Motorists used to listening to the radio or their favorite tunes on CDs may have a new way to entertain themselves, after engineers in Japan developed a musical road surface.
The Hokkaido Industrial Research Institute has built a number of “melody roads”, which use cars as tuning forks to play music as they travel.
The concept works by using grooves(凹槽). They are cut at very specific intervals(间隔) in the road surface. The melody road uses the spaces between to create different notes(音符).
Depending on how far apart the grooves are, a car moving over them will produce a series of high or low notes, and designers are able to create a distinct tune.
Patent documents for the design describe it as notches “formed in a road surface so as to play a melody without producing simple sound or rhythm and reproduce melody-like tones”.
There are three musical roads in central and northern Japan---one of which plays the tune of a Japanese pop song. Reports say the system was invented by Shizuo Shinoda. He scraped some markings into a road with a bulldozer(推土机) before driving over them and found that they helped to produce all kinds of tones.
The optimal speed for melody road is 44 kph, but people say it is not always easy to get the intended sound.
“You need to keep the car windows closed to hear well,” wrote one Japanese blogger. “Driving too fast will sound like playing fast forward, while driving around 12 mph (20 kph) has a slow-motion effect, making you almost car-sick.”
59. According to the passage, to create different notes, melody roads use ______.
A. cars B. grooves C. spaces between internals D. bulldozers
60. We can learn from the passage that the highness of notes is dependent on ______.
A. how far the grooves are B. how big the grooves are
C. the number of the grooves D. the speed of the car
61. The underlined word “optimal” in the passage might mean ______.
A. fastest B. possible C. best D. suitable
62. In order to hear the music well, you have to ______.
A. drive very fast B. drive slowly
C. open the window wide D. keep the window closed
