We don’t know how different our life will be in the future. We can only try to imagine it.
At first we think about human relationship. In the year 2050, we will use computers almost every day. We will make new friends through the Internet—even our husbands or wives will be met in this way. It will be much faster and easier for us. On the other hand, our relationships with people won’t be as important as they are today—we will feel a little lonely.
Computers will also help us in many other activities in 2050. For example, they will be used by the children at school to make their learning easier. In addition, there will be much more other machines which will play a similar role as computers, like robots which will do the housework for us.
Spending holidays will also be completely different. Traveling to other planets or to the moon will be available for everyone. Means of transport will, of course, change, too. We will use solar-powered cars, which will be much cleaner.
We could expect that the faster technological progress would lead to a more polluted environment. But it isn’t true. We will pay more attention to protecting the environment. And, scientists will probably find cures for many dangerous diseases, like cancer or AIDS. Therefore, our surroundings as well as health will be in better condition.
Although we can’t predict the exact changes which will be made in the world, we often think about them. We worry about our and our children’s future;we have expectations, hopes as well as fears. But I think we should be rather hope about our future. We should be happy and believe good things will happen.
1. Why will people probably feel a little lonely in 2050?| A．Because the number of people will become much smaller. |
| B．Because there will be less face-to-face communication. |
| C．Because people won’t like making friends with each other. |
| D．Because people won’t communicate with each other much often. |
| A．computers will do all the things for human beings |
| B．how people will use computers to communicate with each other |
| C．machines like computers and robots will help people a lot |
| D．how people will use robots to do the housework |
| A．How people will communicate in the year 2050. |
| B．What our life will be like in the year 2050. |
| C．How people will travel and spend their holidays in the year 2050. |
| D．What high technology will appear in the year 2050. |
| A．The relationship between people will be more important than that of today. |
| B．The way of spending holidays will be the same as that of today. |
| C．It won’t be difficult for people to travel to other planets. |
| D．Our environment will be much more polluted with a growing number of cars. |
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Tired of carrying around that heavy wallet? Soon you won’t need to! The next generation of smart phones will have NFC technology, which lets you pay for things with your smart phones. All you do is enter your credit card information into your phone. Then, when you are in a shop that allows NFC payments, you just wave your phone over a special instrument at the checkout. The purchase is instantly charged to your credit card.
Ever seen someone wearing something and wished you knew where to get it? Soon it will be easy with PicCommerce, new technology that uses image-recognition software. Here’s how it works. If you see something you like, simply take a photo of it with your smart phone. Then, your phone will send the image to a special server, which will respond with information about where you can buy it and how much it will cost.
Sick of your smart phone battery going flat? With so many applications draining (消耗) the battery, the latest phones need to be charged every day. But next generation smart phones will come with built-in chips that can connect to an antenna (天线) in your home. And as long as your phone is within range of the antenna, you will be able to charge your smartphone wirelessly, even if it is in your pocket.
Worried about getting your smart phones wet in the rain? A company called Hz0 has invented WaterBlock, new technology that makes your phone completely waterproof. And it’s so effective that your phone will even work underwater.
Fed up with carrying a heavy phone around? Soon, you will be able to get a PaperPhone! “Flexible phones are the future,” said scientist Roel Vertegaal. So, what are the benefits of flexible phones? Well, it means that instead of carrying your phone in your pocket, you could wear it wrapped around your wrist, for example.
Of course, there is just the problem: with so much new smart phone technology around, you will soon need to buy a new phone!
1. To pay with your smart phone, you need to ________.
| A．go to a bank | B．store money in the phone |
| C．have a credit card | D．buy a special instrument |
| A．will have chips instead of batteries |
| B．may consume less power |
| C．needn’t be charged frequently |
| D．will be charged easily |
| A．They will be easier to carry. |
| B．They will be cheaper. |
| C．They will be smaller. |
| D．They will be easier to operate. |
| A．Basic Functions of Smart phones |
| B．The Future of Smart phones |
| C．Advantages of Modern Smart phones |
| D．The Development of Phone Technology |
【推荐2】It’s 2035. You have a job, a family and you’re about 40 years old! Welcome to your future life.
Getting ready for work, you pause in front of the mirror. “Turn red,” you say. Your shirt changes from sky blue to deep red.Tiny preprogrammed electronics (智能电子元件) are rearranged in your shirt to change its color. Looking into the mirror, you find it hard to believe you’re 40. You look much younger. With amazing advances in medicine, people in your generation may live to be 150 years old. You’re not even middleaged!
As you go into the kitchen and prepare to pour your breakfast cereal into a bowl, you hear, “To lose weight, you shouldn’t eat that!” from your shoes. They read the tiny electronic code(电子源码) on the cereal box to find out the nutrition details. You decide to listen to your shoes. “Kitchen, what can I have for breakfast?”A list of possible foods appears on the counter as the kitchen checks its food supplies.
“Ready for your trip to space?” you ask your son and daughter. In 2015 only specially trained astronauts went into space—and very few of them. Today anyone can go to space for day trips or longer vacations. Your best friend even works in space. Handing your children three strawberries each, you add, “The doctor says you need these for space travel.” Thanks to medical advances, vaccination shots (防疫针) are a thing of the past. Ordinary foods contain special vaccines. With the strawberries in their mouths, the kids head for the front door.
It’s time for you to go to work. Your car checks your fingerprints and unlocks the doors. “My office. Autopilot,”you command. Your car drives itself down the road and moves smoothly into traffic on the highway. You sit back and unroll your enewspaper. The latest news downloads and fills the viewer. Looking through the pages, you watch the news as video film rather than read it.
1. What changes the color of your shirt?| A．The mirror. |
| B．The preprogrammed electronics. |
| C．The sunlight. |
| D．The medicine. |
| A．By pouring the breakfast into a bowl. |
| B．By getting the doctor’s advice. |
| C．By testing the food supplies in the kitchen. |
| D．By checking the nutrition details of the food. |
| A．breakfast | B．lunch |
| C．vaccines | D．nutrition |
| A．In order of time. |
| B．In order of space. |
| C．In order of preference. |
| D．In order of importance. |
【推荐3】In a few decades, AI (Artificial Intelligence) will outstrip (超越) many of the abilities we believe make us special. This is a grand challenge for our age, and it may require an effective response.
With computers conquering what used to be deeply human tasks, what will it mean in the future to be human?
Some are worried that self-driving cars and trucks may displace millions of professional drivers, and disrupt entire industries. But I worry about my six-year-old son. What will his place be in a world where machines conquer us in one area after another? What will he do, and how will he relate to these ever-smarter machines? What will be his and his human peers’ contribution to the world he’ll live in?
Actually, it all comes down to a fairly simple question: What’s so special about us, and what’s our lasting value? It can’t be skills like arithmetic or typing. Nor can it be rationality (理性), because with all our emotions we humans are lacking it.
So perhaps we might want to consider qualities at a different angle: brave creativity, irrational originality, even a dose of plain illogical craziness, instead of hard-nosed logic.
I am not suggesting we give up on reason, logic, and critical thinking. In fact, just because I think so highly of the values we associate with rationality, I do believe we might want to celebrate a bit of the opposite.
So we must aim our human contribution to this division of labor to complement (补充) the rationality of the machines, rather than to compete with it, because that will sustainably differentiate us from them, and it is differentiation that creates value.
What should we do? If I am right, we should develop a creative spirit, even irrational ideas as we educate our children.
Unfortunately, however, our education system has not caught up to the coming reality of this Second Machine Age. Our schools and universities are structured to mold (塑造) pupils to be mostly servants of rationality, and to develop outdated skills in interacting with outdated machines.
1. What does the author worry about?| A．Many people’s losing their jobs. |
| B．Human beings’ position in the world. |
| C．Machines’ conquering human beings. |
| D．Many automatic machines’ appearing. |
| A．Irrational behaviors. | B．Reasonable activities. |
| C．Dangerous moves. | D．Logic thinking. |
| A．Try to copy their examples. | B．Try to do better than them. |
| C．Try to do what they can’t do. | D．Try to be smarter than them. |
| A．Unclear. | B．Confused. |
| C．Confident. | D．Disappointed. |
【推荐1】Experts say farmers will need to produce about 70 percent more food by the middle of the century. They predict that 9 billion people will need to be fed worldwide by 2050. The prediction means experts will need to develop more effective farming methods that cause less harm to the environment to produce more food. Experts say living things called bacteria could help achieve that goal. A bacterium is an organism.It is so small that it can be seen only with a microscope.
Researchers are finding extremely small organisms in the ground. One gram of soil contains between 100 million and one billion bacteria. Bacteria are taking part in a healthy ex- change with the plants that share the soil. Around plant roots, bacteria change chemicals in the air and soil into food for the plants. The bacteria include the material known as fungi(真菌). Some bacteria act as bodyguards. They produce anti-bodies and other chemicals to fight harmful bacteria.
Plants make sugar through a process called photosynthesis (光合作用).This happens when a plant receiving light changes water and carbon dioxide into food. Much of the sugar is pumped down through the roots. There, it is turned into sugar-based food and released into the soil. That is done to get bacteria to help the plants grow better. Some of the organisms turn chemicals in the air and soil into food that the plants can eat.
The biosciences company Novozymes already sells one kind of fungi. It has found a way to produce it in very large quantities and offer it to farmers as.a bio-pesticide (生物农药).A bio-pesticide protects crops from animals and bacteria. If so, farmers can harvest more crops.
1. What do the experts’ statistics in paragraph 1 show?| A．Bacteria have a good effect on farming. |
| B．There will be more harmful bacteria in 2050. |
| C．There's no need to worry about the problem of future food. |
| D．More food will be needed to feed more people in the future. |
| A．Bacteria can't live without plants. | B．Plants get benefit from bacteria . |
| C．They make sugar cooperatively. | D．They compete for more sunshine. |
| A．It sells crops and animals. |
| B．It beautifies the environment. |
| C．It provides farmers with materials free of charge. |
| D．It produces fungi as a bio-pesticide. |
| A．Crops of High Quality Need Developing |
| B．Bacteria May Help Meet Food Needs of the Future |
| C．A Large Quantity of Farmland Should Be Improved |
| D．Diseases and Pests Can Be Controlled in the Future |
【推荐2】Bananas and apples continue to ripen after being picked. Cherries and grapes do not. The difference between climacteric (后熟的) and non-climacteric fruits matters to fruit growers and greengrocers, who must ensures their products are in excellent condition when arriving at the marketplace. But how those differences originally came about remains unclear.
In a paper in Biology Letters, Fukano Yuya and Tachiki Yuuya of the University of Tokyo offer a suggestion. Fruits, they observe, exist to solve a problem faced by all plants - how best to spread their progeny around. Wrapping their seeds in a sugary flesh, to provide a tasty meal, serves as a way to got animals to do this for them. They do, however, need to ensure their fruits favour the animals most likely to do the distributing. They propose that climacterism or non-climacterism is a way to achieve this. If ground-living animals are the main distributors, then the continuing ripening of fallen fruit is beneficial. If, by contrast, those distributors are tree-living or flying animals, which can feed on unfallen fruit, then non-climacteric fruits will do well.
To test their idea, the two researchers combed through 276 papers about 80 sorts of fruits. They discovered 35 of these fruits were eaten by both groups of animals. But of those where one group or the other were the dominant consumers, 15 of the 19 eaten mainly by ground-living animals were climacteric.
Their assumption is strengthened by other evidence. They point out non-climacteric fruits tend to have vivid colors which may help them stand out amid the leaves, advertising their presence. Climacteric fruits are generally better hidden, making them harder to spot until they have fallen to the ground.
1. What did the two researchers try to find out through their study?| A．What enables fruits to stay in perfect condition. |
| B．How some fruits stand out in the trees, but others fail. |
| C．How many animals play the role of distributors for fruits. |
| D．Why some fruits stop ripening when picked, and others don't. |
| A．Later generations. | B．Hidden qualities. |
| C．Fresh fragrance. | D．Unknown disease. |
| A．Bananas definitely fall into the category. |
| B．They may appeal to flying birds. |
| C．They tend to remain hidden among leaves. |
| D．Ground-living animals generally feed on them. |
| A．The Condition of Products: What Greengrocers Care. |
| B．The Reproduction of Plants: Depending on Themselves. |
| C．The Evolution of Fruit: Finding the Right Distributors. |
| D．The Choice of Animals: Looking for bright-colored fruits. |
【推荐3】Peter and Minke van Wingerden have created something wild: a herd of cows floating on the sea. The Dutch husband-and-wife team’s experiment on sustainable agriculture, called Floating Farm, can be found in the port of Rotterdam. The modernist structure houses 40 cows, who collectively produce some 200 gallons of milk a day. In addition to helping nourish (滋养) the local community, the waterborne farm is playing a part in the global conversation about how the climate crisis is pushing farmers to reconsider how—and where—they produce food.
Floods, extreme heating, droughts and even rising night temperatures have sent the food system off balance. The race to outsmart the constant attack of extreme weather has made the world of farming unrecognizable from what it was only decades ago. A team of scientists in Mexico is developing wheat types that can adapt themselves to different climates, while Jack’s Solar Garden in Longmont, Colorado, is a testbed for the emerging method of solar farming.
Rotterdam has already established itself as one of the most climate-adaptive places in the world. Everything from office buildings to entire neighborhoods are built on water in the city, which is 90% below sea level. The Wingerdens’ Floating Farm was a new but necessary attempt. Should a weather crisis arise, a waterborne farm isn’t necessarily stuck in place. A former property developer with a background in engineering, Peter found his inspiration for the Floating Farm in a climate disaster in New York City, where Hurricane Sandy prevented the delivery of fresh food to millions.
The Wingerdens’ model is ripe for reproduction—which is exactly what the Floating Farm’s team of 14 are working on now. Plans are under way for a floating vegetable farm to move into the space next to the current Floating Farm. Permit applications are also out for similar structures in Dubai, Singapore and the Dutch cities of Haarlem and Arnhem.
The new projects will apply lessons learned from Floating Farm. “You need to build a house in order to know how to build a house,” Peter says. The biggest obstacles he sees ahead, however, are not financial or physical, but rather political and administrative. “One of the biggest challenges we come across worldwide is regulations. Cities need to have disruptive thinking, cities need to have disruptive departments, and cities need to have areas where you can say: OK, this is the experimental zone.” Because what Peter and his team are pulling off is of a different order than the typical sustainability measures. “We are not innovative,” he says. “We are disruptive.”
1. Which of the following is TRUE about the Floating Farm?| A．It is the first modern farming attempt to fight climate change. |
| B．It is a model of new agriculture in the age of climate crisis. |
| C．It has outsmarted other forms of farming like solar farming. |
| D．It copies a similar structure in Dubai ready for reproduction. |
| A．90% of the population in Rotterdam live below the sea level |
| B．The New York City is working hard to fight climate change |
| C．The local community will not be fed without new farming |
| D．Waterborne facilities are necessary to the future of Rotterdam |
| A．in a daring and unusual way | B．in a focused and logical way |
| C．in a careful and detailed way | D．in a rude and unpleasant way |
| A．Is Rotterdam Built on Water? |
| B．Can Floating Farming Survive? |
| C．Are Cows at Sea the Future of Farming? |
| D．Is Extreme Weather Affecting Agriculture? |
