试题库在线考试题库-历年真题模拟试题及答案-英语在线试题测试中心-希赛网

题库

首页 > 题库 > 四六级英语

Human memory is notoriously unreliable. Even people with the sharpest facial-recognition skills can only remember so much.It’s tough to quantify how good a person is at remembering. No one really knows how many different faces someone can recall, for example, but various estimates tend to hover in the thousands— based on the number of acquaintances a person might have.Machines aren’t limited this way. Give the right computer a massive database of faces, and it can process what it sees—then recognize a face it's told to find — with remarkable speed and precision. This skill is what supports the enormous promise of facial-recognition software in the 21st century. It’s also what makes contemporary surveillance systems so scary.The thing is, machines still have limitations when it comes to facial recognition. And scientists are only just beginning to understand what those constraints are. To begin to figure out how computers are struggling, researchers at the University of Washington created a massive database of faces — they call it MegaFace — and tested a variety of facial-recognition algorithms (算法)as they scaled up in complexity. The idea was to test the machines on a database that included up to 1 million different images of nearly 700,000 different people—and not just a large database featuring a relatively small number of different faces, more consistent with what's been used in other research.As the databases grew, machine accuracy dipped across the board. Algorithms that were right 95% of the time when they were dealing with a 13,000-image database, for example, were accurate about 70% of the time when confronted with 1 million images. That’s still pretty good, says one of the researchers, Ira Kemelmacher-Shlizerman. “Much better than we expected," she said.Machines also had difficulty adjusting for people who look a lot alike—either doppelgangers (长相极相似的人)，whom the machine would have trouble identifying as two separate people, or the same person who appeared in different photos at different ages or in different lighting, whom the machine would incorrectly view as separate people.“Once we scale up, algorithms must be sensitive to tiny changes in identities and at the same time invariant to lighting, pose, age,” Kemelmacher-Shlizerman said.The trouble is, for many of the researchers who’d like to design systems to address these challenges, massive datasets for experimentation just don’t exist—at least, not in formats that are accessible to academic researchers. Training sets like the ones Google and Facebook have are private. There are no public databases that contain millions of faces. MegaFace's creators say it’s the largest publicly available facial-recognition dataset out there.“An ultimate face recognition algorithm should perform with billions of people in a dataset,” the researchers wrote.Compared with human memory, machines can（）.Why did researchers create MegaFace?What does the passage say about, machine accuracy?What is said to be a shortcoming of facial-recognition machines?What is the difficulty confronting researchers of facial-recognition machines?

Grow Plants Without Water[A] Ever since humanity began to farm our own food, we’ve faced the unpredictable rain that is both friend and enemy. It comes and goes without much warning, and a field of lush （茂盛的）leafy greens one year can dry up and blow away the next. Food security and fortunes depend on sufficient rain, and nowhere more so than in Africa, where 96% of farmland depends on rain instead of the irrigation common in more developed places. It has consequences: South Africa’s ongoing drought—the worst in three decades—will cost at least a quarter of its corn crop this year.[B] Biologist Jill Farrant of the University of Cape Town in South Africa says that nature has plenty of answers for people who want to grow crops in places with unpredictable rainfall. She is hard at work finding a way to take traits from rare wild plants that adapt to extreme dry weather and use them in food crops. As the earth’s climate changes and rainfall becomes even less predictable in some places, those answers will grow even more valuable. “The type of farming I’m aiming for is literally so that people can survive as it’s going to get more and more dry,” Farrant says.[C] Extreme conditions produce extremely tough plants. In the rusty red deserts of South Africa, steep¬sided rocky hills called inselbergs rear up from the plains like the bones of the earth. The hills are remnants of an earlier geological era, scraped bare of most soil and exposed to the elements. Yet on these and similar formations in deserts around the world, a few fierce plants have adapted to endure under ever-changing conditions.[D] Farrant calls them resurrection plants （复苏植物）.During months without water under a harsh sun, they wither, shrink and contract until they look like a pile of dead gray leaves. But rainfall can revive them in a matter of hours. Her time-lapse（间歇性拍摄的）videos of the revivals look like someone playing a tape of the plant’s death in reverse.[E] The big difference between “drought-tolerant” plants and these tough plants: metabolism. Many different kinds of plants have developed tactics to weather dry spells. Some plants store reserves of water to see them through a drought; others send roots deep down to subsurface water supplies. But once these plants use up their stored reserve or tap out the underground supply, they cease growing and start to die. They may be able to handle a drought of some length, and many people use the term “drought tolerant” to describe such plants, but they never actually stop needing to consume water, so Farrant prefers to call them drought resistant.[F] Resurrection plants, defined as those capable of recovering from holding less than 0.1 grams of water per gram of dry mass, are different. They lack water-storing structures, and their existence on rock faces prevents them from tapping groundwater, so they have instead developed the ability to change their metabolism. When they detect an extended dry period, they divert their metabolisms, producing sugars and certain stress-associated proteins and other materials in their tissues. As the plant dries, these resources take on first the properties of honey, then rubber, and finally enter a glass-like state that is “the most stable state that the plant can maintain,” Farrant says. That slows the plant’s metabolism and protects its dried-out tissues. The plants also change shape, shrinking to minimize the surface area through which their remaining water might evaporate. They can recover from months and years without water, depending on the species.[G] What else can do this dry-out.-and-revive trick? Seeds—almost all of them. At the start of her career, Farrant studied “recalcitrant seeds （顽拗性种子），” such as avocados, coffee and lychee. While tasty, such seeds are delicate—they cannot bud and grow if they dry out （as you may know if you’ve ever tried to grow a tree from an avocado pit）. In the seed world, that makes them rare, because most seeds from flowering plants are quite robust. Most seeds can wait out the dry, unwelcoming seasons until conditions are right and they sprout （发芽）.Yet once they start growing, such plants seem not to retain the ability to hit the pause button on metabolism in their stems or leaves.[H] After completing her Ph.D. on seeds, Farrant began investigating whether it might be possible to isolate the properties that make most seeds so resilient （迅速恢复活力的）and transfer them to other plant tissues. What Farrant and others have found over the past two decades is that there are many genes involved in resurrection plants’ response to dryness. Many of them are the same that regulate how seeds become dryness-tolerant while still attached to their parent plants. Now they are trying to figure out what molecular signaling processes activate those seed-building genes in resurrection plants一and how to reproduce them in crops. “Most genes are regulated by a master set of genes,” Farrant says. “We’re looking at gene promoters and what would be their master switch.”[I] Once Farrant and her colleagues feel they have a better sense of which switches to throw, they will have to find the best way to do so in useful crops. “I’m trying three methods of breeding,” Farrant says: conventional, genetic modification and gene editing. She says she is aware that plenty of people do not want to eat genetically modified crops, but she is pushing ahead with every available tool until one works. Farmers and consumers alike can choose whether or not to use whichever version prevails: “I’m giving people an option.”[J] Farrant and others in the resurrection business got together last year to discuss the best species of resurrection plant to use as a lab model. Just like medical researchers use rats to test ideas for human medical treatments, botanists use plants that are relatively easy to grow in a lab or greenhouse setting to test their ideas for related species. The Queensland rock violet is one of the best studied resurrection plants so far, with a draft genome （基因图谱）published last year by a Chinese team. Also last year, Farrant and colleagues published a detailed molecular study of another candidate, Xerophyta viscosa, a tough-as-nail South African plant with lily-like flowers, and she says that a genome is on the way. One or both of these models will help researchers test their ideas—so far mostly done in the lab——on test plots.[K] Understanding the basic science first is key. There are good reasons why crop plants do not use dryness defenses already. For instance, there’s a high energy cost in switching from a regular metabolism to an almost-no-water metabolism. It will also be necessary to understand what sort of yield farmers might expect and to establish the plant’s safety. “The yield is never going to be high,” Farrant says, so these plants will be targeted not at Iowa farmers trying to squeeze more cash out of high-yield fields, but subsistence farmers who need help to survive a drought like the present one in South Africa “My vision is for the subsistence farmer,” Farrant says. “I’m targeting crops that are of African value.”

Did Sarah Josepha Hale write “Mary’s Little Lamb,” the eternal nursery rhyme (儿歌)about a girl named Mary with a stubborn lamb? This is still disputed, but it’s clear that the woman（） for writing it was one of America’s most fascinating （） . In honor of poem’s publication on May 24, 1830, here’s more about the （） author’s life.Hale wasn’t just a writer, she was also a （） social advocate, and she was particularly （） with an ideal New England, which she associated with abundant Thanksgiving meals that she claimed had “a deep moral influence.” She began a nationwide （） to have a national holiday declared that would bring families together while celebrating the （）festivals. In 1863, after 17 years of advocacy including letters to five presidents, Hale got it. President Abraham Lincoln, during the Civil War, issued a （） setting aside the last Thursday in November for the holiday.The true authorship of “Mary’s Little Lamb” is disputed. According to the New England Historical Society, Hale wrote only part of the poem, but claimed authorship. Regardless of the author, it seems that the poem was （） by a real event. When young Mary Sawyer was followed to school by a lamb in 1816, it caused some problems. A bystander named John Roulstone wrote a poem about the event, then, at some point, Hale herself seems to have helped write it. However, if a 1916 piece by her great-niece is to be trusted, Hale claimed for the （） of her life that “some other people pretended that someone else wrote the poem”.

Directions: For this part, you are allowed 30 minutes to write an essay on the importance of building trust between teachers and students. You can cite examples to illustrate your views. You should write at least 150 words but no more than 200 words.

For this part, you are allowed 30 minutes to translate a passage from Chinese into English. 过去，拥有一辆私家车对大部分中国人而言是件奢侈的事。如今，私家车在中国随处可见。汽车成了人们生活中不可或缺的一部分，他们不仅开车上下班，还经常驾车出游。有些城市的汽车增长速度过快，以至于交通拥堵和停车位不足的问题日益严峻，这些城市的市政府不得不出台新规，限制上路汽车的数量。由于空气污染日益严重，现在越来越多的人选择购买新能源汽车，中国政府也采取了一些措施，支持新能源汽车的发展。

Photography was once an expensive, laborious ordeal reserved for life’s greatest milestones. Now, the only apparent cost to taking infinite photos of something as common as a meal is the space on your hard drive and your dining companion’s patience.But is there another cost, a deeper cost, to documenting a life experience instead of simply enjoying it? “You hear that you shouldn’t take all these photos and interrupt the experience, and it’s bad for you, and we’re not living in the present moment,” says Kristin Diehl, associate professor of marketing at the University of Southern California Marshall School of Business.Diehl and her fellow researchers wanted to find out if that was true, so they embarked on a series of nine experiments in the lab and in the field testing people’s enjoyment in the presence or absence of a camera. The results, published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, surprised them. Taking photos actually makes people er\joy what they’re doing more, not less.“What we find is you actually look at the world slightly differently, because you’re looking for things you want to capture, that you may want to hang onto,” Diehl explains. “That gets people more engaged in the experience, and they tend to enjoy it more.”Take sightseeing. In one experiment, nearly 200 participants boarded a double-decker bus for a tour of Philadelphia. Both bus tours forbade the use of cell phones but one tour provided digital cameras and encouraged people to take photos. The people who took photos enjoyed the experience significantly more, and said they were more engaged, than those who didn’t. Snapping a photo directs attention, which heightens the pleasure you get from whatever you’re looking at, Diehl says. It works for things as boring as archaeological (考古的)museums, where people were given eye-tracking glasses and instructed either to take photos or not. “People look longer at things they want to photograph," Diehl says. They report liking the exhibits more, too.To the relief of Instagrammers (Instagram 用户)everywhere, it can even make meals more enjoyable. When people were encouraged to take at least three photos while they ate lunch, they were more immersed in their meals more than those who weren’t told to take photos.Was it the satisfying click of the camera? The physical act of the snap? No, they found; just the act of planning to take a photo—and not actually taking it—had the same joy-boosting effect. “If you want to take mental photos, that works the same way,” Diehl says. “Thinking about what you would want to photograph also gets you more engaged.”What does the author say about photo-taking in the past?Kristin Diehl conducted a series of experiments on photo-taking to find out （）.What do the results of Diehl’s experiments show about people taking pictures?What is found about museum visitors with the aid of eye-tracking glasses?What do we learn from the last paragraph?

The Ebro Delta, in Spain, famous as a battleground during the Spanish Civil War, is now the setting for a different contest, one that is pitting rice fanners against two enemies: the rice-eating giant apple snail, and rising sea levels. What happens here will have a bearing on the future of European rice production and the overall health of southern European wetlands.Located on the Mediterranean just two hours south of Barcelona, the Ebro Delta produces 120 million kilograms of rice a year, making it one of the continent’s most important rice-growing areas. As the sea creeps into these fresh-water marshes, however, rising salinity (盐分)is hampering rice production. At the same time, this sea-water also kills off the greedy giant apple snail, an introduced pest that feeds on young rice plants. The most promising strategy has become to harness one foe against the other.The battle is currently being waged on land, in greenhouses at the University of Barcelona. Scientists working under the banner “Project Neurice” are seeking varieties of rice that can withstand the increasing salinity without losing the absorbency that makes European rice ideal for traditional Spanish and Italian dishes.“The project has two sides,” says Xavier Serrat, Neurice project manager and researcher at the University of Barcelona, “the short-term fight against the snail, and a mid- to long-term light against climate change. But the snail has given the project greater urgency.”Originally from South America, the snails were accidentally introduced into the Ebro Delta by Global Aquatic Technologies, a company that raised the snails for fresh-water aquariums (水族银)，but failed to prevent their escape. For now, the giant apple snail’s presence in Europe is limited to the Ebro Delta. But the snail continues its march to new territory, says Serrat. “The question is not whether it will reach other rice-growing areas of Europe, but when.”Over the next year and a half investigators will test the various strains of salt-tolerant rice they’ve bred. In 2018, farmers will plant the varieties with the most promise in the Ebro Delta and Europe’s other two main rice-growing regions—along the Po in Italy, and France’s Rhone. A season in the field will help determine which, if any, of the varieties are ready for commercialization.As an EU-funded effort, the search for salt-tolerant varieties of rice is taking place in all three countries. Each team is crossbreeding a local European short-grain rice with a long-grain Asian variety that carries the salt-resistant gene. The scientists are breeding successive generations to arrive at varieties that incorporate salt tolerance but retain about 97 percent of the European rice genome (基因组).Why does the author mention the Spanish Civil War at the beginning of the passage?What may be the most effective strategy for rice farmers to employ in fighting their enemies?What do we learn about “Project Neurice”？What does Neurice project manager say about the giant apple snail?What is the ultimate goal of the EU-funded program?

Peer Pressure Has a Positive Side [A] Parents of teenagers often view their children’s friends with something like suspicion. They worry that the adolescent peer group has the power to push its members into behavior that is foolish and even dangerous. Such wariness is well founded: statistics show, for example, that a teenage driver with a same-age passenger in the car is at higher risk of a fatal crash than an adolescent driving alone or with an adult.[B] In a 2005 study, psychologist Laurence Steinberg of Temple University and his co-author, psychologist Margo Gardner, then at Temple, divided 306 people into three age groups: young adolescents, with a mean age of 14; older adolescents, with a mean age of 19; and adults, aged 24 and older. Subjects played a computerized driving game in which the player must avoid crashing into a wall that materializes, without warning, on the roadway. Steinberg and Gardner randomly assigned some participants to play alone or with two same-age peers looking on.[C] Older adolescents scored about 50 percent higher on an index of risky driving when their peers were in the room—and the driving of early adolescents was fully twice as reckless when other young teens were around. In contrast, adults behaved in similar ways regardless of whether they were on their own or observed by others. “The presence of peers makes adolescents and youth, but not adults, more likely to take risks,” Steinberg and Gardner concluded.[D] Yet in the years following the publication of this study, Steinberg began to believe that this interpretation did not capture the whole picture. As he and other researchers examined the question of why teens were more apt to take risks in the company of other teenagers, they came to suspect that a crowd’s influence need not always be negative. Now some experts are proposing that we should take advantage of the teen brain’s keen sensitivity to the presence of friends and leverage it to improve education.[E] In a 2011 study, Steinberg and his colleagues turned to functional MRI (磁共振)to investigate how the presence of peers affects the activity in the adolescent brain. They scanned the brains of 40 teens and adults who were playing a virtual driving game designed to test whether players would brake at a yellow light or speed on through the crossroad.[F] The brains of teenagers, but not adults, showed greater activity in two regions associated with rewards when they were being observed by same-age peers than when alone. In other words, rewards are more intense for teens when they are with peers, which motivates them to pursue higher-risk experiences that might bring a big payoff (such as the thrill of just making the light before it turns red). But Steinberg suspected this tendency could also have its advantages. In his latest experiment, published online in August, Steinberg and his colleagues used a computerized version of a card game called the Iowa Gambling Task to investigate how the presence of peers affects the way young people gather and apply information.[G] The results: Teens who played the Iowa Gambling Task under the eyes of fellow adolescents engaged in more exploratory behavior, learned faster from both positive and negative outcomes, and achieved better performance on the task than those who played in solitude. “What our study suggests is that teenagers learn more quickly and more effectively when their peers are present than when they’re on their own,” Steinberg says. And this finding could have important implications for how we think about educating adolescents.[H] Matthew D. Lieberman, a social cognitive neuroscientist at the University of California, Los Angeles, and author of the 2013 book Social: Why Our Brains Are Wired to Connect, suspects that the human brain is especially skillful at learning socially significant information. He points to a classic 2004 study in which psychologists at Dartmouth College and Harvard University used functional MRI l,o track brain activity in 17 young men as they listened to descriptions of people while concentrating on either socially relevant cues (for example, trying to form an impression of a person based on the description) or more socially neutral information (such as noting the order of details in the description）. The descriptions were the same in each condition, but people could better remember these statements when given a social motivation.[I] The study also found that when subjects thought about and later recalled descriptions in terms of their informational content, regions associated with factual memory, such as the medial temporal lobe, became active. But thinking about or remembering descriptions in terms of their social meaning activated the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex—part of the brain’s social network—even as traditional memory regions registered low levels of activity. More recently, as he reported in a 2012 review, Lieberman has discovered that this region may be part of a distinct network involved in socially motivated learning and memory. Such findings, he says, suggest that “this network can be called on to process and store the kind of information taught in school—potentially giving students access to a range of untapped mental powers."[J] If humans are generally geared to recall details about one another, this pattern is probably even more powerful among teenagers who are very attentive to social details: who is in, who is out, who likes whom, who is mad at whom. Their desire for social drama is not—or not only—a way of distracting themselves from their schoolwork or of driving adults crazy. It is actually a neurological （神经的）sensitivity, initiated by hormonal changes. Evolutionarily speaking, people in this age group are at a stage in which they can prepare to find a mate and start their own family while separating from parents and striking out on their own. To do this successfully, their brain prompts them to think and even obsess about others.[K] Yet our schools focus primarily on students as individual entities. What would happen if educators instead took advantage of the fact that teens are powerfully compelled to think in social terms? In Social, Lieberman lays out a number of ways to do so. History and English could be presented through the lens of the psychological drives of the people involved. One could therefore present Napoleon in terms of his desire to impress or Churchill in terms of his lonely gloom. Less inherently interpersonal subjects, such as math, could acquire a social aspect through team problem solving and peer tutoring. Research shows that when we absorb information in order to teach it to someone else, we learn it more accurately and deeply, perhaps in part because we are engaging our social cognition.[L] And although anxious parents may not welcome the notion, educators could turn adolescent recklessness to academic ends. “Risk taking in an educational context is a vital skill that enables progress and creativity," wrote Sarah-Jayne Blakemore, a cognitive neuroscientist at University College London, in a review published last year. Yet, she noted, many young people are especially unwilling to take risks at school—afraid that one low test score or poor grade could cost them a spot at a selective university. We should assure such students that risk, and even peer pressure, can be a good thing—as long as it happens in the classroom and not in the car.

Scientists scanning and mapping the Giza pyramids say they’ve discovered that the Great Pyramid of Giza is not exactly even. But really not by much. This pyramid is the oldest of the world’s Seven Wonders. The pyramid’s exact size has（） experts for centuries, as the “more than 21 acres of hard, white casing stones” that originally covered it were（）long ago. Reporting in the most recent issue of the newsletter “ AERAGRAM，” which （） the work of the Ancient Egypt Research Associates, engineer Glen Dash says his team used a new measuring approach that involved finding any surviving （） of the casing in order to determine where the original edge was. They found the east side of the pyramid to be a （） of 5.5 inches shorter than the west side.The question that most （） him, however, isn’t how the Egyptians who designed and built the pyramid got it wrong 4,500 years ago, but how they got it so close to （） . “We can only speculate as to how the Egyptians could have laid out these lines with such （） using only the tools they had,” Dash writes. He says his （） is that the Egyptians laid out their design on a grid, noting that the great pyramid is oriented only （） away from the cardinal directions (its north-south axis runs 3 minutes 54 seconds west of due north, while its east-west axis runs 3 minutes 51 seconds north of due east)—an amount that’s "tiny, but similar,” archeologist Atlas Obscura points out.

Directions: For this part, you are allowed 30 minutes to write an essay on the importance of building trust between businesses and consumers. You can cite examples to illustrate your views. You should write at least 150 words but no more than 200 words.

For this part, you are allowed 30 minutes to translate a passage from Chinese into English.太湖是中国东部的一个淡水湖，占地面积2250平方公里，是中国第三大淡水湖，仅次于鄱阳和洞庭。太湖约有 90个岛屿，大小从几平方米到几平方公里不等。太湖以其独特的“太湖石”而闻名，太湖石常用于装饰中国传统园林。太湖也以高产的捕鱼业闻名。自上世纪70年代后期以来，捕捞鱼蟹对沿湖的居民来说极为重要，并对周边地区的经济作出了重大贡献。太湖地区是中国陶瓷 (ceramics)业基地之一，其中宜兴的陶瓷厂家生产举世闻名的宜兴紫砂壶 (clay teapot)。

In the beginning of the movie I, Robot, a robot has to decide whom to save after two cars plunge into the water——Del Spooner or a child. Even though Spooner screams “Save her! Save her! ” the robot rescues him because it calculates that he has a 45 percent chance of survival compared to Sarah’s 11 percent. The robot’s decision and its calculated approach raise an important question: would humans make the same choice? And which choice would we want our robotic counterparts to make?Isaac Asimov evaded the whole notion of morality in devising his three laws of robotics, which hold that 1. Robots cannot harm humans or allow humans to come to harm; 2. Robots must obey humans, except where the order would conflict with law 1; and 3. Robots must act in self-preservation, unless doing so conflicts with laws 1 or 2. These laws are programmed into Asimov’s robots — they don’t have to think, judge, or value. They don’t have to like humans or believe that hurting them is wrong or bad. They simply don’t do it.The robot who rescues Spooner’s life in I, Robot follows Asimov’s zeroth law: robots cannot harm humanity (as opposed to individual humans) or allow humanity to come to harm—an expansion of the first law that allows robots to determine what’s in the greater good. Under the first law, a robot could not harm a dangerous gunman, but under the zeroth law, a robot could kill the gunman to save others.Whether it’s possible to program a robot with safeguards such as Asimov’s laws is debatable. A word such as “harm” is vague (what about emotional harm? Is replacing a human employee harm?), and abstract concepts present coding problems. The robots in Asimov’s fiction expose complications and loopholes in the three laws, and even when the laws work, robots still have to assess situations.Assessing situations can be complicated. A robot has to identify the players, conditions, and possible outcomes for various scenarios. It’s doubtful that a computer program can do that—at least, not without some undesirable results. A roboticist at the Bristol Robotics Laboratory programmed a robot to save human proves (替身) called “H-bots” from danger. When one H-bot headed for danger, the robot successfully pushed it out of the way. But when two H-bots became imperiled, the robot choked 42 percent of the time, unable to decide which to save and letting them both “die.” The experiment highlights the importance of morality: without it, how can a robot decide whom to save or what’s best for humanity, especially if it, can’t calculate survival odds?What question does the example in the movie raise?What does the author think of Asimov’s three laws of robotics?What does the author say about Asimov’s robots?What does the author want to say by mentioning the word “harm” in Asimov’s laws?What has the roboticist at the Bristol Robotics Laboratory found in his experiment?

Our world now moves so fast that we seldom stop to see just how far we have come in just a few years. The latest iPhone 6s, for example, has a dual-core processor and fits nicely into your pocket. By comparison, you would expect to find a technological specification like this on your standard laptop in an office anywhere in the world.It’s no wonder that new applications for the Internet of Things are moving ahead fast when almost every new device we buy has a plug on the end of it or a wireless connection to the internet. Soon, our current smartphone lifestyle will expand to create our own smart home lifestyle too.All researches agree that close to 25 billion devices, things and sensors will be connected by 2020 which incidentally is also the moment that Millennial(千禧一代)are expected to make up 75 percent of our overall workforce, and the fully connected home will become a reality for large numbers of people worldwide.However, this is just the tip of the proverbial iceberg as smart buildings and even cities increasingly become the norm as leaders and business owners begin to wake up to the massive savings that technology can deliver through connected sensors and new forms of automation coupled with intelligent energy and facilities management.Online security cameras, intelligent lighting and a wealth of sensors that control both temperature and air quality are offering an unprecedented level of control, efficiency, and improvements to what were once classed necessary costs when running a business or managing a large building.We can expect that the ever-growing list of devices, systems and environments remain connected, always online and talking to each other. The big benefit will not only be in the housing of this enormous and rapidly growing amount of data, but will also be in the ability to run real time data analytics to extract actionable and ongoing knowledge.The biggest and most exciting challenge of this technology is how to creatively leverage this ever¬growing amount of data to deliver cost savings, improvements and tangible benefits to both businesses and citizens of these smart cities.The good news is that most of this technology is already invented. Let’s face it, it wasn’t too long ago that the idea of working from anywhere and at anytime was some form of a distant utopian (乌托邦式的) dream, and yet now we can perform almost any office-based task from any location in the world as long as we have access to the internet.It’s time to wake up to the fact that making smart buildings, cities and homes will dramatically improve our quality of life in the years ahead.What does the example of iPhone 6s serve to show?What can we expect to see by the year 2020?What will business owners do when they become aware of the benefits of the Internet of Things?What is the most exciting challenge when we possess more and more data?What does the author think about working from anywhere and at anytime?

Data sharing: An open mind on open data[A] It is a movement building steady momentum: a call to make research data, software code and experimental methods publicly available and transparent. A spirit of openness is gaining acceptance in the science community, and is the only way, say advocates, to address a 'crisis’ in science whereby too few findings are successfully reproduced. Furthermore, they say, it is the best way for researchers to gather the range of observations that are necessary to speed up discoveries or to identify large-scale trends.[B] The open-data shift poses a confusing problem for junior researchers. On the one hand, the drive to share is gathering official steam. Since 2013, global scientific bodies have begun to back policies that support increased public access to research. On the other hand, scientists disagree about how much and when they should share data, and they debate whether sharing it is more likely to accelerate science and make it more robust, or to introduce vulnerabilities and problems. As more journals and funders adopt data-sharing requirements, and as a growing number of enthusiasts call for more openness, junior researchers must find their place between adopters and those who continue to hold out, even as they strive to launch their own careers.[C] One key challenge facing young scientists is how to be open without becoming scientifically vulnerable. They must determine the risk of jeopardizing a job offer or a collaboration proposal from those who are wary of—or unfamiliar with—open science. And they must learn how to capitalize on the movement’s benefits, such as opportunities for more citations and a way to build a reputation without the need for conventional metrics, such as publication in high-impact journals.[D] Some fields have embraced open data more than others. Researchers in psychology, a field rocked by findings of irreproducibility in the past few years, have been especially vocal supporters of the drive for more-open science. A few psychology journals have created incentives to increase interest in reproducible science—for example, by affixing an 'open-data’ badge to articles that clearly state where data are available. According to social psychologist Brian Nosek, executive director of the Center for Open Science, the average data-sharing rate for the journal Psychological Science, which uses the badges, increased tenfold to 38% from 2013 to 2015.[E] Funders, too, are increasingly adopting an open-data policy. Several strongly encourage, and some require, a data-management plan that makes data available. The US National Science Foundation is among these. Some philanthropic （慈善的）funders, including the BUI & Melinda Gates Foundation in Seattle, Washington, and the Wellcome Trust in London, also mandate open data from their grant recipients.[F] But many young researchers, especially （hose who have not been mentored in open science, are uncertain about whether to share or to stay private. Graduate students and postdocs, who often are working on their lab head’s grant, may have no choice if their supervisor or another senior colleague opposes sharing.[G] Some fear that the potential impact of sharing is too high, especially at the early stages of a career. “Everybody has a scary story about someone getting scooped （被抢先），” says New York University astronomer David Hogg. Those fears may be a factor in a lingering hesitation to share data even when publishing in journals that mandate it.[H] Researchers at small labs or at institutions focused on teaching arguably have the most to lose when sharing hard-won data. “With my institution and teaching load, I don’t have postdocs and grad students,” says Terry McGlynn, a tropical biologist at California State University, Dominguez Hills. “The stakes are higher for me to share data because it’s a bigger fraction of what’s happening in my lab.”[I] Researchers also point to the time sink that is involved in preparing data for others to view. Once the data and associated materials appear in a repository （存储库），answering questions and handling complaints can take many hours.[J] The time investment can present other problems. In some cases, says data scientist Karthik Ram, it may be difficult for junior researchers to embrace openness when senior colleagues—many of whom head selection and promotion committees—might ridicule what they may view as misplaced energies. “I’ve heard this recently—that embracing the idea of open data and code makes traditional academics uncomfortable," says Ram. “The concern seems to be that open advocates don’t spend their time being as productive as possible.”[K] An open-science stance can also add complexity to a collaboration. Kate Ratliff, who studies social attitudes at the University of Florida, Gainesville, says that it can seem as if there are two camps in a field—those who care about open science and those who don't. “There’s a new area to navigate— ‘Are you cool with the fact that I'll want to make the data open?’— when talking with somebody about an interesting research idea," she says.[L] Despite complications and concerns, the upsides of sharing can be significant. For example, when information is uploaded to a repository, a digital object identifier （DOI） is assigned. Scientists can use a DOI to publish each step of the research life cycle, not just the final paper. In so doing, they can potentially get three citations—one each for the data and software, in addition to the paper itself. And although some say that citations for software or data have little currency in academia, they can have other benefits.[M] Many advocates think that transparent data procedures with a date and time stamp will protect scientists from being scooped. “This is the sweet spot between sharing and getting credit for it, while discouraging plagiarism （剽窃），” says Ivo Grigorov, a project coordinator at the National Institute of Aquatic Resources Research Secretariat in Charlottenliind, Denmark. Hogg says that scooping is less of a problem than many think. “The two cases I'm familiar with didn’t involve open data or code,” he says.[N] Open science also offers junior researchers the chance to level the playing field by gaining better access to crucial data. Ross Mounce, a postdoc studying evolutionary biology at the University of Cambridge, UK, is a vocal champion of open science, partly because his fossil-based research depends on access to others’ data. He says that more openness in science could help to discourage what some perceive as a common practice of shutting out early-career scientists’ requests for data.[O] Communication also helps for those who worry about jeopardizing a collaboration, he says. Concerns about open science should be discussed at the outset of a study. “Whenever you start a project with someone, you have to establish a clear understanding of expectations for who owns the data, at what point they go public and who can do what with them," he says.[P] In the end, sharing data, software and materials with colleagues can help an early-career researcher to gain recognition—a crucial component of success. “The thing you are searching for is reputation,” says Titus Brown, a genomics （基因组学）researcher at the University of California, Davis. “To get grants and jobs, you have to be relevant and achieve some level of public recognition. Anything you do that advances your presence—especially in a larger sphere, outside the communities you know— is a net win."

The Pacific island nation of Palau has become home to the sixth largest marine sanctuary in the world. The new marine reserve, now the largest in the Pacific, will（） no fishing or mining. Palau also established the world's first shark sanctuary in 2009.The tiny island nation has set aside 500,000 square kilometres — 80 percent—of its maritime （） , for full protection. That’s the highest percentage of an （） economic zone devoted to marine conservation by any country in the world. The remaining 20 percent of the Palau seas will be reserved for local fishing by individuals and small-scale （）fishing businesses with limited exports.“Island （） have been among the hardest hit by the threats facing the ocean,” said President Tommy Remengesau Jr. in a statement. “Creating this sanctuary is a bold move that the people of Palau recognise as （） to our survival. We want to lead the way in restoring the health of the ocean for future generations."Palau has only been an （） nation for twenty years and has a strong history of environmental protection. It is home to one of the world’s finest marine ecosystems, with more than 1,300 species of fish and 700 species of coral.Senator Hokkons Baules, lead （） of the Palau National Marine Sanctuary Act, said the sanctuary will “help build a （） future for the Palauan people by honoring the conservation traditions of our past”. These include the centuries-old custom of “bul”，where leaders would call a temporary stop to fishing for key species in order to give fish （）an opportunity to replenish (补充).

Directions: For this part，you are allowed 30 minutes to write an essay commenting on the saying “Help others, and you will be helped when you are in need.” You can cite examples to illustrate your views. You should write at least 150 words but, no more than 200 words.

For this part, you are allowed 30 minutes to translate a passage from, Chinese into English. 洞庭湖位于湖南省东北部，面积很大，但湖水很浅。洞庭湖是长江的蓄洪地，湖的大小很大程度上取决于季节变化。湖北和湖南两省因其与湖的相对位置而得名：湖北意为“湖的北边”，而湖南则为“湖的南边”。洞庭湖作为龙舟赛的发源地，在中国文化中享有盛名。据说龙舟赛始于洞庭湖东岸，为的是搜寻楚国爱国诗人屈原的遗体。龙舟赛与洞庭湖及周边的美景，每年都吸引着成千上万来自全国和世界各地的游客。

Twenty years ago, the Urban Land Institute defined the two types of cities that dominated the US landscape: smaller cities that operated around standard 9-5 business hours and large metropolitan areas that ran all 24 hours of the day. Analyzing and comparing cities using the lens of this basic divide gives interesting context to how investment capital flows and housing prices have shifted.In recent years, many mid-sized cities have begun to adopt a middle-of-the-road approach incorporating the excitement and opportunity of large cities with small cities’ quiet after midnight. These l&-hour cities are beginning to make waves in real estate rankings and attract more real estate investment. What is underlying this new movement in real estate, and why do these cities have so much appeal?18-hour cities combine the best of 24-hour and 9-5 cities, which contributes to downtown revitalization. For decades, many downtown cores in small to mid-sized cities were abandoned after work hours by workers who lived in the suburbs. Movement out of city centers was widespread, and downtown tenants were predominantly made up of the working poor. This generated little commerce for downtown businesses in the evenings, which made business and generating tax revenue for municipal upkeep difficult. With the rise of a new concept in urban planning that aims to make life easier and more convenient, however, increasing popularity for urban areas that caused the real estate pushes, in major cities like San Francisco or New York, has inspired a type of forward thinking urbanity and policy in smaller cities.Transforming downtown areas so that they incorporate modem housing and improved walkability to local restaurants, retail and entertainment—especially when combined with improved infrastructure for cyclists and public transit—makes them appeal to a more affluent demographic. These adjustments encourage employers in the knowledge and talent industries to keep their offices downtown. Access to foot traffic and proximity to transit allow the type of entertainment-oriented businesses such as bars and restaurants to stay open later, which attracts both younger, creative workers and baby boomers nearing retirement alike. Because of their smaller size, most keep hours that allow people to enjoy themselves, then have some quiet after midnight, as opposed to large major cities like New York, where the buzz of activity is ongoing.These 18-hour cities are rapidly on the rise and offer great opportunities for homeowner investment. In many of these cities such as Denver, a diverse and vigorous economy attracted to the urban core has offered stable employment for residents. The right urban mix has propped up home occupancy, increased property values, and attracted significant investment capital.What do we learn about American cities twenty years ago?What can be inferred from the passage about 18-hour cities?Years ago, many downtown cores in small to mid-sized cities（）.What characterizes the new downtown areas in 18-hour cities?What have 18-hour cities brought to the local residents?

You may have heard that Coca-Cola once contained an ingredient capable of sparking particular devotion in consumers: cocaine. The “coca” in the name referred to the extracts of coca leaf that the drink’s originator, chemist John Pemberton, mixed with his sugary syrup (浆汁). At the time, coca leaf extract mixed with wine was a common tonic (滋补品.,and Pemberton’s sweet brew was a way to get around local laws prohibiting the sale of alcohol. But the other half of the name represents another ingredient less infamous (名声不好的)，perhaps, but also strangely potent: the kola nut.In West Africa, people have long chewed kola nuts as stimulants, because they contain caffeine that also occurs naturally in tea, coffee, and chocolate. They also have heart stimulants.Historian Paul Lovejoy relates that, the cultivation of kola nuts in West Africa is hundreds of years old. The leafy, .spreading trees were planted on graves and as part of traditional rituals. Even though the nuts, which need to stay moist, can be somewhat delicate to transport, traders carried them hundreds of miles throughout the forests and grasslands.Europeans did not know of them until the 1500s, when Portuguese ships arrived on the coast of what is now Sierra Leone. And while the Portuguese took part in the trade, ferrying nuts down the coast along with other goods, by 1620, when English explorer Richard Jobson made his way up the Gambia, the nuts were still peculiar to his eyes.By the late 19th century, kola nuts were being shipped by the tonne to Europe and the US. Many made their way into medicines, intended as a kind of energy boost. One such popular medicinal drink was Vin Mariani, a French product consisting of coca extract mixed with red wine. It was created by a French chemist, Angelo Mariani, in 1863. So when Pemberton created his drink, it represented an ongoing trend. When cocaine eventually fell from grace as a beverage ingredient, kola-extract colas became popular.The first year it was available, Coca-Cola averaged nine servings a day across all the Atlanta soda fountains where it was sold. As it grew more popular, the company sold rights to bottle the soda, so it could travel easily. Today about 1.9 billion Cokes are purchased daily. It’s become so iconic that attempts to change its taste in 1985 — sweetening it in a move projected to boost sales— proved disastrous, with widespread anger from consumers. “Coca-Cola Classic” returned to store shelves just three months after the “New Coke” was released.These days, the Coca-Cola recipe is a closely guarded secret. But it’s said to no longer contain kola nut extract, relying instead on artificial imitations to achieve the flavour.What do we learn about chemist John Pemberton?What does the passage say about kola nuts?How come kola-extract colas became popular?What is known about the taste of Coca-Cola?What is the passage mainly about?

Who’s Really Addicting You to Technology?[A] “Nearly everyone I know is addicted in some measure to the Internet/’ wrote Tony Schwartz in The New York Times. It’s a common complaint these days. A steady stream of similar headlines accuse the Net and its offspring apps, social media sites and online games of addicting us to distraction.[B] There’s little doubt that nearly everyone who comes in contact with the Net has difficulty disconnecting. Many of us, like Schwartz, struggle to stay focused on tasks that require more concentration than it takes to post a status update. As one person ironically put it. in the comments section of Schwartz’s online article, “As I was reading this very excellent article, I stopped at least half a dozen times to check my email,’[C] There’s something different about this technology: it is both invasive and persuasive. But who’s at fault for its overuse? To find solutions, it’s important to understand what we’re dealing with. There are four parties conspiring to keep you connected: the tech, your boss, your friends and you.[D] The technologies themselves, and their makers, are the easiest suspects to blame for our diminishing attention spans. Nicholas Carr, author of The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing lo Our Brains, wrote, "The net is designed to be an interruption system, a machine geared to dividing attention.”[E] Online services like Facebook, Twitter and the like, are called out as masters of manipulation— making products so good that people can’t stop using them. After studying these products for several years, I wrote a book about how they do it. I learned it all starts with the business model. Since these services rely on advertising revenue, the more frequently you use them, the more money they make. It’s no wonder these companies employ teams of people focused on engineering their services to be as engaging as possible. These products aren’t habit-forming by chance; it’s by design. They have an incentive to keep us hooked.[F] However, as good as these services are, there are simple steps we can take to keep them at bay. For example, we can change how often we receive the distracting notifications that trigger our urge to check. According to Adam Marchick, CEO of mobile marketing company Kahuna, less than 15 percent of smartphone users ever bother to adjust their notification settings—meaning the remaining 85 percent of us default to the app makers’ every preset trigger. Google and Apple have made it far too difficult to adjust these settings so it’s up to us to take steps to ensure we set these triggers to suit our own needs, not the needs of the app makers’.[G] While companies like Facebook harvest attention to generate revenue from advertisers, other technologies have no such agenda. Take email, for example. This system couldn’t care less how often you use it. Yet to many, email is the most habit-forming medium of all. We check email at all hours of the day—we’re obsessed. But why? Because that’s what the boss wants. For almost all white-collar jobs, email is the primary tool of corporate communication. A slow response to a message could hurt not only your reputation but also your livelihood.[H] Your friends are also responsible for the addiction. Think about this familiar scene. People gathered around a table, enjoying food and each other’s company. There’s laughter and a bit of kidding. Then, during an interval in the conversation, someone takes out their phone to check who knows what. Barely anyone notices and no one says a thing.[I] Now, imagine the same dinner, but instead of checking their phone, the person belches （打嗝）一 loudly. Everyone notices. Unless the meal takes place in a beer house, this is considered bad manners. The impolite act violates the basic rules of etiquette. One has to wonder why don’t we apply the same social norms to checking phones during meals, meetings and conversations as we do to other antisocial behaviors? Somehow, we accept it and say nothing when someone offends.[J] The reality is, taking one’s phone out at the wrong time is worse than belching because, unlike other minor offense, checking tech is contagious. Once one person looks at their phone, other people feel compelled to do the same, starting a chain reaction. The more people are on their phones, the fewer people are talking until finally you’re the only one left not reading email or checking Twitter. From a societal perspective, phone checking is less like belching in public and more like another bad habit. Our phones are like cigarettes—something to do when we’re anxious, bored or when our fingers need something to toy with. Seeing others enjoy a smoke, or sneak a quick glance, is too tempting to resist and soon everyone is doing it.[K] The technology, your boss, and your friends, all influence how often you find yourself using (or overusing. these gadgets. But there’s still someone who deserves scrutiny—the person holding the phone.[L] I have a confession. Even though I study habit-forming technology for a living, disconnecting is not easy for me. I’m online far more than I’d like. Like Schwartz and so many others, I often find myself distracted and off task. I wanted to know why so I began self-monitoring to try to understand my behavior. That's when I discovered an uncomfortable truth. I use technology as an escape. When I’m doing something I’d rather not do, or when I’m someplace I’d rather not be, I use my phone to port myself elsewhere. I found that this ability to instantly shift my attention was often a good thing, like when passing time on public transportation. But frequently my tech use was not so benign. When I faced difficult work, like thinking through an article idea or editing the same draft for the hundredth time, for example, a more sinister screen would draw me in. I could easily escape discomfort, temporarily, by answering email or browsing the web under the pretense of so- called “research." Though I desperately wanted to lay blame elsewhere, I finally had to admit that my bad habits had less to do with new-age technology and more to do with old-fashioned procrastination (拖延).[M] It’s easy to blame technology for being so distracting, but distraction is nothing new. Aristotle and Socrates debated the nature of “akrasia” —our tendency to do things against our interests. If we're honest with ourselves, tech is just another way to occupy our time and minds. If we weren't on our devices, we’d likely do something similarly unproductive.[N] Personal technology is indeed more engaging than ever, and there’s no doubt companies are engineering their products and services to be more compelling and attractive. But would we want it any other way? The intended result of making something better is that people use it more. That’s not necessarily a problem, that’s progress.[O] These improvements don’t mean we shouldn’t attempt to control our use of technology. In order to make sure it doesn’t. control us, we should come to terms with the fact that it’s more than the technology itself that’s responsible for our habits. Our workplace culture, social norms and individual behaviors all play a part. To put technology in its place, we must be conscious not only of how technology is changing, but also of how it is changing us.

暂未登录

学员用户尊享特权

老师批改作业做题助教答疑学员专用题库高频考点梳理

上一页 2 3 4 5 6 7 下一页