工作状态不佳？都怪二氧化碳
The air in your office is probably damaging your health
You might think it's your colleagues or the pressures of work that's getting you down at the office, but new research suggests it could well be the air you're breathing instead. Scientists in the US have found that the concentration of carbon dioxide inside the confined spaces we use every day could be high enough to damage our health.
你也许会认为是你的同事或者是工作压力让你在办公室里萎靡不振,但是新的研究说明可能只是办公室里的空气在作祟.美国的科学家发现我们每天所处的密闭空间中的高浓度二氧化碳会损害我们的健康.
Of course, it's well established that high levels of CO2 are dangerous, not just for human beings but for the planet as a whole, but the new research raises questions about carbon dioxide concentrations that were previously considered harmless.
当然,地球人都知道二氧化碳浓度过高是危险的,不仅对人是这样,对地球也是如此.但是新的研究提出了这样一个问题,那就是之前被人们当作人畜无害的办公室二氧化碳的浓度问题.
The researchers gathered together 24 volunteers and tested their performance in three different simulated office environments. The key metric here is parts-per-million (ppm) of CO2: 5,000 ppm is currently considered the safe limit for an 8-hour workday, while 90,000 ppm will kill you within f5 minutes.
研究者们找来了24名志愿者,把他们分在三个不同的模拟环境下测试他们的反应.这里有个关键的标准,那就是对于8小时工作而言,5000 ppm的二氧化碳目前被人认是安全标准,如果是90000 ppm,那么你5分钟内就会死.
The team experimented with three different levels over the course of a standard 9-to-5 routine: 550 ppm (similar to outdoor levels), 945 ppm (what you would expect in most offices) and 1,400 ppm (denser but still plausible for many offices).
