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IELTS Academic Reading Sample 44

Để đạt thành tích cao trong kì thi sắp tới, các bạn học sinh có thể sử dụng tài liệu IELTS Academic Reading Sample 44 sau đây làm tư liệu tham khảo giúp rèn luyện và nâng cao kĩ năng giải đề thi, nâng cao kiến thức cho bản thân để tự tin hơn khi bước vào kì thi chính thức. Mời các bạn cùng tham khảo đề thi. | Wind Power in the US Prompted by the oil crises of the 1970s a wind-power industry flourished briefly in the United States. But then world oil prices dropped and funding for research into renewable energy was cut. By the mid 1980s US interest in wind energy as a large-scale source of energy had almost disappeared. The development of wind power at this time suffered not only from badly designed equipment but also from poor long-term planning economic projections that were too optimistic and the difficulty of finding suitable locations for the wind turbines. Only now are technological advances beginning to offer hope that wind power will come to be accepted as a reliable and important source of electricity. There have been significant successes in California in particular where wind farms now have a capacity of 1500 megawatts comparable to a large nuclear or fossil-fuelled power station and produce 1.5 per cent of the state s electricity. Nevertheless in the US the image of wind power is still distorted by early failures. One of the most persistent criticisms is that wind power is not a significant energy resource. Researchers at the Battelle Northwest Laboratory however estimate that today wind turbine technology could supply 20 per cent of the electrical power the country needs. As a local resource wind power has even greater potential. Minnesota s energy commission calculates that a wind farm on one of the state s south western ridges could supply almost all that state s electricity. North Dakota alone has enough sites suitable for wind farms to supply more than a third of all electricity consumed in the continental US. The prevailing notion that wind power is too costly results largely from early research which focused on turbines with huge blades that stood hundreds of metres tall. These machines were not designed for ease of production or maintenance and they were enormously expensive. Because the major factors influencing the overall cost of wind power are .