97 To Drive Without Answering the Phone

名称：97 To Drive Without Answering the Phone
内容简介：
晨读英语美文 真题阅读
[00:03.92]Many countries have made it illegal
[00:06.82]to chat into a hand-held mobile phone
[00:09.99]while driving.
[00:11.43]But the latest research
[00:12.76]further confirms
[00:13.82]that the danger lies less in
[00:15.69]what a motorist's hands do
[00:17.39]when he takes a call
[00:18.92]than in what the conversation does
[00:21.14]to his brain.
[00:22.15]Even using a “hands-free” device
[00:25.25]can divert a driver's attention
[00:27.22]to an alarming extent.
[00:28.93]Melina Kunar
[00:30.86]of the University of Warwick,
[00:32.72]and Todd Horowitz
[00:35.00]of the Harvard Medical School
[00:36.90]ran a series of experiments
[00:38.65]in which two groups of volunteers
[00:40.87]had to pay attention
[00:42.49]and respond to a series
[00:44.57]of moving tasks on a computer screen
[00:46.98]that were reckoned equivalent
[00:49.22]in difficulty to driving.
[00:50.99]One group was left undistracted
[00:54.08]while the other had to engage
[00:56.70]in a conversation using a speakerphone.
[00:59.05]As Kunar and Horowitz report,
[01:01.50]those who were making the equivalent
[01:03.74]of a hands-free call
[01:05.92]had an average reaction time
[01:07.80]212 milliseconds slower
[01:10.94]than those who were not.
[01:12.62]That, they calculate,
[01:14.86]would add 5.7 metres
[01:17.05]to the braking distance
[01:18.53]of a car travelling at 100kph.
[01:20.04]They also found
[01:24.01]the group using the hands-free kit
[01:26.56]made 83% more errors in their tasks
[01:28.70]than those who were not talking.
[01:30.89]To try to understand more about
[01:34.44]why this was,
[01:37.06]they tried two further tests.
[01:38.96]In one, members of a group
[01:40.99]were asked simply
[01:43.06]to repeat words spoken by the caller.
[01:45.29]In the other, they had to
[01:47.94]think of a word that began
[01:49.39]with the last letter
[01:50.87]of the word they had just heard.
[01:52.91]Those only repeating words
[01:54.97]performed the same
[01:56.55]as those with no distraction,
[01:58.50]but those with the more complicated task
[02:00.93]showed even worse reaction times—
[02:04.31]an average of 480 milliseconds
[02:06.85]extra delay.
[02:08.31]This shows that
[02:09.81]when people have to consider
[02:11.36]the information they hear carefully,
[02:13.45]it can impair their driving ability
[02:15.65]significantly.
[02:17.41]Punishing people for
[02:20.08]using hand-held gadgets
[02:21.79]while driving is difficult enough,
[02:23.82]even though they can be seen
[02:25.95]from outside the car.
[02:27.50]Persuading people
[02:29.20]to switch their phones off
[02:30.89]altogether when they get
[02:32.39]behind the wheel
[02:33.57]might be the only answer.
[02:35.17]Who knows,
[02:37.32]they might even come to
[02:38.71]enjoy not having to take calls.