环境科学交叉关系学科 课后题参考答案 第八、九章

1. Early in human history, people began to use additional sources of energy to make their lives more comfortable. They domesticated plants and animals to provide a more dependable supply of food. Domesticated animals furnished a source of energy for transportation, farming, and other tasks. They provided people with a source of power other than their own muscles.

2. Transportation, Residential, commercial and industrial needs

3. Central to the Industrial Revolution was the invention of steam engine, which could convert heat energy into the energy of motion. The major heat energy producer is coal and the steam engine made possible the large-scale mining of coal. Nations without a source of coal or those possessing coal reserves that were not easily exploited thus didn’t participate in the Industrial Revolution.

4. Invention of steam engine, coal discovery and mining as well as wood shortages in densely populated areas.

5. The invention of the internal combustion engine and the automobile dramatically increased the demand for oil products. The prospering automobile industry and road construction lead to more energy consumption, creating more demand for oil.

6.

a. Government policy has kept the cost of energy artificially low and supported the automobile industry while removing support for bus and rail transport.

b. The convenience of rapid travel provided by automobiles.

7.

(1) Imposing taxes on energy

(2) Granting subsidies to energy producers

8. Electricity is both a way that energy is consumed and a way that it is supplied. (secondary energy) The transportation of electrical energy is simple and the uses to which it can be put are varied.

9.

a. The consumption of electricity

b. The government regulations

c. The availability of resources that could produce electricity

10. Residential and commercial energy use; industrial energy use; transportation energy use.

11. OPEC nations control over 75% of the world’s estimated oil reserves of 1,400 billion barrels of oil; Today’s economy is highly dependent on oil as a source of energy. Thus, OPEC countries can set the price of oil through collective action.

12.

Political:

Increased solidarity among OPEC countries and continuing political instability in the Middle East had made oil prices to peak at over US $147 per barrel in mid-2008.

Economic:

The worldwide economic recession that began about 2008 lowered the demands for energy use and people’s access to energy.

13. Despite the possibility that new rich reserves would be found, the price of nonrenewable energy would continue to rise as the availability of energy become less. But as new technologies develop and price of renewable energy goes down, maybe we can see the trend of transformation to “green industry”.

1. Coal, oil, natural gas.

2. A resource is a naturally occurring substance of use to humans that can potentially be extracted.

Reserves are known deposits from which material can be extracted profitably with existing technology under prevailing economic conditions. Reserves are a portion of the total resource. The concept of reserves is an economic idea and is only loosely tied to the total quantity of a material