LEDs are a safe and efficient (高效的) electronic light source that shines with bright white light, now being used around the world. However, according to the International Energy Agency and the World Bank, more than 1 million people in the world still do not have access to electricity. After sunset, most of them light candles or oil lamps. A company in the Netherlands is trying to change that with its product based on LEDs.
“Now for the first time artificial light or solar LED light is less expensive than kerosene (煤油),” said Camille Van Gestel, head of a Dutch company called WakaWaka.
He said WakaWaka, which means “Shine Bright”, is the most efficient solar-powered light and phone charger in the world today. When fully charged, it shines for up to 16 hours. It is affordable, sustainable (可持续的), and its battery lasts for a long time. It can be set up on any flat surface, hung from a ceiling or even placed on a glass bottle.
Van Gestel said it is intended for the poorest of the poor. “Our primary goal is to reach people who live at the base of the pyramid, and who live on less than two dollars a day.” His company operates like any other business, but some of the money made from selling its products is used to make WakaWaka lights affordable to poor people. He said the initiative (发起) is supported by international non-government organizations.
“The International Rescue Committee was one of the first to actually take the WakaWaka power into Syria to provide light and power for Syrian refugees, and now the WakaWaka is the most valued non-food item in Syria,” said Van Gestel.
In the past 24 months, the company has distributed around 300,000 units in places such as Syria, Haiti, Rwanda, Indonesia and the Philippines. Its goal is to reach 1.2 billion people by 2030.
1. What does the first paragraph mainly want to tell us?| A．More than 1 million live in poverty. | B．Candles and oil lamps are out of date. |
| C．LEDs are to be widely used in the world. | D．A safer and cheaper light source is needed. |
| A．It is the largest producer of LEDs in Europe. |
| B．It operates differently from most other companies. |
| C．It has a research and development center in Syria. |
| D．It can produce artificial light that is affordable and sustainable. |
| A．They hope to earn some reputation by donating their company’s products. |
| B．They expect to help some people who are too poor to have access to electricity. |
| C．They wish to gain support from international non-governmental organizations. |
| D．They plan to become the first to produce the most efficient solar-powered light. |
| A．The company is supposed to expand its production. |
| B．The company belongs to the International Rescue Committee. |
| C．The company is trying to promote its products to developed countries. |
| D．The company attempts to teach people in Syria how to use their products. |
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【推荐1】Technology has come to the rescue of Japanese farmers. For thousands of years they have tried to keep animals away from their farms. However, engineers have invented the “Super Monster Wolf” to finally scare away wild animals that want to eat crops of rice, pumpkin or sweet potato. Super Monster Wolf is a solar-powered robot that looks like a real wolf. It has lookalike wolf hair, big scary teeth and red LED eyes with infrared (红外线的) sensors. It also has 48 different wolf howls and other noises that real wolves don’t have. Super Monster Wolf will be used to keep animals like wild pigs and deer out of rice paddies (稻田), farms and fruit orchards (果园). Farmers lose millions of dollars of crops every year to hungry animals.
Members of Japan’s agricultural association took part in trials of the Super Monster Wolf in nine locations across Japan. The association’s spokesman Chikao Umezawa reported that the robot wolf significantly reduced crop losses. He said it was more effective than an electric fence at keeping animals out. The robot can sense movement up to one kilometre away and immediately make its scary sounds.
But one farmer said the cost of buying a Super Monster Wolf was too high and he thought few people would pay for such a robot.“We can protect crops by making simple tools. It’s much cheaper!” he added.
Chikao Umezawa said,“It will have the option of renting the wolf by the month. In the long run, the Super Monster Wolf can effectively save labor costs, and the scope of protection of the robot Wolf is far greater than human.” “The cost of robots will also come down as technology continues to advance, and people will be able to use them at a very cheap price in the future.” he added.
1. What problem do the Japanese farmers face?| A．High cost. | B．Lack of land. |
| C．Terrible pollution. | D．Damage to farm from wild animals. |
| A．Protecting birds from wild animals. |
| B．Attracting other animals to the farm. |
| C．Preventing animals from being killed. |
| D．Scaring off animals that will destroy crops. |
| A．He thinks it’s hard to operate. |
| B．He thinks it’s too expensive to afford. |
| C．He thinks its quality is poor. |
| D．He thinks its noises are too loud. |
| A．Positive. | B．Doubtful. | C．Cautious | D．Neutral |
【推荐2】As a young child, Ann Makosinski would spend hours experimenting with her toys and other everyday objects ar ound her to create her own inventions.
Now a first-year Arts student, Makosinski is a well-known inventor. She won the recent Sustainable Entrepreneurship Award of Excellence, which recognizes creative business solutions to social problems--the same recognition was given to Barack Obama in 2014. Her two inventions—the Hollow Flashlight and the e-Drink—have been causing excitement internationally since their creation.
When Makosinski was 15 years old, she created a flashlight powered by the heat of one's hand. This invention was the result of a 9th grade science project, but her goal was to offer a practical solution to people with unlimited access to power and electricity. “One of my friends from the Philippines told me that she failed school because she had no light to study with at night, so that was kind of the inspiration.” Makosinski explained.
At 12th grade, Makosinski then went on to create the e-Drink. It is a coffee cup that harvests the extra heat of a hot drink while it cools, stores it as electricity in an internal(内置的)battery and makes it available to charge an external device such as a phone, whose life can now be longer by approximately 10 to 30 minutes.
“My favorite part of creating inventions would be when you had the idea and you have to physically build it，and it doesn't work out,” she said. “So you have to figure out different ways to solve it. A lot of times, I'll give up and I’ll come back after a couple of days and I'll take it up again.”
Her advice to other student innovators? “Start now. There’s nothing holding you back. Actually, you can do whatever you want.” Makosinski said，“If you want to make something，follow your heart, then go ahead. If there's something you really want to do, you will make time for it and you will find time in the day to do your schoolwork.”
1. Makosinsky created the powerless flashlight mainly to ________.| A．satisfy her desire to create inventions |
| B．settle problems in study for her friend |
| C．help those who are short of electricity |
| D．finish the assignment of a science project |
| A．How the e-Drink was invented. | B．Why the e-Drink was created. |
| C．What the e-Drink brings. | D．How the e-Drink works. |
| A．Popular Inventions by a Teenager Girl |
| B．Teenager Girl Advancing in Creation |
| C．Valuable Advice from a Creative Girl |
| D．Awards Given to a Young Inventor |
【推荐3】Robots and humans will soon be living in harmony (和睦). A singing robot is being taught to create jazz with a human in a project.
Antonio Chella from Italy is working with a Telenoid robot. To start with, the Telenoid will be trained to follow the movements and simple sounds made by a human singer, and to connect music with different emotional states. Chella then plans to see if the robot can use these connections to create music.
Intelligence is often regarded as the ability to find connections between the existing things. But Chella suggests that a conscious(有意识的) creature should be able to go a step further and introduce new connections that result in the creation of something new.
Some jazz musicians say that they should have a mental library of musical phrases so that they are able to combine them in new ways. More importantly, however, this combination happens in a state that is similar in a sense to dreaming. Chella wants to copy these states in a machine.
“This work raises interesting questions about the link between consciousness and music making,” says Philippe Pasquier, a musician and computer scientist. But he is skeptical about whether a robot musician needs a physical body.
Pasquier argues that the robots are faced with two challenges(挑战). Software that can copy Bach has already been developed. But interpretation(演绎)includes human’s different tastes and judgments. “What made the Beatles famous was not so much their works, but the fact that the interpretations of the works were wonderful,” he says.
It is not yet clear how a robot would go about interpreting music in a new way. But by copying humans and then learning to sing, Chella’s robot could provide clues.
What seems to be important is that human composers often listen to lots of music made by others. So Chella’s robot had better listen to those jazz standards first.
1. Which of the following is the robot’s first step before it tries to create jazz?| A．Living with human beings in harmony. |
| B．Connecting actions with human’s emotions. |
| C．Copying a human singer’s movements and sounds. |
| D．Learning to communicate with human beings freely. |
| A．doubtful | B．worried |
| C．certain | D．concerned |
| A．They are household robots. | B．They can talk with researchers. |
| C．They are faced with two challenges. | D．They will become human singers. |
| A．Chella’s robot needs a physical body to make music. |
| B．How to interpret jazz is a piece of cake for Chella’s robot. |
| C．A new kind of software should be developed to copy Bach. |
| D．Chella’s robot should listen to much jazz to create something new. |
【推荐1】One of our expectations about education is that it will pay off in terms of upward mobility. Historically, the relation between education and income has been strong. But in the early 1970s, a contradiction developed between education and the economy. Our value of education and our average educational attainment（获得）run faster than the capacity of the economy to absorb the graduates.
Since the 1970s, high-school graduates have experienced a striking decrease in earnings, making them the first generation since World War Ⅱ to face a lower standard of living than their parents had. Experts have argued that this contradiction is at the heart of the problem of public education today. It is not, as business leaders claim, that the schools are failing to properly educate students, that they are turning out young people who are inadequately prepared to function in the workplace. The real problem is a shortage of economic opportunities for students who are not continuing on to college. College graduates also are having difficulty finding jobs. Even when they do, the jobs may not be consistent with their training and expectations. Part of the problem is that too many young Americans expect to have professional jobs, making disappointment and frustration unavoidable for some.
Many students assumed that what was true of an individual— that the higher the education, the better the job opportunities — would also be true for an entire society. But when the numbers of better-educated young people became too great, the economy could no longer absorb them. Another part of the problem is the assumption that greater educational attainment guarantees career advancement. In fact, employers do not routinely reward educational attainment; rather, they reward it only when they believe it will contribute to the employee’s productivity.
We should not overlook the fact that there is still a strong relationship between education and occupation and income. College graduates have a strong advantage over those with less education. But the payoff is neither as large nor as certain as it once was. Unfortunately, Americans have focused so strong on the economic payoff that many consider their college education useless if it does not create a desirable, well-paying job. Only in this sense can we speak of an “oversupply” of college graduates.
We could argue that all or at least the majority of Americans would profit by some degree because higher education can enable the individual to think more deeply, explore more widely, and enjoy a greater range of experiences.
1. The underlined phrase “turning out” in Paragraph 2 probably means ________.| A．bringing up | B．putting out |
| C．bringing out | D．putting up |
| A．It offers better job opportunities. |
| B．It makes for higher productivity. |
| C．It guarantees career advancement. |
| D．It brings a definite advantage over others. |
| A．our expectations about education |
| B．the problem of public education today |
| C．the contradiction between education and economy |
| D．the connection between education and occupation |
| A．Objective | B．Indifferent |
| C．Disapproving | D．Favorable |
【推荐2】Exams are disturbing, especially for those already of an anxious character. The silence of the hall; the watchful eye of the monitor; the smug (自命不凡的) expression of the person who has finished 15 minutes early. It, therefore, seems hardly surprising that those who worry about taking tests do worse than those who do not. Scientist Maria Theobald theorised that if this were true, then those with high levels of anxiety would perform worse in a real exam than in a mock exam (模拟考试) or during online practice sessions.
So she worked with 309 students who were preparing for their final exam.
During the 100 days before the exam, all her volunteers used a digital-learning platform which presented them with old exam questions and logged their performance. They also sat a mock exam 40 days before the real thing. To assess their levels of anxiety, they were asked, every day for 40 days in the run-up to the real exam and also on the day of that exam, to respond on a five-point scale (五分制) to statements like, “I feel nervous”.
What Dr Theobald found was not what she expected. Anxiety on the day of the test did not predict exam performance at all. What did predict it was the level of knowledge a student displayed in the mock exam and the earlier digital learning activities. Those who performed well in these also did well in the real thing, regardless of how anxious they were on the day. What actually restricted students was anxiety during the weeks before the exam took place. The greater a student’s anxiety in those days, the lower his or her knowledge gain was, leaving that student with less material to reproduce during the exam.
Dr Theobald notes that test anxiety is at its worst when students have low expectations of success and meanwhile know that passing the exam is extremely important. To reduce this anxiety, she proposes a two fold strategy for students as they revise. First, they can raise their belief in their abilities by reminding themselves of how much they know. Second, they can reduce the significance of the test by reminding themselves that, while it is important, it is not a life-or-death situation.
1. Why did Dr Theobald conduct the research?| A．To prove general ideas about anxiety wrong. |
| B．To find ways to reduce students’ exam anxiety. |
| C．To find out what really contributes to students’ anxiety. |
| D．To see if pressure in the exam hall influences exam results. |
| A．They took part in 40 mock exams. | B．They reported their learning activities. |
| C．They had their psychological state assessed. | D．They used a learning tool to reduce their anxiety. |
| A．Pressure drives students to study hard. |
| B．Students feel more pressure during real exams. |
| C．Anxiety on the exam day makes students perform poorly. |
| D．Students’ performance in mock exams can predict real exam results. |
| A．Being more confident in themselves. | B．Having lower expectations of themselves. |
| C．Treating exams as something unimportant. | D．Taking more mock exams before the real one. |
【推荐3】Some of the world’s best Coffea arabica is grown on Mount Kenya. This variety of the plant produces beans that are tastier than those from its poor cousin, Coffea canephora (known as robusta), which often ends up in instant coffee (速溶咖啡). However, global warming may reduce the total area that is most suited to growing arabica beans by about half by 2050.
Some farmers are trying to adapt to warming by moving uphill. Yet this pushes them into areas long used for growing tea. Not only is there less space higher up; the move stresses how warming also threatens to harm the tea crop, which supports about 10% of Kenya’s population. Warmer weather will push tea itself higher up area.
Kenya’s government-funded Coffee Research Institute is trying to find other ways of helping farmers adapt, such as encouraging them to plant trees to shade their coffee bushes, or to grow hardier (适应性更强) robusta plants. It is also trying to plant a hybrid, Arabusta, which would combine the hardiness of robusta with the flavour of arabica. Coffee snobs may turn up their noses at it, but they may have no other choices.
However, such adaptations may bring social costs. Many smallholder farmers are at risk of being pushed out of the industry altogether because they cannot afford the money needed to protect their crops.
Another option may be entirely new varieties. Researchers in London are studying a wild type of coffee, Coffea stenophylla. It is delicious and can also take the heat. But it produces lower harvest than existing varieties and it may be years before it is widely grown. Without a breakthrough of some sort, caffeine addicts may face a future too unpleasant to imagine. “If we don’t have the innovation (创新) to respond to climate challenges,” Vern Long of World Coffee Research says, “we’re just going to be drinking man-made coffee.”
1. In what way is Coffea arabica better than Coffea robusta?| A．Flavor. | B．Harvest. | C．Hardiness. | D．Sales. |
| A．Robusta. | B．Arabica. | C．Arabusta. | D．Stenophylla. |
| A．Good money will be brought in. |
| B．The areas of tea crop will be reduced. |
| C．The cost of coffee-planting may drop. |
| D．Smallholder coffee farmers may disappear. |
| A．To give suggestions to coffee farmers. |
| B．To recommend new varieties of coffee. |
| C．To introduce coffee industry under threat. |
| D．To list possible solutions to climate changes. |
