奇速英语

北京冬奥会的“黑科技”：人造雪

Anyone watching the 2022 Winter Olympics, from February 4 to 20, has seen lots and lots of snow — man-made snow. Since the area gets little natural snow, this is the first time the Winter Olympics has taken place on almost 100% artificial snow.

This year’s Winter Olympics was held in Beijing and in two areas northwest of Beijing—Yanqing and Zhangjiakou. The areas get cold in the winter, but they don’t get a lot of snow. That’s because they’re not far from the Gobi Desert, and are usually very dry.

So something necessary was done to ensure that all sports events would be carried out well. Water from a reservoir(水库) was taken to a nearby river. Then people ran miles and miles of pipes(管道) which sent water to the mountains for making snow. An Italian company called TechnoAlpin created the snow with hundreds of snow-making machines. It took seven weeks.

The artificial snow is of different kinds, depending on what’s needed for each sport. For example, the snow for downhill skiing is different from the snow made for cross-country skiing. However, it isn’t the same as natural snow, which has more air and less water.

In recent years, it has become more and more common to use artificial snow at winter sports events, even in some places that used to have a lot of snow naturally. Some artificial snow was used in the Winter Olympics in 2010 and 2014 because of warm weather. In the 2018 Games in PyeongChang, South Korea, around 90% of the snow was man-made. As the world warms because of climate change, problems like this are expected to become far more common. Michael Mayr, who leads TechnoAlpin in Asia, says, “You could not have winter sports now without man-made snow.”