If history doesn’t quite repeat
For a few heady years in the 1890s, the bicycle was the must-have — swift, affordable, stylish transportation that could take you anywhere you cared to go, anytime you
Society
By 1898 cycling had become
2 . We all know how colors alter how we feel when looking at pictures, but shapes are just as powerful in affecting us psychologically. They not only provide the framework for the physical world,
Because of its structure, the triangle is often used to represent perseverance and achievement. Its wide base indicates the struggle or the journey,
Squares and, similarly, rectangles are the most common shapes you see in man-made objects.
The square’s positive attributes aren’t just limited to physical entities; it also works well in adding emotional and aesthetic (审美的) layers to images.
| A．it can also produce mystery |
| B．if you want to make a photo that looks different |
| C．while its pointy tip, or the peak, represents the goal |
| D．but they influence how we observe the space around us |
| E．In graphic arts, this shape symbolizes balance and stability |
| F．Its lines and angles make it perfect for framing a scene in a photo |
| G．You find them everywhere from picture frames to large buildings |
3 . A recent discovery shows that our dance style is almost always the same, regardless of the type of music, and a computer can identify the dancer with astounding accuracy. Over the last few years, researchers at the Centre for Interdisciplinary Music Research at the University of Jyväskylä in Finland have used motion capture (动作捕捉) technology — the same kind used in Hollywood — to learn that your dance moves say a lot about you, such as how active or anxious you are, what mood you happen to be in, and even how much you empathize (共情) with other people. Recently, however, they discovered something that surprised them. “We actually weren’t looking for this result, as we set out to study something completely different,” explains Dr. Emily Carlson, the first author of the study.
The 73 participants in the study were motion captured dancing to seven different genres: Blues, Country, Dance/Electronica, Jazz, Metal, Pop and Rap. The only instruction they received was to listen to the music and move any way that felt natural. “We think it’s important to study phenomena as they occur in the real world, which is why we employ a naturalistic research example,” says Professor Petri Toiviainen, the senior author of the study.
The researchers analysed participants’ movements using machine learning, trying to distinguish between the musical styles. Unfortunately, their computer was able to identify the correct style less than 30% of the time. They were shocked to discover, however, that the computer could correctly identify which of the 73 individuals was dancing 94% of the time. “It seems as though a person’s dance movements are a kind of finger print,” says Dr. PasiSaari, co-author of the study and data analyst. “Each person has a unique movement signature that stays the same no matter what kind of music is playing.”Does this mean that face-recognition software will soon be joined by dance-recognition software? “We’re less interested in applications like surveillance(监视) than in what these results tell us about human musicality,” Carlson explains. “We have a lot of new questions to ask, like whether our movement signatures stay the same across our lifespan.”
1. What is the original purpose of the study?| A．To test the dancers’ flexibility. |
| B．To select more excellent dancers. |
| C．To check the accuracy of motion capture technology. |
| D．To analyze people’s personality with their dance moves. |
| A．Move as they like. | B．Determine the style of music. |
| C．Imagine they’re employers. | D．Recognize this tune that is playing. |
| A．It’s an accidental discovery. | B．It’s an unbelievable example. |
| C．It’s a misunderstood fingerprint. | D．It’s a unique method for computers. |
| A．Developing a face-recognition software. |
| B．Promoting it in the application market. |
| C．Learning further about human response to music. |
| D．Finding out the relationship between movements and lifespan. |
4 . Even if we’ve never laid eyes on a certain person, the sound of their voice can relay a lot of information: whether they are male or female, old or young, or perhaps an accent indicating which nation they might come from. While it is possible for us to randomly deduce someone’s facial features, it’s likely that we won’t be able to clearly piece together what someone’s face looks like based on the sound of their voice alone. However, it’s a different matter when machines are put to the task, as researchers from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) have discovered in developing an AI that can vividly reconstruct people’s faces with relatively impressive detail, using only short audio clips(音频片段) of their voices as reference.
Named Speech2Face, the neural(神经的) network — a computer that “thinks” in a manner similar to the human brain — was trained by scientists on millions of educational videos from the Internet that showed over 100,000 different people talking. From this dataset, Speech2Face learned associations between vocal cues(声带) and certain physical features in a human face, researchers wrote in a new study. The AI then used an audio clip to model a photorealistic face matching the voice.
However, the tool was far from perfect. Speech2Face turned out “mixed performance” when confronted with language variations. For example, when the AI listened to an audio clip of an Asian man speaking Chinese, the program produced an image of an Asian face. However, when the same man spoke in English in a different audio clip, the AI generated the face of a white man, the scientists reported.
Thankfully, AI doesn’t know exactly what a specific individual looks like based on their voice alone. Voice privacy otherwise would be a concern like face recognition for us. The neural network recognized certain markers in speech that pointed to gender(性别), age and ethnicity(种族), features that are shared by many people, the study authors reported.“As such, the model will only produce average-looking faces,” the scientists wrote. “It will not produce images of specific individuals.”
1. What can best replace the underlined word “deduce” in Paragraph1?| A．Mistake. | B．Guess. | C．Record. | D．Search. |
| A．It produces the results with great accuracy. |
| B．It allows thousands of people to talk at the same time. |
| C．It has learnt the connection between speech and appearance. |
| D．It can tell the differences between the Chinese and the Europeans. |
| A．Skeptical. | B．Confused. | C．Favorable. | D．Worried. |
| A．MIT’s New Discovery Give a Surprise to People. |
| B．AI Generated Your Faces by Listening to Your Voices. |
| C．Your Voice Could Give Away Your Nationality with the AI Tool. |
| D．Speech2Face: Neural Network Recognized You Behind a Picture. |
Tears are good for your eyes. In fact, without them, your eyes wouldn’t even be able to move. Some people say tears help us in other ways, too. Maybe you know someone who likes to watch sad movies in order to “have a good cry”. It hasn’t been proven, but tears may be good not only for your eyes but also for your emotional health as well.
We generally only notice tears when we cry, but we have them in our eyes all the time. Tears affect how we see the world while at the same time protecting our eyes from it. Without this liquid covering them, our eyes would be at risk of infection. In addition, we need tears in order to see. The cornea (角膜) of the eye does not have a perfectly smooth surface. Tears fill in the holes in the cornea and make it smooth so that we can see clearly. Without tears, the world would look very strange to us.
There are three types of tears, and they are called basal, reflex, and emotional tears. These three types are different not only in purpose but also in composition.
Tom Lutz, the author of Crying: The Natural and Cultural History of Tears, writes, “Throughout history, and in every culture, ... everyone everywhere cries at some time.” Even men and women who say they never cry can usually remember crying as children. Most of us probably think it’s normal for men or women to cry at certain times, and at such times, we may even encourage them to cry. For example, it’s no surprise when someone cries during a sad movie, and we often expect people to cry when a family member dies. However, we don’t always take this view of tears. Sometimes adults who cry — or even children who do — lose the respect of others. For example, what would you think of an adult who cried over losing a card game? Most people are aware of the social rules about when, where, and why it’s OK to cry. These rules generally differ for children and adults, and often for men and women. They depend on things such as family, culture, and religion, and they change over time.
Some people think it’s not just OK to cry but actually healthy to let the tears flow. Doctors in Greece over 2,500 years ago thought that tears came from the brain and that everyone needed to let them out. Today, many people still believe in getting tears out. They say that through crying, we get rid of emotions we have stored up, which is good for our mental health. Some people report that they feel better after crying. This could be because of the chemicals in emotional tears. One chemical is a type of endorphin, a painkiller that the body naturally produces. Emotional tears increase the amount of endorphin that gets to the brain because tears flow from the eye into the nose and pass to the brain that way. This painkiller may make a person less aware of sad or angry feelings, and that could explain why someone feels better after “a good cry”.
1. When do we have tears in our eyes?
2. How do tears help us see clearly?
3. How many kinds of tears do we have?
4. Please list at least two things that are related to the social rules of crying.
5. In which country did doctors over 2,500 years ago believe that tears came from the brain?
6 . Art and science may seem like opposite things. One means the creative flow of ideas, and the other means cold, hard data-some people believe. In fact, the two have much in common. Now, a study finds art can help students remember better what they have learned in the science class.
Mariale Hardiman, an education specialist at Johns Hopkins University, noticed that students who used art in the classroom listened more carefully. They might ask more questions. They might volunteer more ideas. What’s more, students seemed to remember more of what they had been taught when their science lessons had involved(涉及) art. To prove that, Hardiman teamed up with some researchers and six local schools.
In the experiment, the researchers worked with teachers in 16 fifth-grade classrooms. They provided traditional science lessons and art-focused ones. In a traditional science class, for example, students might read aloud from a book. In the art-focused one, they might sing the information instead.
The team randomly assigned(随机分配) each of the 350 students to either a traditional science classroom or an art-focused one. Students then learned science using that way for the whole unit-about three weeks. When they changed to a new topic, they also changed to the other type of class. This way, each student had both an art-focused class and a traditional one. Every unit was taught in both ways, to different groups of students. This enabled the researchers to see how students did in both types of classes.
The team found that students who started off in a traditional class performed better after they moved into an art-focused class. But those who started off in an art-focused class did well even when they went back to a traditional science class. These students appeared to use some of the art techniques(技巧) after going back to a traditional class. Classroom teachers reported that many students continued to sing the songs that they learned after finishing the unit. “The more we hear something, the more we retain it,” Hardiman says. “It suggests that the arts may help students apply creative ways of learning on their own.”
1. Why did Mariale Hardiman do the study?| A．To prove the importance of art at school. |
| B．To see if art might improve science learning |
| C．To find a way to help her students learn better. |
| D．To know how to encourage students to ask questions. |
| A．Take two types of classes. | B．Learn three units in total. |
| C．Learn two topics for three weeks. | D．Choose what they’d like to learn. |
| A．Finish. | B．Express. | C．Improve. | D．Memorize. |
| A．Art helps students develop creativity. |
| B．Art-focused classes interest students a lot. |
| C．Art can make science easier to remember. |
| D．Art has something in common with science. |
A． | B． | C． | D． | E． |
Science fiction doesn’t always get the respect it deserves. My friend Ryan calls
Yes, science fiction is fun, but it’s also “real” literature. After all, some of
Not only
One accurate example by a science fiction writer is the invention of the automatic sliding door,
Okay, so maybe we could survive without automatic doors, but in the short story From the London Times of 1904 (published in 1898), Mark Twain described a m
9 . Humans are pretty unique among life on Earth. As far as we know, we’re the only living species to evolve the higher intelligence, wear clothes, cook our food, and even invent smartphones. But what if humans suddenly went extinct? What other animals might evolve to have the smarts and skills to create large,complex societies as we have?
With modern genetic technology and our understanding of evolution, “we’re pretty good at making short-term predictions. “Martha Reiskind, an ecologist, told Live Science. For example, we can predict that if humans were to disappear tomorrow, climate change would continue to drive many species to adapt to drought. And species living in cold areas would continue to struggle to live as well.
“A big thing will be the concept of convergence.” Dougal Dixon, a geologist, told Live Science Convergence is an evolutionary process by which two unrelated creatures develop similar features in order to succeed in a particular environment. For example, with their sleek (光滑的) bodies and fins, fish are suitable for living in water. However, dolphins have evolved a very similar body plan—and unlike fish, they are warm-blooded, air-breathing animals with a totally different evolutionary background.
One feature that makes humans uniquely good at building is our skillful hands. In order to fill the same role as humans—that is, building cities and heavily modifying our environment—another species would need to develop a similar ability to control objects. Other primates (灵长目动物), like chimpanzees. our closest living relatives, already can make tools in the wild. It’s possible that if humans disappeared, they might replace us.
But any disaster terrible enough to destroy humans is also likely to destroy chimpanzees, which leaves another tool-using candidate to fill humans place: birds. Birds are very brainy. Some birds can use their feet to form wire into hooks. And trained African grey parrots can learn upwards of 100 words and do simple math, including understanding the concept of zero. Birds can also gather in large groups, and some even build group nesting sites.
Of course, all of these are predictions. Scientists have said it’s almost impossible to truly predict how evolution will unfold. As we go further and further out, the prediction is less accurate. And it’s even more difficult to predict whether another species will develop human-level intelligence, Some think that it could happen. Others, however, are less optimistic because they don’t think nature will make mistakes twice.
1. Why does the author mention fish and dolphins in Para. 3?| A．To show how dolphins evolved |
| B．To explain what convergence is. |
| C．To show the advantage of the fish shape |
| D．To explain the feature of animals living in water. |
| A．The ability to make tools | B．The habit of group living |
| C．The ability to do simple math | D．The close relationship with humans |
| A．Sea animals. | B．Chimpanzees |
| C．Birds. | D．Dogs. |
| A．Hopeless. | B．Challenging. |
| C．Promising. | D．Uncertain. |
10 . Did you know roughly one third of food for human consumption goes to waste? Most of it is fresh fruits and vegetables that go bad. The produce dries out or goes bad, which has led scientists to develop ways of coating or sealing the food to keep it fresher for longer. Now research at Rice University reveals there might be a better way.
Scientists discovered that dipping produce like strawberries and bananas into an egg-based was his remarkably good for preserving it. The coating is extremely thick, and made from a mixture of powdered egg whites and yolks(70%), and some wood-sourced cellulose(纤维素) to act as a barrier preventing water loss.
What the scientists found was that the egg-based wash made a significant difference in helping produce stay fresh over a two-week observation period. The appearance of the coated fruits and vegetables didn’t change much, while the uncoated produce ripened and even rotted within the same timeframe. The egg-based coating, as it turned out, reduced each fruit’s chance to get exposed to oxygen.
The non-poisonous coating was found to be flexible and tests showed that it was just as tough as other products， including synthetic films(合成膜), used in produce packaging. For anyone with an egg allergy, the coating can be removed by thorough washing in water and is tasteless.
The scientists hope this could be a breakthrough in the fight against food waste. “Reducing food shortages in ways that are not related to genetic modification, uneatable coatings or chemical additives is important for better sustainable living,” said materials scientist and study author Pulickel Ajayan.
What’s great about this discovery is that it fights food waste in more than one way: even the coating was made from eggs that would otherwise have been thrown away because they weren’t fit for consumption. The researchers said roughly 200 million of US produced eggs go to waste annually. So if this were scaled up, it could be a win-win situation all around.
1. How does the egg-based wash help keep food fresh?| A．By making its coating less thick. | B．By limiting its oxygen exposure. |
| C．By removing its cellulose slowly. | D．By improving its absorbent ability. |
| A．To stress the seriousness of food shortage. | B．To show the significance of the discovery. |
| C．To offer the method of cutting food waste. | D．To give brief description of the research. |
| A．Optimistic. | B．Doubtful. | C．Cautious. | D．In different. |
| A．How to use eggs creatively. | B．A breakthrough in technology. |
| C．How to recycle food waste. | D．A new way to preserve food. |
