When you see a slim tower topping out at 14 feet 6 inches (4.4m) and made up of 208 decks of cards, you may exclaim it’s so incredible!
The tower’s architect, Bryan Berg, is an expert card builder, holding the world’s record for the tallest structure built entirely of paper cards. He’s built houses, stadiums, capitols, and castles. There’s no glue, tape or clips (别针). How can he make them stand firm? He begins by balancing four cards to form a box with arms sticking out, which forms a grid (网格). Then he repeats the grid over and over, expanding outward, to build a solid base. After that, Bryan lays cards around the edge and then across the top to make the floor for the next story of the building.
Interestingly enough, Bryan did not get the idea from any of the physical books. Instead, he discovered the unique way to build solid structures using a trick from nature. The secret is plant cells. Plant cells have hard walls and fit together tightly to form a grid that helps leaves and stems to keep their shape. Bees use the same kind of pattern to create honeycombs. Bryan borrowed this idea to invent repeating grids of card cells.
Out of curiosity, people who come to see the card buildings sometimes push and poke (戳刺) to see if they have clips inside, but find they don’t! Once, when Bryan built a card castle at Disney World, birds kept trying to land on it. A squirrel managed to take down one wall and did plenty of damage inside. But, amazingly, the castle didn’t collapse.
When it’s time to take down a card house, Bryan likes to blow them apart with a leaf blower. Is he ever sad to do it? Bryan admits it’s sometimes painful to see his structures fall. But he always knows one thing: “What goes up must come down — even card houses. They wouldn’t be so special if they were permanent. I also learn a lot from taking them apart — the destruction shows me where the weak points are. That is what my next stronger buildings really need.”
1. What makes Bryan’s card buildings stand firm?| A．Fixed clips. | B．Repeating grids. |
| C．Light-weight cards. | D．Multiple stories. |
| A．The source of Bryan’s inspiration. |
| B．Bryan’s specific building process. |
| C．Bryan’s comprehensive knowledge of biology. |
| D．The similarity between plant cells and honeycombs. |
| A．To arouse people’s interest in visiting. |
| B．To prove the strength of Bryan’s card works. |
| C．To indicate Bryan’s popularity among children. |
| D．To show the harmony between man and nature. |
| A．Pride comes before a fall. |
| B．It’s unrealistic to achieve perfection. |
| C．One can better himself by going beyond himself. |
| D．Nothing is difficult for one who sets his mind to it. |
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【推荐1】One of the most famous buildings in the United States is Carnegie Hall, the home of classical and popular music concerts in New York. Carnegie Hall is known not just for its beauty and history, but also for its amazing sound. Carnegie Hall is named after Andrew Carnegie, who paid for its construction. Construction of Carnegie Hall began in 1890 and the official opening night was on May 5th, 1891.
The hall was owned by the Carnegie family until 1924 when it was sold to Robert E Simon. The building became very old and in 1960, the new owner made plans to destroy it and build an office block. Isaac Stem led a group of people who fought to save Carnegie Hall and finally, the city of New York bought it for $5 million. It was then fixed up between 1983 and 1995.
Advertisements and stories in newspapers about how Carnegie Hall needed help to recover its history led people to send in old concert programmes and information from all over the world. Over 12,000 concert programmes were received and with these it was possible to make a proper record of Carnegie Hall's concert history.
Carnegie Hall is actually made up of several different halls, but the Main Hall, now called the Isaac Stem Auditorium, is the most famous. The hall itself can hold an audience of 2,804 in five levels of seating.
Because the best and most famous musicians of all time have played at Carnegie Hall, it is the dream of most musicians who want to be great to play there. This has led to a very old joke which is now Part of Carnegie Hall's history. Question: "How do I get to Carnegie Answer: "Practice, practice, practice."
1. It can be inferred that people wanted to save Carnegie Hall mainly because____.| A．it made a lot of money |
| B．it was worth visiting |
| C．it made some players become famous |
| D．many important concerts were held in it |
| A．Through old concert programmes. |
| B．Through newspaper reports. |
| C．Through old photographs. |
| D．Through old jokes. |
| A．Because it is difficult to find your way to Carnegie Hall. |
| B．Because you expect the answer to be directions but not advice. |
| C．Because Carnegie Hall is a place where musicians practice a lot. |
| D．Because you don't expect the answer to repeat the same word three times. |
| A．A joke about Carnegie Hall |
| B．The history of Carnegie Hall |
| C．The dream of most musicians |
| D．The best musician having played in Carnegie Hall |
【推荐2】When the residents of Buenos Aires want to change the pesos they do not trust into the dollars they do, they go to an office that acts as a front for thriving illegal exchange market.
As the couriers carry their bundles of pesos around Buenos Aires, they pass grand buildings like the Teatro Colon, an opera house that opened in 1908, and the Retiro railway station, completed in 1915. In the 43 years leading up to 1914, GDP had grown at an annual rate of 6%, the fastest recorded in the world. In 1914 half of Buenos Aires’s population was foreign-born. Its income per head was 92% of the average of 16 rich economies.
It never got better than this. Its income per head is now 43% of those same 16 rich economies; it trails Chile and Uruguay in its own backyard.
The country’s dramatic decline has long puzzled economists. “If a guy has been hit 700,000 shots it’s hard to work out which one of them killed him,” says Rafael di Tella. But three deep-lying explanations help to throw light on the country’s decline. Firstly, Argentina may have been rich 100 years ago but it was not modern. The second theory stresses the role of trade policy. Thirdly, when it needed to change, Argentina lacked the institutions to create successful policies.
Argentina was rich in 1914 because of commodities; its industrial base was only weakly developed. The landowners who made Argentina rich were not so bothered about educating it: cheap labor was what counted.
Without a good education system, Argentina struggled to create competitive industries. It had benefited from technology in its Belle Epoque period, but Argentina mainly consumed technology from abroad rather than inventing its own.
Argentina had become rich by making a triple bet on agriculture, open market and Britain, its biggest trading partner. If that bet turned sour, it would require a severe adjustment. The First World War delivered the initial blow to trade. Next came the Depression, which crushed the open trading system on which Argentina depended. Dependence on Britain, another country in decline, backfired( 失 败 ) as Argentina’s favored export market signed preferential deals with Commonwealth countries.
After the Second World War, when the rich world began its slow return to free trade with the negotiation of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade in 1947, Argentina had become a more closed economy. An institution to control foreign trade was created in 1946; the share of trade as a percentage of GDP continued to fall. High food prices meant big profits for farmers but empty stomachs for ordinary Argentines. Open borders increased farmers’ taking but sharpened competition from abroad for domestic industry. Heavy export taxes on crops allow the state to top up its decreasing foreign-exchange reserves; limits on wheat exports create surpluses(过剩) that drive down local prices. But they also dissuade farmers from planting more land, enabling other countries to steal market shares.
1. Grand buildings are mentioned in the second paragraph to show ________.| A．Argentines were talented | B．Argentina was once a rich country |
| C．Argentines miss the past of Argentina | D．Argentina has a suitable infrastructure |
| A．Argentina is richer than Uruguay. |
| B．Argentina was once attractive to immigrants. |
| C．Britain is playing a leading role in the development of Argentina. |
| D．Argentina is not serious about its agriculture and open markets. |
| A．the decline of Argentina welcomes an analysis from authorities |
| B．it is hard to explain the reasons for Argentina’s decline |
| C．it takes time to explain the reasons for Argentina’s decline |
| D．Argentina has declined for many reasons |
| A．Argentina depends heavily on foreign technology. |
| B．Many world events caused Argentina to break down. |
| C．Argentina failed in adjusting itself appropriately. |
| D．The conflicts between classes needed to be solved. |
【推荐3】Human memory is notoriously unreliable. Even people with the sharpest facial-recognition skills can only remember so much.
It’s tough to quantify how good a person is at remembering. No one really knows how many different faces someone can recall, for example, but various estimates tend to hover in the thousands—based on the number of acquaintances a person might have.
Machines aren’t limited this way. Give the right computer a massive database of faces, and it can process what it sees—then recognize a face it’s told to find—with remarkable speed and precision. This skill is what supports the enormous promise of facial-recognition software in the 21st century. It’s also what makes contemporary surveillance systems so scary.
The thing is, machines still have limitations when it comes to facial recognition. And scientists are only just beginning to understand what those constraints are. To begin to figure out how computers are struggling, researchers at the University of Washington created a massive database of faces—they call it MegaFace—and tested a variety of facial-recognition algorithms (算法) as they scaled up in complexity. The idea was to test the machines on a database that included up to 1 million different images of nearly 700,000 different people—and not just a large database featuring a relatively small number of different faces, more consistent with what’s been used in other research.
As the databases grew, machine accuracy dipped across the board. Algorithms that were right 95% of the time when they were dealing with a 13,000-image database, for example, were accurate about 70% of the time when confronted with 1 million images. That’s still pretty good, says one of the researchers, Ira Kemelmacher-Shlizerman. ”Much better than we expected,“ she said.
Machines also had difficulty adjusting for people who look a lot alike—either doppelgangers (长相极相似的人), whom the machine would have trouble identifying as two separate people, or the same person who appeared in different photos at different ages or in different lighting, whom the machine would incorrectly view as separate people.
“Once we scale up, algorithms must be sensitive to tiny changes in identities and at the same time invariant to lighting, pose, age,”Kemelmacher-Shlizerman said.
The trouble is, for many of the researchers who’d like to design systems to address these challenges, massive datasets for experimentation just don’t exist—at least, not in formats that are accessible to academic researchers. Training sets like the ones Google and Facebook have are private. There are no public databases that contain millions of faces. MegaFace’s creators say it’s the largest publicly available facial-recognition dataset out there.
“An ultimate face recognition algorithm should perform with billions of people in a dataset,” the researchers wrote.
1. What does the passage say about machine accuracy?| A．It falls short of researchers’ expectations. |
| B．It improves with added computing power. |
| C．It varies greatly with different algorithms. |
| D．It decreases as the database size increases. |
| A．They cannot easily tell apart people with near-identical appearances. |
| B．They have difficulty identifying changes in facial expressions. |
| C．They are not sensitive to minute changes in people’s mood. |
| D．They have problems distinguishing people of the same age. |
| A．No computer is yet able to handle huge datasets of human faces. |
| B．There do not exist public databases with sufficient face samples. |
| C．There are no appropriate algorithms to process the face samples. |
| D．They have trouble converting face datasets into the right format. |
【推荐1】George Nakashima always insisted that he was a simple woodworker, not an artist. Even though major museums exhibited his works and the director of the American Craft Museum called him a national treasure, Mr Nakashima rejected the label of artist. For almost fifty years he simply went on shaping wood into beautiful chairs, tables, and cabinets.
Nakashima had a clear goal. He intended each piece of furniture he made to be as perfect as possible. Even making a box was an act of creation, because it produced an object that had never existed before. Initially Nakashima used local wood, sometimes from his own property. Later, he traveled to seek out English oak, Persian walnut, African zebra wood and Indian teak. He especially liked to find giant roots that had been dug out of the ground after a tree was taken down. Nakashima felt that making this wood into furniture was a way of allowing the tree to live again.
Most furniture makers prefer perfect boards, but Nakashima took pleasure in using wood with interesting knots (节疤) and cracks. These irregularities gave the wood personality and showed that the tree had lived a happy life.
He never failed to create an object that was both useful and beautiful. One early piece Nakashima designed was a three-legged chair for his small daughter Mira to use when she sat at the table for meals. The Mira chair became so popular that Nakashima later made both low and high versions. Another famous piece, the Conoid chair, has two legs supported by blade-like (刀片似的) feet. Always, Nakashima's designs were precise and graceful, marked by a simplicity that revealed his love for the wood.
As the years passed, Nakashima's reputation grew and his works received many awards. His children Mira and Kevin, now adults, joined the team of craftspeople in their father's studio. Nakashima's dream of integrating (整合) work and family had come true.
1. Which of the following best describes Nakashima?| A．Generous and outgoing. | B．Creative and modest. |
| C．Capable and friendly. | D．Honest and simple. |
| A．He only made chairs for his family. |
| B．He made chairs of the same style. |
| C．He loved his daughter Mira most. |
| D．Most of his works were simple but beautiful. |
| A．They had an art studio of their own. |
| B．They lacked the ability to create art works. |
| C．They took over their father's work. |
| D．They had a common interest in woodwork. |
| A．he loved both his work and family |
| B．the wood materials he used were precious |
| C．his works were of great artistic value |
| D．he spent most of his life making furniture |
【推荐2】About 2,400 years ago in Athens a man was put to death for asking too many questions. There were philosophers before him, but it was with Socrates that the subject really took off.
Snub-nosed, podgy, shabby and a bit strange, Socrates did not fit in. Although physically ugly and often unwashed, he had great charisma and a brilliant mind. Everyone in Athens agreed that there had never been anyone quite like him and probably wouldn’t be again. He was unique. But he was also extremely annoying. He saw himself as one of those horseflies that have a nasty bite—a gadfly.
As a young man he had been a brave soldier fighting in the Peloponnesian War against the Spartans and their allies. In middle age he shuffled around the marketplace, stopping people from time to time and asking them awkward questions.
An example of this was his conversation with Euthydemus. Socrates asked him whether being deceitful counted as being immoral. Of course it does, Euthydemus replied. He thought that was obvious. But what, Socrates asked, if your friend is feeling very low and might kill himself, and you steal his knife? Isn’t that a deceitful act? Of course it is. But isn’t it moral rather than immoral to do that? It’s a good thing, not a bad one—despite being a deceitful act. Yes, said Euthydemus, who by now is tied in knots. Socrates by using a clever counter-example has shown that Euthydemus’ general comment that being deceitful is immoral doesn’t apply in every situation. Euthydemus hadn’t realized this before.
Over and over again Socrates demonstrated that the people he met in the marketplace didn’t really know what they thought they knew. A military commander would begin a conversation totally confident that he knew what “courage” meant, but after 20 minutes in Socrates’ company would leave completely confused. The experience must have been disconcerting. Socrates loved to reveal the limits of what people genuinely understood, and to question the assumptions on which they built their lives.
| A．That was more or less all he did. |
| B．What made Socrates so wise was that he kept asking questions and he was always willing to debate his ideas. |
| C．They are irritating, but don’t do serious harm. |
| D．If philosophy has a patron saint, it is Socrates. |
| E．It meant understanding the true nature of our existence, including the limits of what we can know. |
| F．A conversation that ended in everyone realizing how little they knew was for him a success. |
【推荐3】In the past few years, Sam Altman, the father of ChatGPT, has become the most familiar face in the world of AI. Many industry leaders and AI researchers see ChatGPT as a fundamental technological shift, as significant as the creation of the web browser (浏览器). But few can agree on the future of this technology.
Some believe it will create a community where everyone has all the time and money they ever wanted. Others believe it could destroy humanity. Still, others spend much of their time arguing that the technology isn’t as powerful as everyone says it is.
Mr. Altman, a slim 37-year-old entrepreneur and investor from St. Louis, sits calmly in the middle of it all, devoted to making ChatGPT perfect. As chief executive of OpenAI, he in some way embodies (体现) each of these seemingly contradictory views, hoping to balance many possibilities as he strikes this unusual, highly effective but imperfect technology into the longer term.
That means he’s usually criticized. But those closest to him imagine that is normal. “If you’re equally upsetting both extreme sides, then you’re doing something right,” mentioned OpenAI’s president, Greg Brockman.
Mr. Altman believes that this technology will occur one way or another, that it will do wonderful things even he can’t yet imagine, and that we can find ways of making up for the harm it may cause. It’s an attitude that mirrors Mr. Altman’s personal track. His life has been a reasonably regular climb towards larger prosperity and wealth, pushed by an efficient set of private expertise. It makes sense that he believes that the good thing will happen rather than the bad.
Georgeann Kepchar, who taught Advanced Placement computer science courses, saw Mr. Altman as one of her most talented computer science students and one with a rare gift for pushing people in new directions. “He had creativity and vision, combined with the ambition and force of personality to convince others to work with him on putting his ideas into action,” she said.
1. Why is the web browser mentioned in paragraph 1?| A．To highlight the importance of ChatGPT. |
| B．To introduce the inspiration for ChatGPT. |
| C．To show the competition in the world of AI. |
| D．To indicate Sam Altman's promising future. |
| A．He apologizes for its harm. | B．He criticizes them violently. |
| C．He focuses on improving it. | D．He faces them nervously. |
| A．The new technology has brought record profits. |
| B．Sam Altman is optimistic about his technology. |
| C．Greg Brockman shows support to Sam Altman. |
| D．Sam Altman has been suffering for a long time. |
| A．Indifferent. | B．Unclear. | C．Critical. | D．Admiring. |
