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  3. The (Non) Risks of Mobile Phones Do mobile phones cause explosions at petrol stations? That question has just been exhaustiv

The (Non) Risks of Mobile Phones Do mobile phones cause explosions at petrol stations? That question has just been exhaustiv

admin2013-07-11  33
问题                     The (Non) Risks of Mobile Phones
    Do mobile phones cause explosions at petrol stations? That question has just been exhaustively answered by Adam Burgess, a researcher at the University of Kent, in England. Oddly, however, Dr.Burgess is not a physicist, but a sociologist. For the concern rests not on scientific evidence of any danger, but is instead the result of sociological factors: it is an urban myth, supported and propagated by official sources, but no less a myth for that. Dr. Burgess presented his findings this week at the annual conference of the British Sociological Association.
    Mobile phones started to become widespread in the late 1980s, when the oil industry was in the middle of a concerted safety drive, Dr. Burgess notes. This was, in large part, a response to the Piper Alpha disaster in 1988, when 167 people died in an explosion on an Oil platform off the Scottish coast. The safety drive did not apply merely to offshore operations, employees at some British oil-company offices are now required to use handrails while walking up and down stairs, for example. So nobody questioned the precautionary ban on the use of mobile phones at petrol stations. The worry was that an electrical spark might ignite explosive fumes.
    By the late 1990s, however, phone makers having conducted their own research realised that there was no danger of phones causing explosions since they could not generate the required sparks. But it was too late. The myth had taken hold.
    One problem, says Dr. Burgess, is that the number of petrol-station fires increased in the late 1990s, just as mobile phones were proliferating. Richard Coates, BP’s fire-safety adviser, investigated many of the 243 such fires that occurred around the world between 1993 and 2004. He concluded that most were indeed caused by sparks igniting petrol vapour, but the sparks themselves were the result of static electricity, not electrical equipment. Most drivers will have experienced a mild electric shock when climbing out of their vehicles. It is caused by friction between driver and seat, with the result that both end up electrically charged. When the driver touches the metal frame of the vehicle, the result is sometimes a spark.
    A further complication was the rise of the internet, where hoax memos, many claiming to originate from oil companies, warned of the danger of using mobile phones in petrol stations. Such memos generally explain static fires quite accurately, but mistakenly attribute them to mobile phones. Official denials, says Dr. Burgess, simply inflame the suspicions of conspiracy theorists.
    Despite the lack of evidence that mobile phones can cause explosions, bans remain in place around the world, though the rules vary widely. For Dr. Burgess, such concerns are part of a broader pattern of unease about mobile phones. There is a curious discrepancy, he notes, between the way that such phones have become indispensable, and the fact that they are also vaguely considered to be dangerous. The safety of mobile phones would appear to be not so much the province of the hard science of physics, as of the soft science of sociology.
According to the experts, explosions at petrol stations______.
选项 A、were in fact not caused by sparks
B、were unrelated to electrical equipment
C、resulted from vehicle drivers’ carelessness
D、should be the focus of sociology instead of physics
答案B
解析 本题考查具体细节。第四段第三句提到专家的结论是，大部分火灾确实是由火花引起，但是火花本身是由静电而不是电气设备引起。由此可知[B]是正确项，同时也排除了[A]。该段提到司机只是为了解释静电的产生过程。排除[C]。[D]将末段末句中的“移动电话的安全问题”偷换成“加油站的爆炸”，前者才可能是社会学而非物理学关注的对象。排除[D]。
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