A city council is putting together its conservation policy. Part of the policy deals with the production of electricity for the city. The city council is considering a new power plant that can use renewable sources of energy. The council has promised its citizens that their electricity bill will increase by no more than 5%. Which of the following questions is most important for the council to consider when choosing which type of power plant to build?
A.
What will be the cost of electricity produced by a power plant that uses renewable energy?
B.
Is it possible to build a water treatment plant that does not run on electricity?
C.
Why did the city build coal-burning power plants in the past?
D.
How long will it take a new power plant to be built?

D

Explanation:

a city would first need to know the cost and benefits

most historians agree that gabriel mouton, the vicar of st. paul’s church in lyons, france, is the “founding father” of the metric system. he proposed a decimal system of measurement in 1670. mouton based it on the length of one minute of arc of a great circle of the earth (now called a nautical mile, 1852 meters). he also proposed the swing-length of a pendulum with a frequency of one beat per second as the unit of length (about 25 cm). a pendulum beating with this length would have been fairly easy to produce, thus facilitating the widespread distribution of uniform standards. over the years, his work was revised, improved, and extended by a number of french scientists.

the political sponsor of weights and measures reform in the french revolutionary national assembly was the bishop of autun, better known as talleyrand. under his auspices, the french academy appointed several committees to carry out the work of developing a usable system of weights and measures for france. one of the committees recommended a decimalized measurement system based upon a length equal to one ten-millionth of the length of a quadrant of the earth’s meridian (i.e., one ten-millionth of the distance between the equator and the north pole).