Given the buzz it’s created, there’s a good chance you’ve heard about ChatGPT. It’s an interactive chatbot powered by machine learning. The technology has basically devoured the entire Internet, reading the collective works of humanity and learning patterns in language that it can recreate. All you have to do is give it a prompt (提示), and ChatGPT can do an endless array of things: write a story in a particular style, answer a question, explain a concept, compose an email—write a college essay-and it will spit out coherent, seemingly human—written text in seconds. The technology is both awesome and terrifying.
22-year-old Edward Tian is working feverishly on a new app to combat misuse of ChatGPT.
Over the last couple years, Tian has been studying an AI system called GPT-3, a predecessor to ChatGPT that was less user-friendly and largely inaccessible to the general public because it was behind a paywall. As part of his studies this fall semester, Tian researched how to detect text written by the AI system while working at Princeton’s Natural Language Processing Lab.
Then, as the semester was coming to a close, OpenAI, the company behind GPT-3 and other AI tools, released ChatGPT to the public for free. For the millions of people around the world who have used it since, interacting with the technology has been like getting a peek into the future; a future that not too long ago would have seemed like science fiction.
For many users of the new technology, wonderment quickly turned to alarm. How-many jobs will this kill? Will this empower nefarious (恶意的) actors and further corrupt our public discourse (公共话语)? How will this disrupt our education system? What is the point of learning to write essays at school when AI-which is expected to get exponentially better in the near future-can do that for us?
Tian had an idea. What if he applied what he had learned at school over the last couple years to help the public identify whether something has been written by a machine?
Tian already had the know-how and even the software on his laptop to create such a program. Ironically, this software, called GitHub Co-Pilot, is powered by GPT-3. With its assistance, Tian was able to create a new app within three days. It’s a testament to the power of this technology to make us more productive.
On January 2nd, Tian released his app GPTZero. It basically uses ChatGPT against itself, checking whether “there’s zero involvement or a lot of involvement” of the AI system in creating a given text.
When Tian went to bed that night, he didn’t expect much for his app. When he woke up, his phone had blown up. He saw countless texts and DMs from journalists, principals, teachers, you name it, from places as far away as France and Switzerland. His app, which is hosted by a free platform, became so popular it crashed. Excited by the popularity and purpose of his app, the hosting platform has since granted Tian the resources needed to scale the app’s services to a mass audience.
1. Which of the following statements is TRUE about GPT-3?| A．It’s designed and researched by Edward Tian in Princeton University |
| B．Not many ordinary people have used it because it is not free. |
| C．It is in the same AI system series as ChatGPT and GPTZero. |
| D．It used to be less user-friendly than ChatGPT but has outdone it now. |
| A．AI may replace human beings in the future when it comes to writing essays. |
| B．Actors may turn bad or even evil if the new technology is adopted in acting. |
| C．The education system may be badly impacted by the misuse of the new technology. |
| D．Many people may be out of employment because of the new technology. |
| A．the app is hosted by a free platform which is very popular. |
| B．they know many journalists are also very interested in it. |
| C．they are eager to share the resources Edward Tian is granted. |
| D．they are worried about the possibility of students cheating in writing. |
| A．Harm set, harm get. | B．Birds of a feather flock together. |
| C．Fight a man with his own weapon. | D．Great minds think alike. |
相似题推荐
【推荐1】Parkinson’s disease is a progressive neurological disorder caused by the deaths of neurons in parts of the brain. Symptoms include loss of motor control, mood disturbance, ruined sleep and altered sense of smell. It is incurable. Early medical intervention can, however, relieve these symptoms and prolong survival. That makes early diagnosis desirable.
Unfortunately, the initial signs of Parkinson’s vary from person to person and there is no specific test at this early stage which can reliably distinguish it from other brain illnesses. It therefore often goes undetected until clear and characteristic manifestations, such as shakes and slowed body movement, appear. But that may soon change. A study published in ACS Omega, by Chen Xing and Liu Jun at Zhejiang University, in China, describes an invention which may be able to detect Parkinson’s before the beginning of trembling. The device in question is an artificially intelligent electronic nose.
The two researchers set out to build this nose in 2019 when they heard reports of Joy Milne, a retired nurse living in Scotland, who could detect people with Parkinson’s from a characteristic smell they emitted—detectable by her, but undetectable by others.
Mrs Milne first noticed this smell when her husband developed the illness. She made the general connection later, when she smelled it at sufferers’ support groups attended by her spouse. She even noted one seemingly healthy individual as having the disease months before other symptoms developed.
Carting Mrs Milne around the world to sniff patients who may have Parkinson’s is, however, not a practical option, so researchers working with her looked for the smell’s source, with a view to detecting it in some other way. They found it in sebum, an oily liquid substance produced by the skin. The sebum of those with Parkinson’s, they discovered, has unusually high concentrations of certain organic compounds. When these are acted on by yeast cells which live naturally on the skin, the result is the mysterious smell.
This Parkinson’s-specific list can be detected using a laboratory technique called gas chromatography-mass spectrometry (gems). Unfortunately, GCMS machines are still too complex and expensive to be used routinely in clinics. However, Dr Chen and Dr Liu, who are both biomedical engineers, believed they could come up with a cheaper and more portable alternative.
The outcome is a machine not much bigger than a toaster. They found it could correctly identify a Parkinson’s patient as having the disease about 70% of the time and a healthy control as being clear of it about 80%. That is not yet as good as Mrs Milne’s nose, which has a history of correctly identifying the presence of Parkinson’s all the time. But it is a start. If its reliability can be improved, the portability and potential cheapness of the system may eventually prove a blessing for the early diagnosis of the illness.
1. What makes early detection of Parkinson’s disease out of the question?| A．The disease progresses too rapidly to spot quickly. |
| B．Early diagnosis relieves various symptoms and prolongs survival. |
| C．Early sufferers of Parkinson’s disease display few recognizable symptoms. |
| D．Dependable examination to diagnose Parkinson’s disease at an early stage is unavailable. |
| A．Mrs Milne first noticed the characteristic smell when attending a sufferer’s support group. |
| B．Mrs Milne can act as a mobile hospital to detect potential Parkinson’s patients. |
| C．Mrs Milne detected a Parkinson’s patient long before other signs appear. |
| D．Mrs Milne volunteered to participate in the research into finding the smell’s source. |
| A．Detecting the mysterious smell of Parkinson’s patients can only be done in a laboratory. |
| B．Parkinson’s patients have much more certain organic substances in their skin’s sebum. |
| C．A toaster-like Parkinson’s patients detecting machine is in high demand. |
| D．The artificially intelligent nose is expected to reliably detect various diseases in the future. |
| A．an enormous obstacle to the diagnosis of Parkinson’s disease |
| B．a sharp-nosed medical worker who can detect people with Parkinson’s |
| C．an economical and convenient method to detect Parkinson’s disease early |
| D．an explanation for Parkinson’s patients emitting a characteristic smell |
【推荐2】Artificial intelligence, or AI, has slowly begun to influence higher education around the world. Now, one new AI tool could change the way university students evaluate their professor. The tool is called Hubert, a teacher evaluation tool that appears as an AI-powered chatbot. Instead of filling out a form, students use a chat window to give feedback(反馈) on the course and their professor. Afterwards, Hubert categorizes the students’ comments for the professor to review.
Hubert is free for educators to use. More than 600 teachers have used it already. The goal of the new Hubert program is to improve education by giving teachers detailed, organized feedback from students.
Viktor Nordmark, from Sweden, started the company in 2015, with several friends. Before creating Hubert, the founders asked teachers what would improve their teaching skills. The answer, Nordmark said, was qualitative(定性的) feedback from their students. In other words, teachers wanted students to write detailed answers to open-ended questions about their experiences in class.
Qualitative feedback is different from the survey responses, which students are often asked to provide at the end of a class. “This kind of data takes a lot of time for professors to collect and analyze,” Nordmark said. And for the students, it can also be “really boring to fill out.” So Nordmark and his friends designed Hubert as a compromise between a traditional survey and a personal interview. “You can reach a really large crowd, but you can also get really qualitative data back,” Nordmark said.
Now, when Hubert receives comments from students, it compares them with the information already in its system to organize the data. Nordmark says that Hubert will continue to get smarter as it receives more comments in the future. Nordmark says he and his co-founders have plans to make Hubert more flexible and accurate. They hope to give teachers the possibility of selecting their own evaluation questions.
1. What can be inferred about traditional teacher evaluation?| A．Its data is easy to collect. |
| B．Users are charged for using it. |
| C．Students needn’t fill out forms. |
| D．Students find it dull to take part in it. |
| A．can improve the students’ performance at school |
| B．is students’ answers to teachers’ questions in class |
| C．can be obtained by asking students to fill out forms |
| D．is detailed responses to questions not for fixed answers |
| A．Being able to change itself to become smarter. |
| B．Saving much time when collecting survey forms. |
| C．Taking on the strengths of a survey and an interview. |
| D．Enabling teachers to select their own evaluation questions. |
| A．The characteristics of qualitative feedback. |
| B．A new AI-powered tool of teacher evaluation. |
| C．The changes in the way teachers are evaluated. |
| D．A potential revolution in the educational system. |
Recently, two researchers, Jose Millan and Michele Tavella from the Federal Polytechnic School in Lausanne, Switzerland, demonstrated (展示) a small robotic wheelchair directed by a person's thoughts.
In the laboratory, Tavella operated the wheelchair just by thinking about moving his left or right hand. He could even talk as he watched the vehicle and guided it with his thoughts.
“Our brain has billions of nerve cells. These send signals through the spinal cord (脊髓) to the muscles to give us the ability to move. But spinal cord injuries or other conditions can prevent these weak electrical signals from reaching the muscles.” Tavella says. “Our system allows disabled people to communicate with external world and also to control devices.”
The researchers designed a special cap for the user. This head cover picks up the signals from the scalp (头皮) and sends them to a computer. The computer interprets the signals and commands the motorized wheelchair. The wheelchair also has two cameras that identify objects in its path. They help the computer react to commands from the brain.
Prof. Millan, the team leader, says scientists keep improving the computer software that interprets brain signals and turns them into simple commands. “The practical possibilities that BCI technology offers to disabled people can be grouped in two categories: communication, and controlling devices. One example is this wheelchair.”
He says his team has set two goals. One is testing with real patients, so as to prove that this is a technology they can benefit from. And the other is to guarantee that they can use the technology over long periods of time.
1. BCI is a technology that can ________.
| A．help to update computer systems |
| B．link the human brain with computers |
| C．help the disabled to recover |
| D．control a person's thoughts |
| A．By controlling his muscles. |
| B．By talking to the machine. |
| C．By moving his hand. |
| D．By using his mind. |
| A．scalp→computer→cap→wheelchair |
| B．computer→cap→scalp→wheelchair |
| C．scalp→cap→computer→wheelchair |
| D．cap→computer→scalp→wheelchair |
| A．make profits from them |
| B．prove the technology useful to them |
| C．make them live longer |
| D．learn about their physical condition |
| A．Switzerland, the BCI Research Center |
| B．New Findings About How the Human Brain Works |
| C．BCI Could Mean More Freedom for the Disabled |
| D．Robotic Vehicles Could Help to Cure Brain Injuries |
【推荐1】On a February afternoon in a Brooklyn classroom, 16-year-old Taylor came face to face with a cow — but it was all in her head. A virtual (虚拟的) reality headset had transported her and eight classmates to a New York farm 250 miles away and for students, the technology means field trips are no longer limited by the length of a bus ride. “I was not expecting it to be right in my face!” Taylor said after peeling off the purple headset and finding herself back in her classroom.
On any given day, students nationwide are deep-sea diving, observing medical operations, even swimming through the human circulatory system using gadgets (小装置) that are becoming increasingly accessible in both cost and content. At least it’s another way to engage the iPhone generation of students and at best, it can enhance their understanding and improve their grades.
“It instantly grabs the students,” said Colin Jones, who teaches science in the Plainview-Old Bethpage Central School District. He has used a system called zSpace to dissect (解剖) cells and has walked goggled students through the boreal forest with a Google app called Expeditions. “It’s something that can be done in a period or two,” he said, “it could take even a week sometimes when you’re doing in a lab.”
In Brooklyn, Taylor and classmates virtually walked through barns and fields in Watkins Glen, stretching arms toward videotaped pigs and cows. “It’s different from watching video because you can have more than one perspective; you can actually move,” Taylor said.
Students can not only move, but also feel. In the lab, the physical effects of virtual reality become clear as subjects standing on solid ground teeter (摇晃) on storeys-high virtual scaffolding or experience motion sickness without moving.
“Some of the research we’re doing has actually shown that what you experience in virtual reality has very similar, if not the same, physiological responses that you would get if you were doing the actual activity, like your heart rate, cognition, breathing and even everything,” said Richard Lamb, who studies how the brain processes information at the University at Buffalo Neurocognition Science Lab. “The effect on learning is to improve interest, understanding and recall.”
It’s unknown how many classrooms have or will adopt the technology, but experts say it’s still relatively rare largely due to the fact that, while individual headsets that require a user’s phone can cost as little as $20 or $30, systems and software for classes run into thousands of dollars. Early complaints about a lack of good software are fading as more companies enter the market, but the rules for use haven’t necessarily caught up to the technology. In New York, for example, simulated lab experiments don’t count toward the state’s hands-on lab time requirements. Even so, the science is the area where virtual reality, especially enhanced to let users manipulate their surroundings, holds particular promise for classrooms.
“The biggest barrier, I think, is going to be the quality of that experience, how closely it mimics the physical world,” said David Evans, executive director of the National Science Teachers Association. “However, the ability to do dangerous things and to run many, many more common cases in a simulation (模拟) space as opposed to the real physical space represents a huge learning opportunity.”
Lamb, who taught chemistry, agreed. “Too often in schools, when we do things with labs, it’s... you mix this together, mix that together and get this outcome. And if you don’t get that outcome, you did something wrong, but we don’t have enough resources for you to redo it,” he said. In virtual reality, “all I do is hitting reset on the computer. I don’t have to actually use chemicals.”
Both Lamb and Evans stressed using the technology to have similar experience to their real world, where any number of subtle factors can affect an outcome. “ We have to remain anchored in the actual world,” Evans cautioned, “because that’s the one that we really need to explain.”
1. What’s Colin Jones’ attitude towards the application of virtual reality to teaching?| A．Positive. | B．Critical. |
| C．Objective. | D．Disapproving. |
| A．Students can hardly experience everything in real life. |
| B．It’s beneficial for students to experience virtual reality. |
| C．Much exposure to virtual reality makes students focused. |
| D．Actual experiences are more important than virtual reality. |
| A．students show little interest in it |
| B．rules for it haven’t been made so far |
| C．users will spend much money applying it |
| D．it isn’t good enough to be operated by students |
| A．It imitates the real world perfectly. |
| B．It features many unpractical life skills. |
| C．It shouldn’t refer to dangerous things. |
| D．It offers guidance for users on real life. |
| A．Saving lots of time. |
| B．Reducing resource waste. |
| C．Minimizing experimental errors. |
| D．Improving experimental success rate. |
| A．Virtual reality shouldn’t be divorced from reality. |
| B．There’re still many unsolved mysteries in real life. |
| C．People gain much inspiration from the actual world. |
| D．Everyone should have a chance to try virtual reality. |
【推荐2】A solar plane on a round-the-world journey has reached the point of no return over the Pacific Ocean after departing Hawaii, and now it’s California or bust.
The plane was cruising over the cold northern Pacific late Thursday at about 6,000 meters with a nearly-full battery as night descended（降临）, according to the website that’s recording the journey of Solar Impulse 2.
After some uncertainty about winds, the plane took off from Hawaii and was on course to land in Mountain View, California, in about three days. The crew that helped it take off was clearing out of its Hawaiian hangar （飞机库）and headed for the mainland for the weekend arrival.
At one point the plane was passed by a Hawaiian Airlines jet whose passengers caught a glimpse of the Solar Impulse 2 before the powerful airliner left the slow-moving one behind.
The aircraft landed in Hawaii in July and was forced to stay in the islands after the plane’s battery system sustained heat damage on its trip from Japan.
The aircraft started its journey in March 2015 from Abu Dhabi, the capital of the United Arab Emirates, and made stops in Oman, Myanmar, China and Japan. It’s on the ninth leg of its circumnavigation（环行）.
Pilot Bertrand Piccard, who is flying the latest leg of the trip, was confident on Thursday that things would go according to plan.
Piccard and his co-pilot Andre Borschberg were in charge of the mission. The team was delayed in Asia. When first attempting to fly from Nanjing to Hawaii, the crew had to divert to Japan because of unfavorable weather and a damaged wing.
A month later, when weather conditions were right, the plane departed from Nagoya in Japan for Hawaii.
1. What does the underlined phrase “California or bust” mean in the first paragraph?| A．Success or failure. | B．Return or California. |
| C．Damage or repair. | D．Destination and success. |
| A．Hawaiian Air Jet. | B．Andre Borschberg. |
| C．Solar Impulse 2. | D．Solar Challenger. |
| A．Because the plane’s battery system sustained heat damage on its trip. |
| B．Because it was a slow-moving solar plane. |
| C．Because the weather was unfavorable and a wing was damaged. |
| D．Because both of the pilots have no confidence about the solar plane. |
| A．A Solar Plane Trip in Asia |
| B．The Round-the-world Trip |
| C．Solar Plane Soars（高飞）from Hawaii to California |
| D．A Pleasant Solar Plane Trip from Japan to California |
【推荐3】Japanese technology giant Toshiba has built a huge “clean” factory farm where it is growing various types of lettuce (生菜) leaves without sunlight or soil for sale in its new healthcare business. Located in a disused 21,000-square-foot electronics factory in Yokosuka, Toshiba announces to have created a perfect “bacteria free” environment where it will grow three million bags of lettuce a year. Therefore, the company will make more money than before.
Completely cut off form conditions outside the temperature controlled tank, lettuce inspectors wear full body suits while making notes on the quality and growth of the leaves on their iPads in order to prevent the air around the plants becoming polluted. Each plant is given man-made lighting to trick it into believing it is exposed to sunlight, while vitamins and nutrients are put directly into its roots, meaning the lettuce does not need soil.
Toshiba’s new high-tech farm may produce the world’s highest quality lettuce. The final product will be free of any form of bacteria or insect life before being placed into sealed bags, which should ensure the product has a longer shelf life than other normal lettuces. The gardening technique aims to have a bacteria amount of no more than 1/1000th – much lower than that found in normal gardening soil.
Toshiba aims to harvest three million bags of leaf lettuce, baby leaf greens, cabbages and other kinds of vegetables every year – with each bag likely to cost people 1 pound. The most important thing in organic vegetables, the lettuce requires no pesticides but is expected to have a similar shelf to plants that have been heavily treated with chemicals.
The lettuce factory is no marketing trick by Toshiba, however. Instead it represents the company’s latest attempt to expand its technology-led business. There are already plans for the technology giant to build similar factories around the world over the coming years – and it will also be selling the high tech equipment that allows factories to produce similar products of exceptionally high quality.
1. What is the purpose of Toshiba in planting the new type of lettuce?| A．To make a profit. |
| B．To do scientific research. |
| C．To improve the healthcare. |
| D．To increase the production. |
| A．It is more nutritious. |
| B．It is easy to plant. |
| C．It is much cheaper. |
| D．It is pollution-free. |
| A．needs soil to grow |
| B．has to be exposed to sunlight |
| C．can be stored longer than the normal |
| D．gains vitamins and nutrients from man-made lighting |
| A．The process of planting lettuce. |
| B．The new way of planting lettuce. |
| C．The brief introduction of Toshiba. |
| D．The development of a factory farm. |
【推荐1】For every one article on some positive aspect, some positive element of life, wellbeing, satisfaction, joy, happiness, you get 21 articles on depression, anxiety and so on. Ratio of 21 to 1. Studies focus primarily on what doesn’t work. And this is not a new phenomenon. The science of psychology (心理) has been far more successful on the negative than on the positive side. It has revealed to us much more about man’s shortcomings, his illnesses, but little about his potentialities, his virtues or his psychological height. We study a lot of depression and anxiety, misjudgments and errors, very much focusing on this aspect and very little on the positive. If you had a person who 21 hours in a day was depressed and one hour in a day felt good or one day feeling good and then 21 days feeling anxious and depressed, you would say that this person would need help. And I think psychology needs help.
Today depression is 10 times higher than it was in 1960. Now part of it is because there’s more awareness, because we measure better. But that’s not all. It’s also simply because objectively there’s more depression. The average age for depression today is less than 15. Kids at very young age are introduced to the “information highway”. And very often, they are not prepared, not able to deal with it in an effective way.
As a result, when we look at this data, we say we do need more research to help people overcome depression or anxiety. And there seems nothing wrong about that.
According to the studies, 47% Harvard students over the past year have experienced depression to the point of not functioning. So they couldn’t leave home. They were really struggling to just basically get through the day. Now this is not unique to United States. We have a global epidemic here. And once again going back: Is the 21: 1 ratio good? How can we even think about studying happiness and well-being and love and joy?
What I’m going to argue for is that we do need to also focus on the positive. I am going to talk about three reasons why we should do that. The first reason is that it is important to focus on what works, because what works or what we focus on rather creates reality. If we focus on what is working, we’ll have more working in our world, more working in ourselves, more working in our relationships. The second reason why positive psychology as an independent field of study is important is that being happy is not just the negative statement of depression. It doesn’t mean just getting rid of depression or anxiety that I am experiencing so I spontaneously (自然而然) become happy. That’s not the case. That’s not how it works. And finally, prevention, which is the most effective way of preventing hardship, is actually realized by focusing on and cultivating the positive. So for these three reasons, we need positive psychology.
1. By using the ratio of 21 to 1, the author means in fact that ________.| A．on an average a person is depressed 21 hours a day and feels good one hour |
| B．most articles and studies focus primarily on what goes wrong |
| C．the science of psychology has revealed human’s nature |
| D．nearly half of Harvard and nationwide students suffer from depression |
| A．The reason for more measures. | B．The need for doing with depression. |
| C．The reason for more depression. | D．The need for taking some measures. |
| A．Prevention by focusing on and cultivating the positive feelings. |
| B．Offering various ways of overcoming the negative feelings. |
| C．Focusing on what is working to have more working in our life. |
| D．Being happy is not equal to avoiding being unhappy. |
| A．It is essential for our research to focus more on the bright side. |
| B．There is no need for the science of psychology to deal with the negative side. |
| C．The conflict between the negative psychology and positive one can’t be avoided. |
| D．We have to remove depression completely for the purpose of being happy. |
【推荐2】Like bootcut jeans or farm fresh produce,television is proving its staying power regardless of trends. It seems to be just like a home cooked meal,never to be replaced,thanks to the wide application of big data.
Americans are still watching an average of five hours of TV each day and over 50%of homes have a television subscription service like Netflix or Hulu.This is due to the fact that television programming has undergone a renaissance(复兴),with cinema-quality programs on broadcast,new ways of delivery-Netflix or Hulu and other over-the-top(OTT)providers and now the promise of data-driven insights for advertisers. Data is the key to television's profitability.Advertisers have access to more audience information than ever,while networks and content providers use data,in addition to instinct(本能)to guide programming decisions.The abundance of data available to content providers,marketers and advertisers makes it possible to process,analyse and transform big data into profitable,useful insights.
For those 50% of homes with a subscription service,OTT TV is using data to make decisions not just about programming,but to guide viewers to the right content.The most famous example of data-driven content is Netflix's House of Cards,a popular TV series in America,designed to be a hit based on platform data like user viewing habits,ratings and preferences.But the content provider uses data to guide all of its decisions,ranging from title images to homepage layouts.
Netflix receives data from millions of set top boxes and online accounts,and then processes data using real time technology like Spark.These data have led to clearly-seen results,like a 20%-30%increase in programs'viewship numbers.
1. Why is"home cooked meal"mentioned in Paragraph 1?| A．To introduce the topic. |
| B．To show TV can't be replaced. |
| C．To give background information. |
| D．To prove big data can be applied. |
| A．It keeps making a high profit. |
| B．It's losing its viewers to cinemas. |
| C．It's too dependent on advertising. |
| D．It is updated to meet the challenges. |
| A．content choice |
| B．subscription service |
| C．homepage layout |
| D．providers'preference |
| A．To show how television increases profits. |
| B．To explain how data benefit the TV industry. |
| C．To present how over-the-top television works. |
| D．To tell how the television industry goes digital. |
【推荐3】Pleasingly, a new study supports one of my favourite insights about writing, or getting any creative work done-though I’m pretty sure that wasn’t intentional, since the researchers were actually studying traffic jams. Jonathan Boreyko, an American engineering professor, was crawling along in his car one day, observing how drivers naturally bunch up at red lights, leaving mere inches between vehicles. Their motivation isn’t a mystery: the closer you are to the car ahead, you’d assume, the better your chances of squeezing through before the light goes back to red, and the sooner you’ll reach your destination, even if you also increase the risk of collisions.
But you’d assume wrong. When Boreyko and a colleague recreated the traffic-light scenario (场景) on a special test track, they found that drivers who bunched up made no swifter progress. True, they stopped slightly closer to the light. But it also took them longer to resume (继续) moving safely, and these two factors canceled each other out. “There’s no point in getting closer to the car in front of you when traffic comes to a stop.” Boreyko concluded.
This is true of writing or similar work. People never rest in urgent pursuit of their goals. Yes, it all looks impressively productive. But as the psychologist Robert Boice argues, racing to get a task completed generally brings a cost that outweighs the benefit. You tire yourself out, so you can’t shine the next day. Or you neglect so many other duties that you’re forced to take an extra day to catch up. Or you start damaging work you already produced — which is why the novelist Cabriel Carcfa Marqucz said he gave up writing in the afternoon: he wrote more, but he had to redo it the next morning, so the overall effect was to slow him down. That’s also why Boice insists that when you’re writing on a schedule, it’s as important to be disciplined about stopping as starting, even if you’re on a roll.
Clearly, this is all a convenient way to feel superior to people who put in more hours. But that doesn’t mean it’s untrue. Indeed, it’s scary to ask what role impatience play in your life in general: how much of each day we spend leaning into the future, trying to get tasks “out of the way”, always focused on the destination, metaphorically (隐喻地) inching closer and closer to the bumper of the car ahead. None of it gets us anywhere faster. It’s also no way to live.
1. Which of the following best summarizes the finding of Boreyko’s study?| A．The sooner, the better. | B．More haste, no extra speed. |
| C．The early bird catches the worm. | D．Chances favour the prepared mind. |
| A．tight planning avoids chaos | B．overwork polishes our images |
| C．impatience almost never pays | D．afternoon time is less productive |
| A．advise people to stop racing | B．instruct people to write skillfully |
| C．persuade people to treasure time | D．warn people to obey traffic rules |
