【推荐3】In the 16th century, it was not unusual to see armed men standing guard outside Britain’s dovecotes (鸽舍). They were not there to protect the pigeons living inside, but rather to prevent thieves from breaking in and stealing something far more valuable—the birds’ waste.

Chemists in mid-1500s Nuremburg had discovered that the birds’ waste was a rich source of saltpetre, a vital ingredient in the making of gunpowder. As a consequence, for several decades pigeon droppings were almost as valuable as silver. Moreover, waste gathered from the dovecotes was a rich fertiliser, particularly sought after by those with vineyards and orchards (果园).

The dovecote was not only a source of food and revenue in medieval times, but also a status symbol. The privilege of building or owning dovecotes was reserved for the upper class. The right was granted by the king. Those who were allowed to build a dovecote usually placed it in some conspicuous places, so that passersby could behold it.

However, the abundance of dovecotes across the British countryside was not universally welcomed. Even a small dovecote had nesting holes for 500 birds. Each day they flew off to stuff themselves on other people’s crops. By the middle of the 17th century, the disaster of pigeons was so great that poet John Milton voiced his fears that the dangerous doves would turn England into a desert.

Later, vast quantities of natural saltpetre were discovered in Chile and California, destroying the value of pigeon waste as a chemical resource. Keeping pigeons was no longer necessary nor profitable, nor even fashionable. During the 18th and 19th centuries, around 95 per cent of Britain’s dovecotes fell into disuse and were demolished.

Now homeless, the tens of thousands pigeons that had once lived in the dovecotes flew off to find somewhere else to live. A species that in the wild had nested on cliffs, the birds discovered that Britain’s rapidly growing towns and cities were full of the sort of rock-faces they liked to root into—humans called them “buildings”. And so these once noble and attractive birds settled there. Over time they’d become the wild urban pigeons that we know today.

1. Which of the following is NOT pigeon’s function in the past?

A．Provide material for gunpowder.	B．Improve the level of soil fertility.
C．Increase income by selling meat.	D．Promote a man’s social position.

2. What does the underline word “conspicuous” in Paragraph 3 mean?

A．Face-saving.

B．Hand-reaching.

C．Eye-catching.

D．Breath-taking.

3. Why does the author mention John Milton in Paragraph 4?

A．To emphasize the danger of land desertification.

B．To describe the destructive power of the pigeons.

C．To highlight the local’s deep hatred for pigeons.

D．To represent pigeon’s strong ability to reproduce.

4. Which of the following is the best title of the passage?

A．Pigeons: from Prosper to Problem	B．The Origin of Wild Urban Pigeon
C．Pros and Cons of Raising Pigeons	D．The Glorious History of Pigeon

【推荐1】Art and technology have much more in common than one might think. Each of these pursuits is, after all, an attempt by humans to describe and understand the world. Though the methods used to reach that “aha” moment may be different, both art and technology are fundamentally humans, and both play very important roles in the human experience as well as human innovation(革新).

Technology is changing art and opening the doors to new virtual museums and new creative mediums. It is no secret that technology is an increasingly pervasive part of our lives, and its influence is finding its way to the art world. Some of the changes may seem obvious, like the increasing popularity of digital art galleries. But there are other, less expected changes that have made art more accessible to both creators and buyers.

Here is a question for you, “If a computer creates’art’, should it still be considered art?”This puzzlement has laid at the heart of some of the most debatable types of art, AI-produced art. AI-produced art has sold for thousands, but does that mean it is any good? An AI-produced portrait of Edmond de Belamy by French art collective Obvious Art sold for an eye-watering $432,000 in 2018, the most expensive AI painting by far.

The process of creating AI-produced art is not as complex as you may think. Though there are many different paths to creating AI art, in general, artists write algorithms(算法)that are able to “learn” a specific aesthetic(美感)by analyzing thousands of images.

The algorithm then tries to produce new images along the lines of the aesthetics it has learned. You could teach an AI algorithm to “paint” like your favorite artists. This combination of technology and art may someday prove to be one of the most exciting new areas in the art world. And with new AI artists appearing each year, some day may be getting closer.

1. What does the first paragraph mainly talk about?

A．Different functions of art and technology.	B．Similar goal of art and technology.
C．Definition of art and technology.	D．Limit of art and technology.

2. What does the underlined word “pervasive” in Paragraph 2 mean?

A．Widespread.

B．Important.

C．Special.

D．Local.

3. Why does the author mention an AI-produced portrait of Edmond de Belamy?

A．To stress there is argument on art’s influence.	B．To argue that people have wrong attitudes to art.
C．To say art can be measured by money.	D．To prove technology’s influence on art.

4. What’s the author’s attitude towards the combination of technology and art?

A．Aggressive.

B．Neutral.

C．Positive.

D．Critical.

【推荐2】From writing Shakespeare-style poetry to making music, ChatGPT has amazed the world since its launch in late 2022 by the US-based company OpenAI. It even passed several law exams in four courses at the University of Minnesota, US, according to CNN.

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 OpenAl said in an interview with Forbes, “it's not actually 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 complicated 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 capture the meaning of texts more accurately.

The GPT models 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 of texts it 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, told The Guardian. 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.

Some argue that ChatGPT will be used to generate fake news, spread falsities, or be used for ill purposes. 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. How does ChatGPT work?

A．By making complicated texts simpler.

B．By gathering a wide variety of information.

C．By passing several law exams in four courses.

D．By employing its large collection of information.

2. What makes ChatGPT so amazing?

A．A completely new technology.

B．The ability to track the location of a word.

C．The combination of a network and self-learning.

D．Better understanding of the meaning of every word.

3. What does the underlined word “falsities” mean in the last but one paragraph?

A．False information.	B．Something new.
C．Various resources.	D．Timely responses.

4. Why is ChatGPT forbidden in many us schools?

A．Because a ban on it has recently been passed.

B．Because it provides fake news that will mislead students.

C．Because students use it for the purpose of improving their essays.

D．Because with it, students finish their assignments without thinking.

【推荐3】Paying with your palm

Your palm（手掌）could soon be your ticket to a concert, thanks to Amazon One. On Sept 14, Amazon, a tech giant from the United States, announced that it is bringing Amazon One, a palm recognition technology, to music places as a replacement for physical tickets and apps. People just need to wave their hands over a piece of equipment outside the place to connect their palm to a ticketing account. Then they can use their palm to get into other shows and events at the place.

Catching CO₂ from air

Carbon dioxide（CO₂）is the main kind of greenhouse gas. It is usually the result of human activities, like driving cars and flying airplanes. Now, Swiss company Climeworks has created a machine called Orca to help catch CO₂. From its base in Iceland, Orca catches CO₂ from the air and keeps it 1, 000 meters underground. Orca can catch 4, 000 tons of CO₂ each year-around the same amount of CO₂ emissions that 870 cars give off per year.

Creating starch in a lab

Starch（淀粉）is the most important part of human food. Scientists at the Tianjin Institute of Industrial Biotechnology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences have created starch using CO₂, hydrogen（氢）and electricity, according to a study published in the journal Science on Sept 24. Lab tests show that synthetic（合成的）starch is about 8.5 times more efficient than starch produced by traditional agriculture. “There are many industries that can benefit from this technology.” Ma Yanhe, the author of the study, told China Daily.

1. What do you know about Amazon One？

A．It can be a replacement for music places.

B．It can help people attend a concert without payment.

C．It can connect the palm with the recognition system.

D．It is a piece of palm-sized equipment.

2. What benefit can the technology of synthetic starch bring us？

A．Better quality.

B．Higher efficiency.

C．Lower cost.

D．Higher safety

3. In what part of a newspaper will this passage appear？

A．Science and Technology.	B．Nature and Health.
C．Society and Environment.	D．Life and Business.

【推荐2】Chinese writer Can Xue, along with Japanese author Haruki Murakami, was reportedly named as the fourth-ranked candidate(候选人)to have the highest chance of winning the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2019.

Can, whose real name is Deng Xiaohua, was born in Changsha, Hunan in 1953. Not raised as a writer, she spent almost 20 years while being a worker, tailor and medical practitioner (从业者).Yet she never gave up on her passion, and in 1985 published her first novel Yellow Mud Street. Like her other works, it made use of symbolism. The book became known as the autobiography of her inner world. Such a work was not easily accepted or understood by Chinese readers during that period. But Can never stopped pursuing her own style.

Other representative works include Old Floating Cloud and The Barefoot Doctor. Some have been translated in other languages, while others have been selected as textbooks at world-class universities in the US and Japan. Her novel The Last Lover has been honored with the Neustadt International Prize for Literature in US, widely considered a prelude award for the Nobel.

Sharing a stylistic similarity with Franz Kafka, Can has been called the "Chinese Kafka" by permanent Nobel Literature Committee judge and renowned sinologist Goran Malmqvist. Malmqvist even believed Can could achieve more than Kafka, as she has already created more than 7 million words of literary composition.

Can responded she was unworthy of that level of praise, and she is just standing on Kafka's shoulders.

Though not understood by many Chinese, Can still writes in a way that combines Western and Chinese culture. But Can said many Western readers thought her works novel enough, as she praised the virtues of introducing Chinese culture to the West.

1. When did Can Xue publish her first novel?

A．In 1953

B．In 1973.

C．In 1985.

D．In 2019.

2. Which of her works won a prize for literature in America?

A．Old Floating Cloud.	B．The Last Lover.
C．The Barefoot Doctor.	D．Yellow Mud Street.

3. Why has Can Xue been called the "Chinese Kafka"?

A．Her works made use of symbolism.

B．She introduced Chinese culture to the West.

C．She won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2019.

D．Her works shared a similar style with Franz Kafka.

4. What word can describe Can Xue best according to the text?

A．Modest

B．Passive.

C．Mean.

D．Generous.