1 . In a major medical breakthrough, Tel Aviv University researchers have “printed” the world’s first 3D vascularized (有血管的) engineered heart using a patient’s own cells and biological materials. Their findings were published on April IS in a study in Advanced Science.
“This is the first time anyone anywhere has successfully engineered and printed an entire heart,”says Prof. Tal Dvir of Department of Materials Science and Engineering, who led the research for the study. “This heart is made from human cells and patient-specific biological materials. In our process, these materials serve as the bioinks, something made of sugars and proteins that can be used for 3D printing of complex tissue models,” Prof. Dvir says. “People managed to 3D print the structure of a heart in the past, but not with cells or with blood vessels (血管). Our results demonstrate the potential of our approach for engineering personalized tissue and organ replacement in the future.”
According to Prof. Dvir, the use of “native” patient-specific materials is important to successfully engineering tissues and organs.
The researchers are now planning on culturing the printed hearts in the lab and “teaching them to behave” like hearts, Prof. Dvir says. They then plan to transplant the 3D-printed heart in animal models.
“We need to develop the printed heart further,” he concludes. “The cells need to form a pumping ability; they can currently contract (收缩) , but we need them to work together. Our hope is that we will succeed and prove our method’s efficacy (功效) and usefulness. “Maybe, in ten years, there will be organ printers in the finest hospitals around the world, and these procedures will be conducted routinely.”
1. What do we know about the latest3D-printed heart?| A．It can be cultured in the lab. |
| B．It can match a patient perfectly. |
| C．It has been transplanted in animals. |
| D．It has been widely used in hospitals, |
| A．Ambiguous. | B．Positive. |
| C．Disapproving. | D．Cautious. |
| A．To explain the basic principle of 3Dtechnology. |
| B．To introduce a breakthrough of medical research. |
| C．To doubt the medical value of a new invention. |
| D．To prove the effectiveness of the new technology. |
2 . Nowadays, the world is slowly becoming a high-tech society and we are now surrounded by technology. Facebook and Twitter are innovative tools; text messaging is still a somewhat existing phenomenon and even e-mail is only a flashing spot on the screen when compared with our long history of snail mail. Now we adopt these tools to the point of essentialness, and only rarely consider how we are more fundamentally affected by them.
Social media, texting and e-mail all make it much easier to communicate, gather and pass information. But they also present some dangers. By removing any real human engagement, they enable us to develop our abnormal self-love without the risk of disapproval or criticism theatrical metaphor (隐喻), these new forms of communication provide a stage on which we create our own characters, hidden behind a fourth wall of tweets, status updates and texts. This unreal state of unconcern can become addictive as we separate ourselves a safe distance from the cruelty of our fleshly lives, where we are imperfect, powerless and insignificant. In essence, we have been provided not only the means to be more free, but also to become new, to create and protect a more perfect self to the world. As we become more reliant on these tools, they become more a part of our daily routine and so we become more restricted in this fantasy.
So it is that we live in a cold era, where names and faces represent two different levels of closeness, where working relationships occur only through the magic of email and where love can start or end by text message. An environment such as this reduces interpersonal relationships to mere digital exchanges.
Would a celebrity have been so daring to do something dishonorable if he had had to do it in person? Doubtful. It seems he might have been lost in a fantasy world that ultimately convinced himself into believing the digital self could obey different rules and regulations, as if he could continually push the limits of what’s acceptable without facing the consequences of “real life.”
1. The author compares e-mail with snail mail to show ________.| A．the influence of high-tech on our life | B．the history of different types of mails |
| C．the value of traditional communications | D．the rapid development of social media |
| A．Destroying our life totally. | B．Posing more dangers than good. |
| C．Helping us to hide our faults. | D．Replacing traditional letters. |
| A．Sheltering us from virtual life. | B．Removing face-to-face interaction. |
| C．Leading to false mental perception. | D．Making us rely more on hi-tech media. |
| A．Technologies have changed our relationships. |
| B．The digital world is a recipe for pushing limits. |
| C．Love can be better conveyed by text message. |
| D．The digital self need not take responsibility. |
3 . In America, the “Big Dig”, a highway project that resulted in a mess of traffic in the centre of Boston for years, came in five times over its initial budget. Even the Germans get huge projects wrong. Conception to operation of Berlin Brandenburg Airport has taken 30 years, with seven missed opening dates. The airport ended up costing $8.2 billion. However, the original estimate was about $2.7 billion.
Huge projects like Berlin Brandenburg Airport are the subject of an amusing new book called How Big Things Get Done by Bent Flyvbjerg and Dan Gardner. Mr. Flyvbjerg sets up a database of over 16, 000 projects and data analysis reveals that only 8.5% of the projects meet their initial estimates on cost and time, and 0.5% of them achieve what they set out to do on cost, time and benefits.
Over-optimistic time and cost estimates originate from both psychological and political perceptions: the reliance on intuition (直觉) rather than data, and a problem that Mr. Flyvbjerg calls “strategic misrepresentation”. This is when budgets are intentionally reduced in order to get things going. And once the projects are under way, they will not be stopped, because money spent on them will thus be wasted.
Mr. Flyvbjerg speaks highly of Pixar’s methodical approach to developing and testing films in great detail before they go into production. He also tells the story of how Frank Gehry’s well-developed architectural models helped ensure the success of the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao. Narrowing down the producing window of a project before it is actually carried out reduces the probability of unexpected events.
Big customized projects are particularly likely to run into trouble. However, the more a project can be divided into standardized processes, the better its prospects are. Projects run into problems for specific reasons as well as general ones: Britain’s trouble is not something that China has to worry about, for instance. But the iron law is that if you plan strictly and standardize where possible, you are less likely to dig yourself into a hole.
1. How does the author introduce the topic of the passage?| A．By making a contrast. | B．By giving an explanation. |
| C．By presenting examples. | D．By showing an experience. |
| A．Projects’ success rates can be estimated. |
| B．Projects’ desired outcome can’t be achieved. |
| C．Most projects suffer overspending and delays. |
| D．Most projects lack comprehensive data analysis. |
| A．Failures in decision-making. | B．Methods of reducing massive costs. |
| C．Strategies for getting work done. | D．Reasons behind inaccurate estimates. |
| A．Planning thoroughly in advance. |
| B．Analyzing specific and general reasons. |
| C．Focusing on efficiency of projects. |
| D．Drawing lessons from former experiences. |
4 . If you look at the dynamic “Global Temperatures” map on NASA’s website, you can see the historic temperature change over time across the planet as the timeline goes from 1880 to the modern day. By 2019, the entire planet is in red, orange, and yellow colors, indicating temperatures much higher than the historical average in every country and human inhabitance.
If the timeline went to 2023, the map would look even worse. That’s because the summer of 2023 was the hottest ever, according to ocean monitors. July was the hottest month in recorded history. Next July could be worse. Unless we do something quickly, we face dealing with more and more dangerous and expensive natural disasters in the future.
Forest fires sent smoke from Canada across the North American continent, causing New York City to have the worst air quality in its recorded history. Heavy rainstorms fell on Vermont and the Northeastern United States in just a couple of days in the middle of July, which exceeded the amount that area would usually receive in two months and caused extreme damage to homes and businesses. Around the same time, flash flooding in Bucks County, Pennsylvania — north of Philadelphia — killed nearly a dozen people.
Erich Fischer, a researcher specializing in climate studies at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, is concerned that natural disasters could get much worse in the future—and in ways we cannot predict. He called for a “strike for climate justice,” which actually took place on Sept. 15, 2023. “The strategy needs to be twofold (双重的) . We need to decrease carbon emissions as much as realistically possible. That is already happening with people using electric cars and other green technologies. At the same time, we also need to find ways to predict the risk of natural disasters ahead of time,” said Erich Fischer.
1. Why does the writer mention the data on NASA’s website in paragraph 1?| A．To explain a concept. | B．To introduce a topic. |
| C．To provide a solution. | D．To make a prediction. |
| A．The severity of natural disasters. | B．The worst air quality in New York City. |
| C．The extreme damage by flash flooding. | D．The cause of the forests fires in Canada. |
| A．He advocated a twofold strategy. |
| B．He suggested forbidding carbon emissions. |
| C．He required people to use more electric cars. |
| D．He emphasized the awareness of climate changes. |
| A．The Hottest Month in History | B．Natural Disasters in the World |
| C．Extreme Weather Could Get Worse | D．Green Technology Would be Needed |
Beyond
6 . In online meetings, it’s easy to keep people from talking over each other. Someone just hits the mute (静音) button. But for the most part, this ability doesn’t translate easily to recording in-person meetings. In a cafe, there are no buttons to silence the table beside you.
The ability to locate and manage sound —separating one person talking from a specific location in a crowded room, for example — has challenged researchers, especially without the help of cameras.
A team led by researchers at the University of Washington has developed a shape-changing smart speaker, which can divide rooms into speech areas and track the position s of individual speakers. With the help of the team’s deep-learning AI model, the system lets users mute certain areas or separate simultaneous (同时的) conversations, even if two people have similar voices. In a room meeting, such a system might be used instead of a central microphone, allowing better control of in-room sound.
“If I close my eyes and there are10 people talking in a room, I have no idea who’s saying what and where they are in the room exactly. That’s very intractable for the human brain to process. Until now, it’s also been hard for technology,” said co-lead author Malek Itani. “For the first time, we’re able to track the positions of different people talking in a room and separate their speech.” Early research has required using overhead cameras, projectors or special surfaces. The new system is the first to use only sound.
Instead of processing the sound in the cloud, as most smart speakers do, the new system processes all the sound locally. And even though some people’s first thoughts may be about observation, the system can be used for the opposite, the team says.
“It can actually benefit privacy, beyond what current smart speakers allow,” Itani said. “I can say, ‘Don’t record anything around my desk,’ and our system will create a bubble 3 feet around me. Nothing in this bubble would be recorded.”
1. What did the research team focus on?| A．Allowing real-time communication by AI. |
| B．Developing Al-powered language models. |
| C．Lowering the background noise of conversations. |
| D．Tracking and controlling sound in crowded settings. |
| A．Dangerous. | B．Natural. |
| C．Difficult. | D．Necessary. |
| A．Educational. | B．Influential. |
| C．Pioneering. | D．Costly. |
| A．It records nearby conversations. |
| B．It offers improved privacy protection. |
| C．It deadens the noise in a particular space. |
| D．It includes simultaneous translation service. |
1. Where does Mark usually read news now?
| A．In a newspaper. | B．In a magazine. | C．On the Internet. |
| A．It has a small glass window. |
| B．It can make a pizza in a short time. |
| C．It offers four types of pizzas at a time. |
| A．It is quite necessary. | B．It might not be popular. | C．It will certainly succeed. |
| A．The 24-hour service. | B．Tasty pizza made by it. | C．The low production cost. |
8 . Imagine this. You need an image of a balloon for a work presentation and turn to an AI text-to- image generator, like Midjourney or DALL-E, to create a suitable image. You enter the prompt (提示词) “red balloon against a blue sky” but the generator returns an image of an egg instead.
What’s going on? The generator you’re using may have been “poisoned”. What does this mean? Text-to-image generators work by being trained on large datasets that include millions or billions of images. Some of the generators have been trained by indiscriminately scraping online images, many of which may be under copyright. This has led to many copyright infringement (侵害) cases where artists have accused big tech companies of stealing and profiting from their work.
This is also where the idea of “poison” comes in. Researchers who want to empower individual artists have recently created a tool named “Nightshade” to fight back against unauthorised image scraping. The tool works by slightly altering an image’s pixels (像素) in a way that confuses the computer vision system but leaves the image unaltered to a human’s eyes. If an organization then scrapes one of these images to train a future AI model, its data pool becomes “poisoned”. This can result in mistaken learning, which makes the generator return unintended results. As in our earlier example, a balloon might become an egg.
The higher the number of “poisoned” images in the training data, the greater the impact. Because of how generative AI works, the damage from “poisoned” images also affects related prompt keywords. For example, if a “poisoned” image of a Picasso work is used in training data, prompt results for masterpieces from other artists can also be affected.
Possibly, tools like Nightshade can be abused by some users to intentionally upload “poisoned” images in order to confuse AI generators. But the Nightshade’s developer hopes the tool will make big tech companies more respectful of copyright. It does challenge a common belief among computer scientists that data found online can be used for any purpose they see fit.
Human rights activists, for example, have been concerned for some time about the indiscriminate use of machine vision in wider society. This concern is particularly serious concerning facial recognition. There is a clear connection between facial recognition cases and data poisoning, as both relate to larger questions around technological governance. It may be better to see data poisoning as an innovative solution to the denial of some fundamental human rights.
1. The underlined word “scraping” (para. 2) is closest in meaning to ____.| A．facilitating | B．collecting | C．damaging | D．polishing |
| A．increase the accuracy of returned information |
| B．cause users to forget the prompt key words |
| C．interfere with the training of generative AI |
| D．discriminate against great masterpieces |
| A．Data poisoning is somehow justified to direct attention to human rights. |
| B．Computer scientists has learned to respect the copyright of most artists. |
| C．Nightshade is being abused by human rights activists to recognize faces. |
| D．The issue of technological governance has aroused the lawyers’ interest. |
| A．Data Poisoning: Government Empowering Citizens to Protect Themselves |
| B．Data Poisoning: Addressing Facial Recognition Issues Among Artists |
| C．Data Poisoning: Risks and Rewards of Generative AI Data Training |
| D．Data Poisoning: Restricting Innovation or Empowering Artists |
1. Where does kiwifruit (猕猴桃) originally come from?
| A．America. | B．New Zealans. | C．China. |
| A．In 1923. | B．In 1930. | C．In 1959. |
| A．An American company. | B．A Japanese company. | C．A France company. |
10 . Phonetic (语音) information—the smallest sound elements of speech - is considered by researchers to be the basis of language. Babies are thought to learn these small sound elements and add them together to make words. But a new study suggests that phonetic information is learnt too late and slowly for this to be the case. Instead, rhythmic (有韵律的) speech helps babies learn language and is effective even in the first few months of life.
Researchers from the Trinity College Dublin investigated babies’ ability to process phonetic information during their first year. Their study, published in the journal Nature Communications. found that phonetic information wasn’t successfully encoded (编码) until seven months old, and did not occur very often at 11 months old when babies began to say their first words. From then individual speech sounds are still added in very slowly—too slowly to form the basis of language.
The researchers recorded patterns of brain activity in 50 babies at four, seven, and eleven months old as they watched a video of a primary school teacher singing 18 nursery rhymes (童谣) to a baby. They found that phonetic encoding in babies appeared inchmeal over the first year of life, beginning with labial sounds (e.g. “d” for “daddy”) and nasal sounds (e.g. “m” for “mummy”), with the “read out” progressively looking more like that of adults.
“The reason why we use nursery rhymes is because that is the best way for babies to discover and connect sounds with language, so we are teaching them how to speak,” said Giovanni Di Liberto, lead author of the study at Trinity College Dublin in Ireland. “Parents should talk and sing to their babies as much as possible or use baby-directed speech because it will make a difference to language outcome,” she added.
1. What should babies learn in the first few months of life according to the new study?| A．Small sound elements | B．Rhythmic information. |
| C．Phonetic information. | D．Individual words. |
| A．The poor phonetic encoding in babies. | B．The advantages of phonetic information. |
| C．The babies’ great ability to learn language. | D．The babies’ growing process in the first year. |
| A．Gradually. | B．Suddenly. | C．Successfully. | D．Occasionally. |
| A．When Babies Are Able to Say Their First Words |
| B．How Phonetic Information Changes Over Time |
| C．Why Phonetic Is Better Than Rhythmic for Babies |
| D．Why Babies Need Nursery Rhymes for Language Mastery |
