2013年高考英语真题[word校对版]上海卷(英语)(含答(10)

2013年高考英语真题[word校对版]上海卷(英语)(含答案)

71. Which of the following is true according to the warranty? A. Consequential damages are excluded across America.

B. A product damaged in a natural disaster is covered by the warranty. C. A faulty cabinet due to rust can be replaced free in the second year. D. Free repair is available for a product used improperly in the first year.

C

A team of engineers at Harvard University has been inspired by Nature to create the first robotic fly. The

mechanical fly has bee a platform for a series of new high-tech integrated systems. Designed to do what a fly does naturally, the tiny machine is the size of a fat housefly. Its mini wings allow it to stay in the air and perform controlled flight tasks.

“It’s extremely important for us to think about this as a whole system and not just the sum of a bunch of individual ponents (元件),” said Robert Wood, the Harvard engineering professor who has been working on the robotic fly project for over a decade. A few years ago, his team got the go-ahead to start piecing together the ponents. “The added difficulty with a project like this is that actually none of those ponents are off the shelf and so we have to develop them all on our own,” he said.

They engineered a series of systems to start and drive the robotic fly. “The seemingly simple system which just moves the wings has a number of interdependencies on the individual ponents, each of which individually has to perform well, but then has to be matched well to everything it’s connected to,” said Wood. The flight device was built into a set of power, putation, sensing and control systems. Wood says the success of the project proves that the flying robot with these tiny ponents can be built and manufactured.

While this first robotic flyer is linked to a small, off-board power source, the goal is eventually to equip it with a built-in power source, so that it might someday perform data-gathering work at rescue sites, in farmers’ fields or on the battlefield. “Basically it should be able to take off, land and fly around,” he said.

Wood says the design offers a new way to study flight mechanics and control at insect-scale. Yet, the power, sensing and putation technologies on board could have much broader applications. “You can start thinking about using them to answer open scientific questions, you know, to study biology in ways that would be difficult with the animals, but using these robots instead,” he said. “So there are a lot of technologies and open interesting scientific questions that are really what drives us on a day to day basis.” (392 words)