Low
speed bicycle crashes can badly injure or even kill children if they fall onto
the ends of the handlebars (车把) so a team of engineers is redesigning the humble
handlebar in a bid to make it safer. Kristy Arbogast, a
bioengineer at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia in Pennsylvania, began
the project with her colleagues after a study of serious abdominal (腹部的)
injuries in children in the past 30 years which showed that more than a third
were caused by bicycle accidents. "The task was to identify how the injuries
occurred and come up with some countermeasures (对策)," she says.
By interviewing the children and their parents, Arbogast and her team were able
to reconstruct (重建；重构) many of the accidents and identified a common mechanism
responsible for serious injures. They discovered that most occur when children
hit an obstacle at a slow speed, causing them to topple over. To maintain their
balance they turn the handlebars through 90 degrees, but their momentum (冲力)
forces them into the end of the handlebars. The bike then falls over and the
other end of the handlebars hits the ground, ramming it into their
abdomen. The solution the group came up with is a handgrip (握柄)
fitted with a spring and damping (制动的；减速的，缓冲的) system. The spring absorbs up to
50 percent of the forces transmitted through the handlebars in an impact. The
group hopes to commercialize (使商品化) the device, which should add only a few
dollars to the cost of a bike. "But our task has been one of education because
up until now, bicycle manufacturers were unaware of the problem," says
Arbogast. The team has also approached the US Consumer Product
Safety Commission to try to persuade manufacturers to adopt the new design. A
decision is expected later this year.
单选题
According to the passage, some engineers are trying to improve the
handlebars because ______.