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  3. Cities are often described as being alive. A nice metaphor, but does it mean

Cities are often described as being alive. A nice metaphor, but does it mean

游客2023-12-03  16
问题     Cities are often described as being alive. A nice metaphor, but does it mean anything? And, if it does, can town planners and biologists learn from one another? Steven Strogatz, a mathematician at Cornell University, wrote last year that Manhattan and a mouse might just be variations on a single structural theme. His point was that both are, in part, composed of networks for transporting stuff from one place to another. Roads, railways, water and gas mains, sewage pipes and electricity cables all move things around. So do the blood vessels of animals and the sap-carrying xylem and phloem of plants. How far can the analogy be pushed?
    Peter Dodds of the University of Vermont draws a particular analogy between the blood system and a suburban railway network. The commuter-rail system of a city ramifies from the centre. The farther out you go, the sparser it is. By analogy, Dr. Dodds predicted, the network of capillaries would not be as dense in large animals as it is in small ones. They, too, branch ultimately from a central source — the heart. Surprisingly, no one had looked for this before, but in a paper published recently in Physical Review Letters Dr. Dodds shows that this does indeed turn out to be the case.
    Dr. Dodds’s calculations overthrow a 70-year-old rule of thumb which is known as the 3/4 law of metabolism. This suggests energy expenditure is proportional to body mass raised to the power of three-quarters. That a mouse expends more energy per gram than an elephant does is well known. But Dr. Dodds’s calculations show that metabolic rates must fall off faster than had previously been believed as animals get bigger because less glucose than thought is being transported by the smaller than predicted capillary network. The law needs to be adjusted to something more like two-thirds.
    Two other studies published in the same volume similarly overthrow conventional wisdom about plants. Traditionally, biologists have celebrated the trunk, branch and twig system of a tree as no accident. Many mathematical formulas have suggested it is the best, least wasteful way to design a distribution network. But the very end of such a network, the leaf, has a different architecture. Unlike the xylem and phloem, the veins in a leaf cross-link and loop. Francis Corson of Rockefeller University in New York used computer models to examine why these loops exist.
    From an evolutionary point of view, loops seem inefficient because of the redundancy inherent in a looped network. Dr. Corson’s models show, however, that this inefficiency is true only if demand for water and the nutrients it contains is constant. By studying fluctuations in demand he discovered one purpose of the loops: They allow for a more nuanced delivery system. Flows can be rerouted through the network in response to local pressures in the environment, such as different evaporation rates in different parts of a leaf.
    The leaf, then, is a resilient distribution network — one whose principles could be applied to, say, electricity grids. Next time your power is cut off because a tree has fallen on the cable, remember that. [br] Dr. Corson’s models suggest that______.
选项 A、the looped network of leaf veins is inefficient to meet a constant need for water
B、the looped network of leaf veins allows for a more nuanced delivery system
C、the redundancy in a looped network of leaf veins is inherent
D、different local pressures in the environment are inevitable
答案 A
解析 细节题。从第五段可以判断Dr．Corson的计算机模型展示了当水和养料的需求是恒量时叶脉的循环网络系统降低了输送效率，而当叶表的蒸发使得需求为一个变量时，这个系统将根据变量的细微差别运作得更加灵活有效。由此看A正确。作为科学研究的表述，B不严谨，缺少了一个前提条件when demand fluctuates。C和D不是该计算机模型要展示的关键。
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