IV PRACTICAL INNOVATIONS

“CORK FLOORS, OLD PICKLE BARRELS”

ANNAPOLIS, Maryland (AP) - When the Chesapeake Bay Foundation moves into its new headquarters later this year, employees will use flushless toilets and wash their hands in unheated rainwater. A system of computerized red and green lights will tell them when, in the interest of energy efficiency, whether they should open or close windows. Photo sensors will turn off the lights when there is enough natural light shining through the glass walls looking out over the Chesapeake Bay.

Rain that runs off the parking lot will be routed through two filtering systems and wetlands before entering the bay, at which time it is supposed to be pure enough to drink. Those are just a few of the features incorporated in what foundation officials think will be one of the "greenest" office buildings ever built.

Chuck Foster, director of fleets and facilities for the foundation, said environmental criteria guided every decision, from the selection of building materials and office furniture, to landscaping, to the height of outdoor lighting, which is low to reduce the impact on birds at night.

"Every building material was looked at" with environmental questions in mind, Foster said. What was the recyclable content? How long was the life cycle? How far would materials be transported from the manufacturing site to the construction site? How much packing material would be used?

And, looking far into the future, the final question: "When it dies, can it be made into something useful again?" Foster said.

The Chesapeake Bay Foundation, an environmental group that works to restore the health of the bay, has offices scattered in several locations around Annapolis. It spent several years looking for a site for a new headquarters.

It settled on a 33-acre (13-hectare) tract on the Chesapeake Bay in the community of Bay Ridge at the mouth of the Severn River, a few miles from downtown Annapolis. A $7.5 million gift from Philip Merrill, publisher of Washingtonian Magazine, The (Annapolis) Capital and four other newspapers, provided the major funding for the headquarters.

Tom Eichbaum, partner in Smith Group Architects, which designed the building, said residential development of the property would have had a more negative impact on the environment than its use by the bay foundation.

Eichbaum said it was fun to design what he called "this wonderful puzzle that is slowly emerging." One example of an environmentally friendly design element: using cork flooring throughout most of the building instead of carpeting, even though carpeting would have cost less. Cork is quiet, is a warm color and does not give off harmful gases as does some carpet. Plus, it is a renewable resource, Eichbaum said.

You harvest cork and the tree remains alive. You're not destroying a forest," he said. The designers used wood from old pickle barrels salvaged by Foster to build sun screens that will reduce heat from the summer sun but allow sun to help heat the building in winter.

They used galvanized siding for the exterior walls. Foster said the siding has a high recyclable content, requires little maintenance, is manufactured within 300 miles (500 kilometers) of the site and "is flat and required minimal packaging."

Energy use got a lot of attention. About one-third of the energy will come from renewable sources, including solar panels to heat water for showers and laundry and geothermal heat pumps operating in 300-foot (90-meter) deep wells to assist in heating and cooling the building.

Foster estimates the building will use only about one-third as much energy from conventional sources as a traditional office building.

Those flushless toilets, with wastes going directly into composting bins, will contribute to large reductions in water use. Foster estimates the building will use only about 10 percent as much water from wells or public water supplies as a conventional building.

All this environmental concern does not come cheap. The costs will be around $200 a square foot, considerably more expensive than a standard building but "not too far out of line with a very high-end building," Foster said. He estimates efforts to make the building as green as possible added about $50 a square foot to the $7.5 million project.

There will be some long-term savings from reduced energy use and reduced maintenance, but not enough to make up the difference, Foster said.

"Our board wanted us to set an example, to show people what can be done," Foster said.

(fromCNN.com)

Task 4. Answer the following questions.

1. What is so unusual about the new headquarters of the Shakespeare Bay Foundation?

2. On what principle were building materials chosen?

3. Where is the new building located?

4. What is an example of environmentally friendly design element?

5. What are the benefits of using cork flooring instead of carpeting?

6. What materials did designers use for the exterior walls of the building?

7. How much energy will come from renewable sources?

8. What are these renewable sources?

9. What devices can assist in heating and cooling the building?

10. Is this environmental concern cheap?

V SPACE

Task 1. Answer the following questions.

1. What is happening at the moment in the American, Russian, and European space programmes?

2. What are they planning to do?

Task 2. In pairs write some questions. What would you like to know about living in space?

Task 3. Read the text below and decide which of your questions were answered.

Task 4. Answer the following questions in pairs.

1. The article refers to the flights to the Moon in the 1970s as 'camping trips'. What does this mean?

2. Sheffield is about 150 miles from London. How high above the Earth does the Shuttle orbit?

3. Who produced these plans for a space settlement?

4. Why would gravity be so important?

5. Why is the Moon unsuitable for a settlement?

6. How and why would sunlight be controlled?

7. Why would the settlement look similar to 'modern' small towns on Earth?

8. What is L5?

9. There could be settlements in space that would house adventurers leading more or less normal lives. What elements of living in space would be normal? What would be unusual?

LIFE IN SPACE

We haven't conquered space. Not yet. We have sent some 20 men on camping trips to the Moon, and the USA and the Soviet Union have sent people to spend restricted lives orbiting the Earth. During the next few weeks, for instance, the US Space Shuttle will take Spacelab tо orbit, showing that ordinary (non-astronaut) scientists can live and work in space - for a few days only.

All these are marvellous technical and human achievements, but none of them involves living independently in space. The Russians need food and even oxygen sent up from Earth. And they haven't gone far into space. The residents of Sheffield are farther from London than those of the Shuttle or the Soviet's Salyut. It is only in fiction, and in space movies, that people spend long periods living more or less normally deep in space.

But in a couple of decades this could have changed. There could be settlements in space that would house adventurers leading more or less normal lives. It seems like science fiction - but it is not. It is based on plans produced by hard-headed people: engineers and scientists, headed by Qerard O'Neill of Princeton University, summoned to a conference by NASA. They are space enthusiasts, of course, but they are not dreamers.

The settlement is a gigantic wheel, a tube more than 400ft in diameter bent into a ring just over a mile across. The wheel spins gently once a minute, it is this gentle rotation that makes this settlement different from the Shuttle and Salyut, and infinitely different from the Lunar modules that took man for the first time to any non-terrestrial soil, because the spin produces a force that feels like gravity. Every space trip has shown that the human body needs gravity if it isn't to deteriorate, and gravity also makes normal activities possible. Nobody would want to live for long in a space settlement where everything - people and equipment and the eggs they were trying to fry - moved weightlessly around.

With gravity, life in space can be based on our experience on Earth. We can have farming and factories and houses and meeting-places that are not designed by guesswork.

The need for gravity is one of the reasons for building a space colony, rather than sending settlers to an existing location such as the Moon or the planets. The Moon is inhospitable. Its gravity is tiny - and any one place on the Moon has 14 days of sunlight followed by 14 of night, which makes agriculture impossible and means there is no using solar energy.

In the settlement, which floats in permanent sunlight, the day-length is controlled. A gigantic mirror about a mile in diameter floats weightlessly above the ring of the settlement. It reflects sunlight on to smaller mirrors that direct it into the ring, through shutters that fix the day length.

The sunlight is constant during the 'daytime', so farming is productive to an extent which can be reached on Earth only occasionally. The aim is to provide a diet similar to that on Earth, but with less fresh meat.

The farms will be arranged in terraces with fish ponds and rice paddies in transparent tanks on the top layer; wheat below; vegetables, soya, and maize below that.

The population of the settlement is fixed at about 10,000 people: farm output can be accurately planned. Research reports suggest that about 44 square metres of vegetables will be needed tor each person, and just over five square metres of pastures.

People will live in settlements which don't look very different from modern small towns on Earth, and this is deliberate. Science-fiction films feature vast glass tower blocks and subterranean warrens, but real-life space settlers won't want these. Throughout history, settlers have tried to put up buildings like the ones they left behind, because these are familiar: space settlers will do the same.

And where would the settlement be? 'Why', say the experts, 'at L5, of course. This reference describes a point on the Moon's orbit around the Earth, equidistant from Moon and Earth, where the gravitational forces of the two bodies balance. (The L stands for Lagrange, a French mathematician who listed a number of 'balance' points.) Those who intend to settle in space have formed an L5 Society. The members are not all impractical eccentrics: that is, they are not all impractical.

(Source: Headway Intermediate, Oxford University Press)

Task 5. Express your point of view on the following issues.

1. The article does not say what would occupy people's time in space. What do you think they could do?

2. No reasons are given why there should be settlements in space. What reasons can you think of?

3. Does the article make living in space sound attractive? What would appeal to you?

4. Do you think the expense of such space programmes is justified?

Date: 2016-01-05; view: 836