单选题 Have you switched off your computer? How about your television? Your video? Your CD player? And even your coffee percolator? Really switched them off, not just pressed the button on some control panel and left your machine with a telltale bright red light warning you that it is ready to jump back to life at your command? Because if you haven" t, you are one of the guilty people who help pollute the planet. It doesn" t matter if you" ve joined the neighborhood recycling scheme, conscientiously sorted your garbage and avoided driving to work. You still can" t sleep easy while just one of those little red lights is glowing in the dark. The awful truth is that household and office electrical appliances left on stand-by mode are gobbling up energy, even though they are doing absolutely nothing. Some electronic products—such as CD players-—can use almost as much energy on stand-by as they do when running. Others may use a lot less, but as your video player spend far more hours on stand-by than playing anything, the wastage soon adds up. In the US alone, idle electronic devices consume enough energy to power cities with the energy needs of Chicago or London—costing consumers around $ 1 billion a year. Power stations fill the atmosphere with carbon dioxide just to do absolutely nothing. Thoughtless design is partly responsible for the waste. But manufactures only get away with designing products that waste energy this way because consumers are not sensitive enough to the issue. Indeed, while recycling has caught the public imagination, reducing waste has attracted much less attention. But "source reduction" , as the garbage experts like to call the art of not using what you don"t need to use, offers enormous potential for reducing waste of all kinds. With a little intelligent shopping, you can cut waste long before you reach the end of the chain. Packaging remains the big villain. One of the hidden consequences of buying products grown or made all around the world, rather than produced locally, is the huge amount of packaging. To help cut the waste and encourage intelligent manufacturers the simplest trick is to look for ultra-light package. The same arguments apply to the very light but strong plastic bottles that are replacing heavier glass alternatives, thin-walled aluminum cans, and cartons made of composites that wrap up anything drinkable in an ultra-light package. There are hundreds of other tricks you can discuss with colleagues while gathering around the proverbial water cooler—filling up, naturally, your own mug rather than a disposable plastic cup. But you don" t need to go as far as one website which tells you how to give your friends unwrapped Christmas presents. There are limits to source correctness.

单选题 From the first two paragraphs, the author implies that______.

单选题 The waste caused by household and office electrical appliances on stand-by mode seems to______.

单选题 By idle electronic devices, the author means those appliances______.

单选题 Ultra-light packaging______.

单选题 The conclusion the author is trying to draw is that______.