鴿子化身倫敦的環保衛士

四川雙流中學 蔣建平

題材環保體裁說明文文章詞數 難度 建議用時363 ★★★ 6 分鐘

難詞探意

reputation /?repju?te??n/ n. 名譽；名聲

Pigeons in London have a bad reputation. Some people call them flying rats. And many blame them for causing pollution with their droppings. But now the birds are being used to fight another kind of pollution in this city.

“The problem of air pollution is that it's been largely ignored as an issue for a long time,” says Andrea Lee, who works for the London-based environmental organization ClientEarth.“People don't realize how bad it is, and how it actually affects their health. London's poor air quality is linked to nearly 10,000 early deaths a year,” Lee says, citing a report released by the city manager last year. If people were better informed about the pollution they're breathing, she says, they could pressure the government to do something about it.

Nearby, on a windy hill in London's Regent's Park, an experiment is underway that could help—the first week of flights by the Pigeon Air Patrol. It all began when Pierre Duquesnoy, the director for DigitasLBi, a marketing firm, won a London Design Festival contest last year to show how a world problem could be solved using Twitter. Duquesnoy, from France, chose the problem of air pollution.

“Basically, I realized how important the problem was,” he says. “But also I realized that most of the people around me didn't know anything about it.” Duquesnoy says he wants to better measure pollution while making the results accessible to the public through Twitter.

“So,” he wondered, “how could we go across the city quickly collecting as much data as possible?”Drones were his first thought. But it's illegal to fly them over London. “But pigeons can fly above London,right?” he says. “They live here—actually, they are Londoners as well. So, yeah, I thought about using pigeons equipped with mobile apps. And we can use not just street pigeons, but racing pigeons, because they fly pretty quickly and pretty low.”

So it might be time for Londoners to have more respect for their pigeons. The birds may just be helping to improve the quality of the city's air.

Reading Check

1. What can we infer about London's air quality from paragraph 2?

A. Londoners are very satisfied with it.

B. The government is trying to improve it.

C. Londoners should pay more attention to it.

D. The government has done a lot to improve it.

2. Duquesnoy attended the London Design Festival to ____________.

A. entertain Londoners B. display the way of solving a problem

C. design a product for sale D. protect animals like pigeons

3. Why did Duquesnoy give up using drones to fly across London?

A. They fly too high. B. They are forbidden.

C. They fly too quickly. D. They are too expensive.

Language Study

Difficult sentence

Duquesnoy says he wants to better measure pollution while making the results accessible to the public through Twitter.

【翻譯】_____________________________________________________________________________

【點石成金】while引導的是一個時間狀語，從句省略了he is。