首页
登录
职称英语
After vaccines and bed nets, could the humble cooking stove be the next big
After vaccines and bed nets, could the humble cooking stove be the next big
游客
2023-12-05
16
管理
问题
After vaccines and bed nets, could the humble cooking stove be the next big idea to save millions of lives in poor countries? Hillary Clinton, America’s secretary of state, hopes so. She was marking the launch on September 21st of a new alliance that aims to raise $250m to supply clean stoves to 100m poor households by 2020. It is headed by the United Nations Foundation, a charity. Among its backers are governments(chiefly America, which has put up an initial $50m), charities(the Shell Foundation)and private firms(Morgan Stanley, an investment bank).
Around two billion people have no access to modern energy, and a billion have it only sporadically. The smoky stoves that many of them use, the World Health Organisation reckons, produce particulate pollution that causes around 2m premature deaths a year. Makeshift cookers also catch fire easily, maiming and killing. And lives are not the only things wasted. Women and girls in rural villages lose time and energy walking around collecting dirty solid fuels, ranging from crop waste to cow dung(better used as fertiliser).
The appeal of a stove that produces more heat, more cleanly and with less fuel is clear. But Kirk Smith, a stove specialist at the University of California at Berkeley, points out that most efforts to promote cleaner stoves have flopped. Too much emphasis has gone on technology and talking to people at the top, too little to consulting the women who actually do the cooking. When subsidies run out, the schemes have faltered, with stoves left unused or broken.
Why might it be different this time? Wouter Deelder of Dalberg, a development consultancy, says that stoves have improved in everything from the materials used to the design of chimneys. Even so, the new stoves can cost $30 or more. Greater efficiency means they pay for themselves in a few months, but the price is still prohibitive for people living on a few dollars a week. Moreover, technology that works well in the laboratory may fail in the field, where fuels, cooking practices and even the shapes of vessels vary widely.
Last month the Indian government and the X Prize Foundation, a charity that organises incentive prizes, launched a global competition to develop a cheap, clean-burning stove. Gauri Singh of the Indian renewable energy ministry says she wants a stove with a "high-tech heart" that can be tweaked for local conditions.
Another lesson of past failures, says Daniel Kammen, who runs the World Bank’s clean-energy programmes, is the need for better data about how stoves are actually used. That is increasingly possible, because cheap sensors can be embedded in stoves. At Berkeley, Mr. Smith’s team is working with Vodafone, a mobile-phone company, on a wireless gadget that allows researchers on motorcycles to download the data from stoves. Some in the alliance also hope to tap the money available to curb greenhouse-gas emissions.
But the best reason for hope may lie in the new-found awareness of market forces among governments and the UN crowd. Pressed on this point, Mrs. Clinton says emphatically that the new stoves "must not be given away". As with anti malarial bed nets, she argues, charging a little makes people value and use them properly.
That will come as good news to the small army of entrepreneurs in the developing world now coming up with novel business models to sell and service the cooking stoves. One such innovator is Suraj Wahab of Toyola, a start-up selling some 60,000 stoves a year in Ghana by offering micro-credit. His advice to the new UN coalition is "please don’t offer handouts and don’t give away stoves. " [br] According to Kirk Smith, the previous plan of clean stoves
选项
A、was too ideal.
B、required more effort.
C、waited for opinions.
D、should ignore technology.
答案
A
解析
细节题。由题干定位至第三段。第二句“…Kirk Smith,…points out that most efforts to promotecleaner stoves have flopped”说明从前的打算制造清洁炉灶的计划最后都失败了,至于为什么失败,后文提到,把太多精力用在实验室理想状态的研究上,却忽略了征询实际操作的妇女们的意见,因此这种设计显得过于理想化,[A]正确。
转载请注明原文地址:https://tihaiku.com/zcyy/3247166.html
相关试题推荐
Aftervaccinesandbednets,couldthehumblecookingstovebethenextbig
Aftervaccinesandbednets,couldthehumblecookingstovebethenextbig
Aftervaccinesandbednets,couldthehumblecookingstovebethenextbig
Aftervaccinesandbednets,couldthehumblecookingstovebethenextbig
Aftervaccinesandbednets,couldthehumblecookingstovebethenextbig
Aftervaccinesandbednets,couldthehumblecookingstovebethenextbig
Aftervaccinesandbednets,couldthehumblecookingstovebethenextbig
Aftervaccinesandbednets,couldthehumblecookingstovebethenextbig
锅里正在做着蔬菜。Thevegetablesarecooking.
锅里正在做着蔬菜。Thevegetablesarecooking.
随机试题
E-maillivessomewherebetweenaphonecallandaformalletter:itcanbeunpre
HowCanGirlsWininMathandScience?
[originaltext]M:Hi,Jenny,youdon’tlookhappy.What’swrong?W:Well,Jack,
患者,女,22岁。月经不调,常提前7天以上,甚至10余日一行。治疗应首选A.足
A.清热解毒 B.截疟解毒,润肠通便 C.补中缓急 D.补益精血 E.养
某混凝土试块强度值不满足规范要求,但经法定检测单位对混凝土实体强度经过法定检测后
一段时间后,如果沪深300指数上涨10%,那么该投资者的资产组合市值( )。A
资本资产定价模型是估计权益成本的一种方法。下列关于资本资产定价模型参数估计的说法
确定投标报价中的综合单价时,确定计算基础主要是指()。A.确定每一清单项目
根据用途和平面形状,道岔分为普通单开道岔和()等。A.单开对称道岔 B.三开道
最新回复
(
0
)