【推荐1】The death of the plastic credit card could be a step closer as high street names including McDonald's and the Co-op prepare to test a breakthrough finger-scanning payment technology.

FingoPay, developed by British start-up Sthaler, uses a biometric reader to scan the veins of a shopper’s finger, building up a “map” that is unique to each individual.

By connecting this pattern with a credit card or bank account, the company plans to let shoppers pay simply by placing their finger in a pocket-sized scanner, doing away with cash and credit cards.

Sthaler, founded by former music industry executive Nick Dryden, will begin testing the technology next month in Proud, a London nightclub. Mr. Dryden said McDonald's is experimenting with a pilot of the technology, and that Sthaler is also planning a project with Co-op’s food stores.

It comes amid growing interest in using biometric identification in payments, which backers believe are more secure and efficient than passwords and PINs. Apple Pay, which uses the iPhone’s fingerprint technology, launched in the UK in 2015 and was followed by the Android equivalent in May 2016.

Hendrik Kleinsmiede, the director of Visa Europe’s innovation arm Collab, which is backing Sthaler, said the Fingopay technology was less immune to problems such as wet and dusty fingers or fraud. “People are ready to accept biometrics as a secure authentication mechanism,” he said.

Sthaler says the chance that two people have the same vein structure is 3.4bn-to-one, making it virtually impossible to crack. The vein scanner, developed by Hitachi, is already being used by Barclays to identify business customers as well as in cash machines in Japan, but Sthaler has the unique rights to license it to retailers.

In the trial at Proud set to begin in September, the technology will be used to speed up waiting times at the bar both by cutting down on cards and by being able to suggest drinks based on what a patron has previously ordered.

1. Which of the following is TRUE about Fingopay?

A．It works by identifying shoppers’ fingerprints.

B．It scans the finger veins to identify shoppers.

C．It was first tested on Barclays’ cash machines in Japan.

D．It is currently being tested in the Co-op Group’s food stores.

2. According to Hendrik Kleinsmiede, ________.

A．it is impossible to find two people who share the same vein structure

B．people have to clean their hands before they use Fingopay

C．it won’t be long before biometrics are more widely used

D．Fingopay technology is much more effective than passwords and PINs

3. What can we conclude from the last paragraph?

A．The use of Fingopay technology has bought in more customers.

B．Fingopay technology helps businesses to meet customers’ needs.

C．Fingopay technology could increase the sales of certain drinks.

D．The use of Fingopay technology wasn’t allowed in the trial at Proud.

4. What might be the best title of the passage?

A．Pay with your vein: Fingopay

B．Cedit cards vs. Fingopay

C．Different ways of payment

D．A new technology: fingerprints

【推荐3】From writing Shakespeare-style poetry to making music, ChatGPT has amazed he world since its launch in late 2022 by the US-based company OpenAI. It even passed several law exams in four courses at the Unlversity of Minnesota, US.

The AI program can answer questions on a whole host of topics and write essays, stories and any other written texts you can think of. It does this by drawing on information collected from a large corpus (语料库) of text data.

What makes ChatGPT so impressive? As Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI said n an interview, “It’s not actually a fundamentally new technology that made this (ChatGPT) have a moment.” According to MIT Technology Review, ChatGPT is based on GPT-3, a large language model. Because texts are more complex than the meaning of every word combined, language models require a type of neural network (神经网络) that can make sense of texts.

One breakthrough behind today’s model is a network called Transformer, which was invented by Google researchers in 2017. The neural network can infer word meanings by tracking where the word appears in a sentence. Transformer can therefore gather the meaning of texts more accurately.

The GPT models were built by OpenAI combined Transformer with unsupervised (无人指导的) learning, meaning that the models can learn by themselves without being told what to look at. ChatGPT can now generate human-like responses instantly due to the large scale (规模) of texts It made sense of and learned from.

“One of the biggest problems with ChatGPT is that it comes back, very confidently, with falsities,” Michael Wooldridge at the Alan Turing Institute in London, UK. This means that ChatGPT doesn’t know the truth about the world — it learns information from various resources but It cannot decide what is true or false. As for education, many US schools recently banned students from using ChatGPT on school networks because students began to use it as a shortcut for essays.

1. What aspect of ChatGPT is most impressive?

A．The neural network.	B．The large text database.
C．The ability to combine words.	D．The application of technology.

2. What is the key to ChatGPT’s response like humans?

A．Data-based communication.	B．Learning from masses of texts.
C．Human-guided machine learning.	D．Collecting texts for a large corpus.

3. What is the author’s attitude toward ChatGPT?

A．Supportive.

B．Confused.

C．Objective.

D．Confident.

4. What can be a suitable title for the text?

A．Is ChatGPT a Good Translator?

B．Should ChatGPT be Banned at School?

C．Can ChatGPT Choose True Information?

D．Will ChatGPT be the Wonder of Modern Technology?

【推荐2】The second little pig was unlucky. He built his house from sticks, which was blown away by a wolf. His brother, by contrast, built a wolf-proof house from bricks. The fairy tale could have been written by an agent for the construction industry, strongly favoring brick, concrete and steel. However, in the real world it would help reduce pollution and slow global warming if more builders copied the wood-loving second pig.

No other building material has environmental credentials (认证信息) as exciting and overlooked as wood. The energy required to produce a laminated wooden beam (层压木梁) is one-sixth of that required for a steel one of comparable strength. As trees take carbon out of the atmosphere when growing, wooden buildings contribute to negative emissions by storing the stuff. And for refitting older buildings to be more energy efficient, wood is a good insulator (绝缘体). A softwood window frame provides nearly 400 times as much insulation as a plain steel one of the same thickness and over a thousand times as much as an aluminium (铝) equivalent.

But such bigger stories are still uncommon. Governments can help push the industry to use more wood, particularly in the public sector — the construction industry’s biggest client. That would help wood-building specialists achieve greater scale and lower costs. Zero-carbon building regulations should be altered to take account of the emissions that are presented in materials.

Construction codes could be regulated to make building with wood easier. Here the direction of travel is wrong. Britain, for instance, is banning the use of timber on the outside of tall buildings after 72 people died in a tower fire in London in 2017. That is a nonsense. Grenfell Tower was covered in aluminium and plastic, not wood. Modern cross-laminated timber (交叉层叠木板) panels perform better in fire tests than steel ones do.

Carpentry alone will not bring the environmental cost of the world’s buildings into line. But using wood can do much more than is appreciated. The second little pig was not wrong, just before his time.

1. The purpose of the writer telling the story in the first paragraph is to _______.

A．attract the readers’ attention	B．make the argument more convincing
C．criticize the author of the tale	D．lead in the topic of the text

2. Paragraph 2 is intended to inform us _______.

A．wood is a good insulator

B．such skyscrapers with wood are uncommon currently

C．the unique advantages of wood material being friendly environmental

D．how wood reduces the emission of carbon dioxide

3. Which of the following does NOT belong to the governments’ measures to help the scheme?

A．To encourage the construction industry’s biggest client to use more wood.

B．To transform Zero-carbon building regulations.

C．To arouse the public’s awareness of protecting the woods.

D．To regulate the Construction codes.

4. The author may imply that _______.

A．the second pig in the tale was unlucky

B．the outside of tall buildings Grenfell Tower could have been constructed in wood

C．we haven’t appreciated the characteristics of using wood at all

D．wood-building specialists will achieve greater profits

【推荐3】How can we possibly cope with the large amount of information about virus spread, canceled plans and uncertainty about the future? Some people are buried in the fear, anxiety and sadness, checking news sites and social media constantly. Others try to be prevented from knowing it all and ignore the outside world.

There's a third option, though. Rather than fully getting involved in the negative or ignoring it, we can do our best to experience joy alongside everything else that is sad in the world. In fact, research that and others have conducted suggests that allowing the two different emotions to coexist may actually benefit us in the long run.

Dr. Jeff Larsen and his colleagues invented an expression known as the “coactivation model of mixed emotions”, and the basic idea is that we may be able to deal with, and learn from negative emotions like sadness if we experience them concurrently with positive emotions like joy at the same time. Here, positive emotions provide a psychological buffer (缓冲),making it easier for people to deal with the things they don't want to face.

The comedian Mitch Hedberg proposed ananalogythat captures this essence quite well, noting that it would be cool if you could eat a carrot with an onion ring and they would travel down to your stomach. Then they would get there, and the carrot would say, “It's cool, he's with me.” Applied to our emotional lives, we could do a better job in digesting,processing gaining insight into the negative events in our lives if we could do so alongside the positive.

Several years ago, my partner Jon Adler and I set out to test this exact idea. Specifically, we looked at sample of adult volunteers who signed up for weekly mental , health therapy sessions. Between each week, they reported the feelings they were having and also took a few questionnaires that were meant to assess their overall health. This design allowed us to examine how different emotional experiences would impact mental health in a longitudinal fashion, over the course of 12 weeks.

It's worth noting first that everyone seemed to improve a bit as the weeks marched on:therapy helps and so does time. More to the point, though, mixed emotions at one time point were positively associated with improvements in psychological well-being at the next time point. The more of a mixture of, say, happiness and sadness someone experienced today, the better feeling they'd experience next week.

However, when we looked at mixed emotions that were experienced in a given week, they weren't associated with improved mental health in that same week.

The true benefit from mixed emotions may not happen immediately, but rather, likely happen sometime in the future.

1. What does the author recommend people do with a flood of bad news?

A．Take no notice of it at all.

B．Make better plans to fight against it.

C．Take in all of the negative emotions.

D．Get involved in the negative and enjoy happiness as well.

2. Which of the following may Jeff Larsen agree with?

A．Mixed emotions remain to be proved.

B．The negative emotion is easy to deal with.

C．The positive emotion makes it easier for people to succeed.

D．Mixed emotions allow people to handle the negative better.

3. What does the underlined word “analogy” in paragraph 4 mean?

A．Exhibition.

B．Promotion.

C．Similarity.

D．Requirement.

4. Why were lots of questions asked during the research?

A．To measure the volunteers health on the whole.

B．To record what the volunteers are experiencing.

C．To treat the mental diseases of the adults.

D．To over turn the theory co activation model of mixed emotions.

5. What is the main idea of the passage?

A．Ignore bad news completely to make you cutoff from outside and feel happy.

B．Make your negative emotions less severe by focusing on positive ones.

C．Negative emotions will eventually benefit people in the long run.

D．Positive and negative emotions can not coexist at the same time.

【推荐1】Scientists have not found any signs of life on Mars yet,but they say a robotic vehicle called “Curiosity” is helping them learn a lot about the planet’s history and climate.

Curiosity landed on Mars in August 2012 after travelling through space for more than eight months.It was sent to Mars by scientists from NASA in the United States.

Curiosity is about the size of a car and has six wheels.It also has a robotic arm,cameras,and instruments that allow it to examine things it finds on the surface.Then it sends the information back to the earth.

Curiosity’s main task is to find out if anything could live on Mars,either now or in the past.On Nov.2,NASA scientists held a press conference (新闻发布会) to discuss what Curiosity had found in its first two months on Mars.

Curiosity has found soil that is similar to the sand formed by volcanoes (火山) on the earth.Scientists say that studying the minerals in Martian soil will help them understand what conditions were like on the planet in the past.Curiosity also found smooth stones like the ones found on river beds and seashores on the earth,where their rough edges have been worn down by water.Mars is very cold and dry now,but scientists say the smooth stones tell them that a river used to run through the place where they were found.

Curiosity has been testing the atmosphere around Mars for a type of gas called methane (甲烷),but so far it has not found any.On the earth,most methane is produced by plants or animals.Methane on Mars might indicate that some type of tiny plants or animals lived there.

Curiosity is the fourth robotic vehicle to be sent to Mars.It will continue to explore the planet for about two years.

1. Which of the following descriptions about Curiosity is TRUE?

A．It landed on Mars in January 2012.

B．It is small in size and has four arms.

C．It took over eight months to arrive in Mars.

D．It was sent to Mars by scientists from Russia.

2. According to the information sent back by Curiosity,scientists believe that 　　　.

A．there’s no air on Mars	B．Mars is warm and wet now
C．the soil on Mars is rich	D．there used to be water on Mars

3. The underlined word “they” in Paragraph 5 refers to “　　　”.

A．smooth stones	B．rivers
C．robotic vehicles	D．volcanoes

4. We know from the sixth paragraph that 　　　.

A．some tiny animals once lived on Mars

B．there are no plants or animals on Mars now

C．the atmosphere around Mars is full of methane

D．Curiosity is designed to test the atmosphere around the earth

5. What is the main idea of the passage?

A．Humans benefit a lot by going to Mars.

B．Scientists will stop the research on Mars soon.

C．It is possible to build an earth-like environment on Mars.

D．A robotic vehicle helps scientists get useful information from Mars.

【推荐2】When you close your eyes and try to think of the shape of your own body, what you imagine (or rather, what you feel) is quite different from what you see when you open your eyes and look in the mirror. The image you feel is much vaguer（模糊的） than the one you see. And if you lie still, it is quite hard to imagine yourself as having any particular size or shape.
When you move, when you feel the weight of your arms and legs and the natural resistance of the objects around you, the “felt” image of yourself starts to become clearer. It is almost as if it were created by your own actions and the feelings they cause.
The image you create for yourself has rather strange proportions（部分）; certain parts feel much larger than they look. If you get a hole in one of your teeth, it feels enormous; you are often surprised by how small it looks when you inspect it in the mirror.
Although the “felt” image may not have the shape you see in the mirror, it is much more important. It is the image through which you recognize your physical existence in the world. In spite of its strange proportions, it is all one piece, and since it has a consistent right and left and a top and bottom, it allows you to locate new feelings when they occur. It allows you to find your nose in the dark and point to a pain.
If the felt image is damaged for any reason—if it is cut in half or lost as it often is after certain strokes （中风）which wipe out recognition of one entire side –these tasks become almost impossible. What is more, it becomes hard to make sense of one’s own visual appearance. If one half of the “felt” image is wiped out or injured, the patient stops recognizing the affected part of his body. It is hard for him to find the location of feelings on that side, and, although he feels the doctor’s touch, he locates it as being on the undamaged side.
1. According to the passage the “felt” image          the mirror image.

A．is precisely the same as	B．is as clear as
C．often different from	D．is always much smaller than

2. Which of the following statements is NOT true?

A．The felt Image is much more important because it helps you locate new feelings.

B．When you are in bed with your eyes closed, it is not easy to imagine your image.

C．When you move, the “felt” image of yourself starts to become clearer.

D．The “felt” image is not so important as the mirror image.

3. If a man loses the ability to recognize his right side,           .

A．he can’t locate the doctor’s touch on his left side

B．he can’t locate the doctor’s touch on his right side

C．he loses his sense of touch on the left side

D．he loses feeling on both sides

4. What is this passage mainly about?

A．Stroke victims’ “felt” images

B．Stroke victims’ mirror images.

C．The importance of “felt” images

D．The importance of mirror images.

【推荐3】For as long as we’ve known about it, humans have searched for a cure for cancer. Across the world, countless amounts of time and money have been spend on researching a way to stop the terrible disease.

But now, it seems like the answer could have been inside our own bodies the whole time.

Recently, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in the US, a government agency that’s responsible for healthcare, approved a new form of gene therapy that could mean the end of a certain type of cancer.

The therapy allows scientists to “train” the immune cells of sick patients to fight leukemia – a blood cancer that mostly affects young people.

The exciting new treatment works by removing healthy immune cells from the patient, known as T-cells, which are then altered to be able to “hunt down” cancer cells.

The cells are then put back into the patient, before they begin to get rid of the patient’s leukemia over time, similar to how the body fights off other illnesses.

“This is truly an exciting new day for cancer patients,” Louis J. DeGennaro, president of the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society, said in a news release. Up until now, a drawn-out （持续很久时间的）and painful bone marrow transplant was the only option for many leukemia patients.

In this procedure, healthy blood cells are taken from a donor and placed into the sick patient, who also has to go through chemotherapy to allow their body to adjust to the new cells.

But with a recovery rate of around 83 percent–according to a news release published by the FDA–it’s hoped that the days of painful trips to the hospital, or even death, are over for leukemia sufferers.

“We’re entering a new frontier in medical innovation with the ability to reprogram a patient’s own cells to attack a deadly cancer,” FDA commissioner Scott Gottlieb said in the release.

“New technologies such as gene and cell therapies hold the potential to transform medicine and... our ability to treat and even cure many intractable（难治的） illnesses.”

1. Which of the following is NOT true according to the passage?

A．Scientists take healthy immune cells from a patient and then reprogram them to help fight some cancer.

B．Much time and effort have been put to stop cancer

C．Scientists have now found a new form of gene therapy which can cure leukemia.

D．The altered T-cells are expected to find and fight cancer cells.

2. The underlined phrase “hurt down” can be replaced by____.

A．fight off.

B．cure.

C．search for.

D．treat.

3. It can be inferred that ____.

A．new technologies such as gene and cell therapies hold the potential to transform medicine.

B．the new therapy may save leukemia patients from painful bone marrow transplant.

C．the new therapy still requires blood cell donations.

D．science enters a new frontier in medical innovation.

【推荐1】It’s that time of the year again, when Apple fans go crazy about the release (发行) of the new iPhone. The new model, which will be released in the Chinese mainland later this year, is a little bit longer than the iPhone4S.

Although the size changed, the model is actually thinner and lighter than last one. It comes with a high-resolution “retina” screen that’s sharper than the 4S, according to Apple.

So far, demand for the iPhone5 has been higher than expected (预计的), with 2 million pre-orders (预定) made in the first 24 hours. But while the new phone excited many people, it also left a lot of people disappointed (失望). Mat Honan called the iPhone5 “completely amazing and very boring”. “Though we’ve reached the sixth iPhone, things have got so good that Apple does not change very much any more,” he said. “And so you get the iPhone5, which looks like a longer, thinner one of the iPhone4.”

When Steve Jobs introduced the iPhone back in 2006, it won praise from all over the world. Similar praise was given to Apple when it introduced the first iPad in 2010.

However, recent smart-phone designs have failed to satisfy people as much. Stephen Shankland said “it’s time to lower your expectations (期望).” This is because we have entered a time where it is harder for phone designers to come up with better ideas and changes. It could be some time before someone comes up with the next big idea.

1. Apple fans are going crazy because of______.

A．the size of the new phone	B．the release of iPhone5
C．the length of the new phone	D．the sharper screen

2. The iPhone 5 is different from the iPhone 4S in all the following, EXCEPT its ______.

A．size	B．screen
C．weight	D．colour

3. Which of the following is TRUE according to the passage?

A．The iPhone5 is known to few people in the Chinese mainland.

B．The iPhone5 hasn't won the same praise as the first iPhone.

C．So far, two million people have pre-ordered the iPhone5.

D．People don’t have any expectations for the coming iPhone6.

4. Mat Honan thinks that the iPhone5 ______.

A．has not improved much	B．has nothing amazing
C．is not as good as the iPhone4S	D．looks more beautiful

5. What can we infer (推断) from the last two paragraphs?

A．The iPhone in 2006 and the first iPad were failures in the end.

B．There is still a long way to go to design a better iPhone.

C．The new iPhone5 impressed lots of people and was popular.

D．Stephen Shankland thought the iPhone5 is good enough.

【推荐2】SHOULD WE FIGHT NEW TECHNOLOGY?

This morning, I saw the shocking headline: “Passenger Dies When Car Crashes in Driverless Mode”. In the article, a lot of people said that the public should oppose the idea of developing driverless cars. They said that some advances in technology were unnecessary and could even be dangerous. Hence, we should cease accepting technology just because it is new. The newspaper reported that the car company had already apologized for the accident, but the families of the deceased said it was not enough. Nevertheless, the company still claimed that most people would be travelling in driverless cars one day soon.

On the one hand, there are many different groups of people around the world who live happily in the absence of new technology. Probably the most well-known are the Amish, a group of Christians living in rural America. They do not own or drive cars, watch TV, or use the Internet. They have lived mainly as farmers since the 18^th century, and they will probably be living the same way in the distant future. They advocate a simple life with an emphasis on hard work, family, and community. They think that is better than caring about luxuries or following the lives of the rich and famous. It could even be argued that the Amish’s quality of life is better since they live in and appreciate the natural environment rather than living in large, polluted cities.

On the other hand, new technology has provided people everywhere with many benefits over the years. For example, the latest weather-tracking computer programs give people lots of warnings about potential natural disasters, which saves many lives. Moreover, the Internet has made it possible for friends and family to keep in touch easily even if they are on opposite sides of the world. It has also made finding opportunities in life much easier, as it allows people to make larger networks of friends through using social media.

Personally, I have benefited quite a lot from technological advances. I found my career as an AI designer through a social media network. My health monitor, which I wear all the time, has also helped me get into the best shape of my life. Of course, when new technology changes the way we live, it can be a scary prospect. Nevertheless, I will always look on the positive side of change and accept it rather than resist it.

1. What can we learn from the first paragraph?

A．A person died in an accident while driving his brand-new car.

B．The relatives of the victim would never accept the apology.

C．Many people took a negative attitude to this new technology.

D．The company was very concerned about the future of this new technology.

2. What is the author’s purpose in mentioning the Amish in the second paragraph?

A．To persuade us to follow their natural living style.

B．To tell us the Amish prefer a harmonious and peaceful life.

C．To prove people can still live better without new technology.

D．To advocate a simple life with family and community by hard work.

3. According to the third paragraph, which of the following benefits is not talked about?

A．Monitoring people’s physical health.

B．Providing chances in life more easily.

C．Predicting the earthquake and tsunami.

D．Helping people contact each other easily.

4. Why did the author decide to write about the passage?

A．To praise the advantages of new technology.

B．To show his supportive idea of new technology.

C．To criticize the disadvantages of new technology.

D．To arouse people’s concern about new technology.

【推荐3】Do you jump out of bed early, wide awake and ready to start your day？If so, you would be called an “early bird”. Perhaps, you hate the sound of your alarm clock each morning and have little energy until afternoon. If so, you're probably a “night owl”．

Most people can be divided into such two groups, but what makes us this way？And is one better than the other？There are different opinions.

Usually, early risers have been praised as hard-working while those who prefer to get up late are considered lazy. Most people believe the early bird catches the worm.

Yet some scientists now believe “night owls” can really focus(集中) longer and produce more than early risers.

Research has found that the early bird does not always get the worm. In a Belgian study, both “morning people” and “evening people” were watched during their normal asleep and awake routines(常规)．After 10 hours of being awake, the “evening people” became more alert(思维敏捷的). However, the “morning people” became sleepy and less focused. Researchers believe the reason for this difference is that night owls receive a last-minute increase from their brains. This added energy allows them to stay alert for longer periods of time.

Environment, lifestyle, activities and childhood routines all may have an effect on sleeping habits, yet genetics(遗传学)may play the biggest role.

It is possible to change your sleeping habits through regular bedtimes, early exercise and by avoiding midnight snacks. But if you're happy rising early or staying up late, you're probably doing what works best for your own personal body clock.

1. The author introduces the subject by ________.

A．telling an interesting story

B．giving different opinions

C．showing research results

D．asking a question

2. What does the underlined sentence in Paragraph 3 really mean?

A．Those who get up early achieve their goals.

B．Early to bed, early to rise is good for health.

C．“Night owls” can focus longer than “early birds”.

D．“Early birds” are as hard-working as “night owls”.

3. What did the researchers find in a Belgian study?

A．Late risers become sleepier than early risers.

B．Early risers become as focused as later risers.

C．Late risers can think quickly after being awaken for 10 hours.

D．Early risers can think clearly after being awake for 10 hours.

4. What opinion does the author finally agree to?

A．People should get up early.

B．Whatever time suits you, it’s OK.

C．Staying up late is good for health.

D．It’s impossible to change one’s sleeping habit.