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  3. Even plants can run a fever, especially when they’re under attack by insects

Even plants can run a fever, especially when they’re under attack by insects

游客2023-07-25  53
问题     Even plants can run a fever, especially when they’re under attack by insects or disease. But unlike humans, plants can have their temperature taken from 3,000 feet away-straight up. A decade ago, adapting the infrared (红外线的) scanning technology developed for military purposes and other satellites, physicist Stephen Paley came up with a quick way to take the temperature of crops to determine which ones are under stress. The goal was to let farmers precisely target pesticide (杀虫剂) spraying rather than rain poison on a whole field, which invariably includes plants that don’t have pest(害虫)problems.
    Even better, Paley’s Remote Scanning Services Company cold detect crop problems before they became visible to the eye. Mounted on a plane flown at 3,000 feet at night, an infra-red scanner measured the heat emitted by crops. The data were transformed into a color-coded map showing where plants were running "fevers". Farmers could then spot-spray, using 50 to 70 percent less pesticide than they otherwise would.
    The bad news is that Paley’s company closed down in 1984, after only three years. Farmers resisted the new technology and long-term backers were hard to find. But with the renewed concern about pesticides on produce, and refinements in infra-red scanning, Paley hopes to get back into operation. Agriculture experts have no doubt the technology works. "This technique can be used on 75 percent of agricultural land in the United States," says George Other of Texas A&M. Ray Jackson, who recently retired from the Department of Agriculture, thinks remote infra-red crop scanning could be adopted by the end of the decade. But only if Paley finds the financial backing which he failed to obtain 10 years ago. [br] Plants will emit an increased amount of heat when they are ______.
选项 A、sprayed with pesticides
B、facing an infra-red scanner
C、in poor physical conditions
D、exposed to excessive sun rays
答案 C
解析 文章的第一段第一句话说到：Even plants can run a fever，especially when they’re under attack by insects or disease．换句话说就是在健康不佳时释放的能量增加。显然，这里的“run a fever”指的是植物释放的热量更多。A、B、D项在文章中没有提及，故不选。
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