- Industry: Broadcasting & receiving
- Number of terms: 5074
- Number of blossaries: 1
- Company Profile:
The largest broadcasting organisation in the world.
A hybrid car is one that has both a petrol engine and an electric motor and switches between them according to the driving conditions. It is different from a dual-fuel vehicle, which uses two types of liquid fuel.
Industry:Natural environment
The lowest level of the atmosphere, from the surface to about 10km. It is the level at which clouds form and where our weather phenomena occur.
Industry:Natural environment
Water pressure is the force that pushes water through pipes and determines the rate of flow from your taps. Water companies are required to provide water at a pressure that will reach the upper floors of houses, but where this is a problem, pressure can be improved using pumps. However, devices such as power showers, which use a pump to boost flow for a more powerful shower spray, also greatly increase the volume of water used and the energy required to heat it.
Industry:Natural environment
A watt is a unit of power. Power is the rate at which energy is used, and a watt is equal to a rate of one joule of energy per second. Watts are commonly used when referring to the energy consumption of relatively small things like lightbulbs, while kilowatts (a thousand watts) are used for larger machines. Megawatts (a million watts) are used to measure the electricity generation of power stations. See also kilowatt-hours.
Industry:Natural environment
The state of the atmosphere with regard to temperature, cloudiness, rainfall, wind and other meteorological conditions. It is not the same as climate which is the average weather over a much longer period.
Industry:Natural environment
Acid rain is simply rain with higher than normal acidity. Its main cause is emissions of nitrogen and sulphur compounds from burning fossil fuels to power transport, power stations, forest fires, fertiliser and industry.
Industry:Natural environment
A kilowatt-hour is an amount of energy equivalent to a power of one kilowatt (a thousand watts) running for one hour. The unit is commonly used on electricity meters. If you know how many kilowatt-hours of energy your household uses, you can translate this into kilograms of CO2 emitted by multiplying it by 0.527. A megawatt hour (MWh) is an amount of energy equivalent to the power of one megawatt (a million watts) running for one hour. Similarly, a gigawatt hour (GWh) is a billion watts for one hour, and a terawatt hour (TWh) is a trillion. While your domestic gas bill will be set out in kWh, the output for a power station, for example, will obviously be expressed in one of these much larger units.
Industry:Natural environment
Air pollution usually refers to the presence of any chemical or particulate that alters the normal make-up of our atmosphere, causing direct threats to human health (such as breathing difficulties) or longer-term damage through its effects on our planet's ecosystem. Pollutants include smoke and dust, nitrogen oxides, methane, and the fumes from aerosol sprays and other solvents. Industrial processes and transport are major contributors to air pollution, but it can also be caused by natural processes such as forest fires and volcanoes. See also acid rain.
Industry:Natural environment
The atmosphere is the name for the mixture of gases surrounding the earth and retained there by the planet's gravitational pull - our air, in other words. The atmosphere comprises the troposphere, the stratosphere, the mesosphere and the thermosphere.
Industry:Natural environment
A mixture of two or more elements, at least one of which is a metal.
Industry:Natural environment
