morning sun bathes them in warm orange hues.
The back side of Notre-Dame is the creation of Eugène Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc, the young architect in charge of the cathedral’s restoration in the 19th century. It looks nothing like the grandiose main entrance, whose hundreds of Medieval stone carvings make it one of the most recognizable images of Paris around the world.
The view from behind is different from what it was just a few months ago. During the great fire of April 15, 2019, the cathedral lost the spire that Viollet-le-Duc erected, and sections of the roof are hidden under protective scaffolding. But the structure still shows its splendor at night, the flat, dark silhouette of its flying buttresses visible through the trees.
I am never alone when I come here. Sitting atop a tall, stark pylon on the southeastern bank of the bridge is the 1928 statue of Sainte Geneviève, the patron saint of Paris. The fifth-century saint is portrayed as a young woman, her hands on the shoulders of a child who represents the city. During her lifetime, Geneviève predicted that Attila and his Mongol hordes would spare Paris from massacre and destruction; after she was proved right, she was heralded as the savior of Paris. These days, she looks out on the water — and perhaps down on me — like a silent protector.
The Seine begins to awaken at dawn. The first barges of the morning move downstream. The river police begin their patrols in fast-moving inflatable boats. The garbage trucks rumble along the quays picking up the refuse from the revelry the night before. Dogs bark. Crows caw.
I have found on the Pont de la Tournelle a special place and time in which to make Paris my own.
All that contemplation whets my appetite, and from here, I walk along the quay on the Left Bank until I reach Le Depart Saint-Michel, a 24-hour café-brasserie. A touristy place to avoid at lunch and dinner, it is a great place for people-watching over an omelet and an espresso at early rush hour and a fitting way to savor the magic of a Seine River bridge at dawn.
Study Paris through its bridges, and you have a mosaic of the city’s history and architecture.
There are 35 bridges crossing the eight-mile span from one end of Paris to the other, starting at the Pont National upstream to the Pont du Garigliano, the last bridge as the river moves to the sea (the number is 37 if you count the Boulevard Périphérique, the utilitarian highway that rings the city and crosses the river upstream at Charenton/Bercy and downstream at Saint-Cloud/Issy).
UNESCO celebrates 23 of the city’s bridges in its designation of the banks of the Seine — from the Pont de Sully, near Notre-Dame Cathedral to the Pont d’Iéna, at the Eiffel Tower — as a World Heritage cultural site.
The bridges stretch themselves over the river as if they are posing for passers-by. Every one of them has its own story, structure, purpose and character. Four are footbridges; two carry Metro trains. Twenty-six welcome both motorists and pedestrians; three are even more ambitious, with car and pedestrian lanes and Metro or tram tracks.
Indeed, there is only one way to discover the bridges of Paris: on foot. With good walking shoes, you can make it east to west, from the first to the last bridge, in a day, stopping for lunch at a riverside cafe midway.
Source: The New York Times
【笔记格式要求】
精读笔记格式要求： 1.总结文章中心大意 2.总结分论点或每段段落大意 3.摘抄印象深刻或者觉得优美的句子 4.总结文章中的生词 5.记录阅读时间、总结时间、总时间
精听笔记格式要求： 1.逐句听写整篇文章 2.对照原文修改听写稿，标记出错原因 3.总结文章中心大意 4.总结精听过程中的生词 5.记录听写时间、总结时间、总时间
这里也给大家两点学习小建议哦~ 精读：如遇到读不懂的复杂句，建议找出句子主干，分析句子成分，也可以尝试翻译句子来帮助理解~ 精听：建议每句不要反复纠结听，如果听 5 遍都没听出来，那就跳过，等完成后再回听总结原因，时间宝贵，不要过于执着哦~
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发表于 2020-5-23 22:24:48
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