【英语时差8,16】如何降低你的电费？

 How To Lower Your Electricity Bill At the end of the day, just before going to bed, you go through the house to do an energy check. You make sure all the lights are off, the oven is cold, the iron is unplugged. So now you’ve done your duty as a good energy conserver, right? Not so fast… Because if you go through the house again you might notice several ghostly, glowing lights. There’s one on your computer, resting for the night on standby mode. And your cell phone charger is still plugged in, emitting a green glow. And what about the iPod charger and adapters for your digital camera and every other digital device you own? When left plugged in, these devices create what’s known as phantom¹ energy loss. If you add up all the phantom energy being drained in houses across the United States, it adds up to a whopping sixty-five billion kilowatt² hours of electricity every year. And it costs us around 5.8 billion dollars every year. Plus, all those extra kilowatt hours pump more than eighty-seven billion pounds of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. So what can you do? Simply put: pull the plug. If your cellphone is fully³ charged, unplug the charger. Same goes for your mp3 player and smart phone. And instead of leaving your desktop⁴ computer on all the time, shut it down when you’re not using it. It’s not true that leaving a computer on all the time makes it last longer. Bottom line, turning things off will lower your electricity bill and help protect the environment.

1 phantom   

n.幻影，虚位，幽灵；adj.错觉的，幻影的，幽灵的

参考例句：

• I found myself staring at her as if she were a phantom.我发现自己瞪大眼睛看着她，好像她是一个幽灵。
• He is only a phantom of a king.他只是有名无实的国王。

2 kilowatt   

n.千瓦

参考例句：

• They pay thirty fen per kilowatt hour.他们每度电付三角钱。
• The watt is a small unit of power so that we use the kilowatt instead.瓦特是小功率的单位，因此我们用千瓦代之。

3 fully   

adv.完全地，全部地，彻底地；充分地

参考例句：

• The doctor asked me to breathe in,then to breathe out fully.医生让我先吸气，然后全部呼出。
• They soon became fully integrated into the local community.他们很快就完全融入了当地人的圈子。

4 desktop   

n.桌面管理系统程序；台式

参考例句：

• My computer is a desktop computer of excellent quality.我的计算机是品质卓越的台式计算机。
• Do you know which one is better,a laptop or a desktop?你知道哪一种更好，笔记本还是台式机？