Anxious thinker. Loner. Wallflower. These are some negative comments for “introvert” (内向者), showing a common mind-set in America. Actually they just interact differently; they do well when given time alone to think and prefer close conversations.
American society is ruled by the “Extrovert Ideal (外向理想型)”: successful people take risks and always voice their opinion, whether or not they know what they’re doing. The problem is that people value this ideal so much that they often ignore meaningful opinions from the quieter introverts. Isn’t there something problematic about having to get our thoughts out before we finish thinking about them?
Over-stressing the Extrovert Ideal can lead to unwise decisions. In one case, several introverts, who tend to be more careful and think more, pointed out warning signals before the economic downturn of 2008. But the decision makers — often the bold, risk-taking types —ignored their opinion. People say introverts often overthink every decision. Yes, maybe we think before we speak. But is that really so bad?
Of course, social skills are important for everyone. But the misunderstanding about how introverts work creates a cultural bias (偏见). Required class participation at school often leads to students shouting out whatever thoughts come to their mind, too pressured by their participation grade to take the time and think of a meaningful response. During the Covid-19quarantine, some of my classes started using Parlay, a website that allows for discussions through anonymous (匿名的) written comments. I saw that many of my classes were able to have deeper conversations this way, freed from the pressures of having to speak up on the spot. So encouraging a balanced variety of learning methods can reduce the existing bias.
Society seems to think only the loud and outgoing ones can make a difference. But Rosa Parks was known for being “soft spoken” and “timid.” Gandhi said, “In a gentle way, you can shake the world.” So please, give us introverts a chance to change the world in our own quiet way!
1. What is the author’s attitude towards the “Extrovert Ideal”?| A．Objective. | B．Doubtful. | C．Favorable. | D．Unclear. |
| A．The benefit of the Extrovert Ideal. | B．The introverts’ poor social skills. |
| C．The harm of over-valuing extroverts. | D．The extroverts’ ways of decision-making. |
| A．requiring no class participation | B．providing online learning platforms |
| C．allowing different learning styles | D．conducting free classroom discussions |
| A．Brave. | B．Lazy. | C．Easygoing. | D．Shy. |
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At the same time, Americans say they don’t put kindness first when it comes to teaching kids values. Among all participants, honesty is taught more than kindness as well as other things like courage, leadership and storing work ethic(道德). But the younger generation—those aged 18-24—think highly of kindness rules. They choose kindness by 10% over honesty as the most important quality to teach kids.
The question of whether kindness is learned or taught—or somewhere in between —causes different opinions. According to the study, Americans have different opinions on whether kindness in something one is born with or needs to be learned and nurtured over time. Slightly more than half(52%) of the participants believe that all of us are born with the ability to show kindness, while 48% believe kindness must be developed.
Parenthood(父母身份) makes a difference to your thoughts on the causes of kindness. Those without kids(56%) are more likely to think that people are born to be kind, while 50% of the participants with kids think kindness is developed.
Also, 51% of dads and 54% of men with no kids believe kindness is something time is born with. Slightly more than half of the moms say kindness must be learned, while 48% believe it is what one is born with.
1. 62% of the participants believe that today’s kids are ________.
| A．born to be kind |
| B．taught to be less kind |
| C．not well educated at school |
| D．not so kind as kids in the past |
| A．Honesty. | B．Leadership. | C．Kindness. | D．Courage. |
| A．kept | B．developed |
| C．replaced | D．protected |
| A．48% | B．51% | C．52% | D．54% |
| A．causes of today’s kids being less kind. |
| B．The important qualities of today’s kids. |
| C．Different peoples opinions on kindness. |
| D．findings of research on today’s kids’ kindness |
【推荐2】The Supreme Court’s decision on physician-assisted suicide carry important implications for how medicine seeks to relieve dying patients of pain and suffering.
Although it ruled that there is no constitutional right to physician-assisted suicide, the Court in effect supported the medical principle of “double effect”, a centuries-old moral principle holding that an action having two effects — a good one that is intended and a harmful one that is foreseen — is permissible if the actor intends only the good effect.
Doctors have used that principle in recent years to justify using high doses of morphine to control terminally ill patients’ pain, even though increasing dosages will eventually kill the patient.
Nancy Dubler, director of Montefiore Medical Center, contends that the principle will shield doctors who “until now have very, very strongly insisted that they could not give patients sufficient mediation to control their pain if that might hasten death.”
George Annas, chair of the health law department at Boston University, maintains that, as long as a doctor prescribes a drug for a legitimate medical purpose, the doctor has done nothing illegal even if the patient uses the drug to hasten death. “It’s like surgery,” he says. “We don’t call those deaths homicides because the doctors didn’t intend to kill their patients, although they risked their death. If you’re a physician, you can risk your patient’s suicide as long as you don’t intend their suicide.”
On another level, many in the medical community acknowledge that the assisted-suicide debate has been fueled in part by the despair of patients for whom modern medicine has prolonged the physical agony of dying.
Just three weeks before the Court’s ruling on physician-assisted suicide, the National Academy of Science (NAS) released a two-volume report, “Approaching Death: Improving Care at the End of Life”. It identifies the under-treatment of pain and the aggressive use of “ineffectual and forced medical procedures that may prolong and even dishonor the period of dying” as the twin problems of end-of-life care.
The profession is taking steps to require young doctors to train in hospices, to test knowledge of aggressive pain management therapies, and to develop new standards for assessing and treating pain at the end of life.
Annas says lawyers can play a key role in insisting that these well-meaning medical initiatives translate into better care, “Large numbers of physicians seem unconcerned with the pain their patients are needlessly and predictably suffering,” to the extent that it constitutes “systematic patient abuse”. He says medical licensing boards “must make it clear that painful deaths are presumptively ones that are incompetently managed and should result in license suspension”.
1. From the first three paragraphs, we learn that ________.| A．doctors used to increase drug dosage to control their patients’ pain |
| B．it is still illegal for doctors to help the dying end their lives |
| C．the Supreme Court strongly opposes physician-assisted suicide |
| D．patients have no constitutional right to commit suicide |
| A．Doctors will be held guilty if they risk their patients’ death. |
| B．Modern medicine has assisted terminally ill patients in painless recovery. |
| C．The Court ruled that high-dosage pain-relieving medication can be prescribed. |
| D．A doctor’s medication is no longer justified by his intentions. |
| A．prolonged medical procedures | B．inadequate treatment of pain |
| C．systematic drug abuse | D．insufficient hospital care |
| A．manage their patients incompetently |
| B．give patients more medicine than needed |
| C．reduce drug dosages for their patients |
| D．prolong the needless suffering of the patients |
【推荐3】People who grow up outside of cities are better at finding their way around than urbanites, a large study on navigation suggests. The results, described online on March 30 in Nature, hint that learning to handle environmental complexity as a child strengthens mental muscles for spatial skills.
Nearly 400,000 people from 38 countries around the world played a video game called Sea Hero Quest, designed by scientists and game developers as a fun way to collect data about people’s brains. Players piloted a boat in search of various targets.
On average, people who said they had grown up outside of cities, where they would have probably encountered lots of complicated paths, were better at finding the targets than people who were raised in cities.
What’s more, the difference between city residents and outsiders was most obvious in countries where cities tend to have simple layouts (布局), such as Chicago with its streets laid out at 90-degree angles. The simpler the cities, the bigger the advantage for people from more rural areas, cognitive scientist Antoine Coutrot of CNRS and his colleagues report.
Still, from these video game data, scientists can’t definitively say that the childhood environment is behind the differences in navigation. But it’s possible. “As a kid, if you are exposed to a complex environment, you learn to find your way, and you develop the right cognitive processes to do so,” Coutrot says.
Other factors have been linked to navigational performance, including age, gender, education and even a superior sense of smell. Figuring out these details will give doctors a more precise baseline (基准) of a person’s navigational abilities. That, in turn, might help reveal when these skills weaken, as they do in early Alzheimer’s disease, for instance.
1. What does the underlined word “urbanites” in Paragraph 1 refer to?| A．Those who live close to urban areas. |
| B．Those who are from rural areas. |
| C．Those who are raised in cities. |
| D．Those who long for urban life. |
| A．By playing a game called Sea Hero Quest. |
| B．By gathering data from the video game. |
| C．By recording electrical activities in brains. |
| D．By comparing various targets of the game. |
| A．City outsiders performed no better than city residents in the study. |
| B．Cities’ simple layouts gave city residents an advantage in the game. |
| C．There was no significant difference between city residents and outsiders. |
| D．The players’ performance had something to do with their earlier experience. |
| A．How environment impacts early childhood development |
| B．Why is early childhood education important for our future |
| C．When is the best time to obtain your navigational skills |
| D．Where you grew up may shape your navigational skills |
【推荐1】Christmas wouldn’t be Christmas without mountains of wrapping paper covering the floor on 25 December. Or would it?
A rise in interest in crafting(手工艺)，coupled with a greater awareness of the environment under lockdown, has led to an increase in interest in furoshiki-the Japanese art of fabric wrapping this year.
Furoshiki are traditional Japanese cloths used to transport food, clothes or gifts. They are increasingly being accepted by shoppers as an alternative to paper. The cloths are easy to use: gifts are placed in the centre of the fabric, which is then tucked(卷起)around the object and fastened with a knot (结).
Because fabric is so much more malleable (可塑的)than wrapping paper, it can be used to make even the most awkward-shaped gifts look professionally wrapped. The Covid-19 pandemic(大流行病)has brought the environment into a new focus for people, causing people all to make more environmentally conscious decisions around what we buy.
Part of the appeal of fabric wrapping is that it is a present in itself. The receiver can not only enjoy a beautifully wrapped gift but can then reuse the cloth to give a gift of their own.
Some customers use their cloth within family or friendship circles, so that it eventually makes its way back to them. There’s a certain magic and tradition in passing it from person to person.
Then there’s the rising interest in craft. Fabric wrapping is often handmade. Compared to standard wrapping paper, fabric wrapping offers more chances to experiment with different folding techniques and the way it lends itself to botanical decoration. There is a huge appetite for people wanting to learn new craft skills and perhaps create their own gifts for friends and family.
The practice of using furoshiki became widespread during Japan’s Edo period (1603-1868), when people bundled(捆)their clothes in fabric while visiting public baths. The custom was generally the preserve of older people in Japan, but younger generations are getting on board as a result of the pandemic. They have started to reconsider their ways of life.
1. Which of the following can best describe furoshiki?| A．Sustainable. |
| B．Wasteful. |
| C．Complex to knot. |
| D．Awkward to carry. |
| A．It has less human touch. |
| B．It improves gardening skills. |
| C．It stimulates appetite for food. |
| D．It offers more space for creativity. |
| A．It has a long family tradition. |
| B．Pandemic promotes green rethink. |
| C．Public baths are gaining popularity. |
| D．It’s their turn to preserve the custom. |
| A．The history of furoshiki. |
| B．The benefits of furoshiki. |
| C．Ways to wrap a gift with furoshiki. |
| D．Reasons for a growing interest in furoshiki. |
【推荐2】If you have gone to the cinema and watched the popular movie “The Wandering Earth II” recently, you might be impressed by the intelligent computer MOSS. It can make the reasonable decision in the shortest time based on the given conditions. In fact, such strong AI like MOSS does not exist in reality for the time being.
However, weak AI, which replaces human processing in a specific field, has already influenced our daily life. For example, OpenAI, the San Francisco-based startup opened up the language model ChatGPT for public testing in November 2022. Compared with traditional search engines, which display simple results according to searching keywords, ChatGPT can interact with people just like dialoguing, answer professional questions, and also answer follow-up questions. Thanks to its revolutionary user experience, ChatGPT obtained more than one million users just five days after its release.
More than a Chatbot, ChatGPT can also realize article creation, code generating and other functions only by requesting. ChatGPT can even write code such as Python, debug (排错) code and generate comments for code just like a professional programmer. It also presented strong capacity in content continuation, literary creation, music creation, etc. It is so powerful that New York City public schools have banned it from their networks and school devices.
However, ChatGPT is still far from perfect. Even OpenAI’s CEO once said, “It’s a mistake to be relying on it for anything important right now. It’s a preview of progress. We have lots of work to do on robustness (稳健性) and truthfulness.”
Even though AI like ChatGPT still has a long way to go, predictions about how the technology will influence our society are already there. Among the industries that may be most affected by ChatGPT, experts say, are journalism, law and translation.
1. Why is the movie “The Wandering Earth II” mentioned in the first paragraph?| A．To prove that the movie is a hit. |
| B．To introduce the topic of the text. |
| C．To show how intelligent MOSS is. |
| D．To advertise the movie. |
| A．It’s well-received for its truthfulness. |
| B．It can just display simple results content. |
| C．It should be banned from all school networks. |
| D．It makes human-machine interaction more intelligent. |
| A．It’s totally reliable. | B．It’s a product of accident. |
| C．It needs improving. | D．It should speed up its progress. |
| A．Moss Beats ChatGPT | B．OpenAI Develops Well |
| C．AI Takes Over | D．ChatGPT Works |
【推荐3】The world’s most complex biological computer made from a group of engineered cells, could one day be implanted into the body to detect diseases and deliver treatments.
In an early research in 2012, Martin Fussenegger at ETH Zurish in Switzerland and his colleagues engineered two kidney cells to become a biological circuit capable of simple mathematics. One of the cells was able to calculate addition: the presence or absence of each of two chemicals would switch on a reaction inside the cell that would make it shine different colours. The other cell worked in the same way but could subtract amounts. This kind of biological circuit resembles a simple logic circuit in a computer. In theory, it could be used to indicate the presence of an infectious substance while in fact it failed.
Most biological reactions in the body aren’t that simple, though. They rarely rely on “one input and one output”—instead, multiple inputs lead to different outputs. For instance, a high level of calcium in the body in the presence of a specific hormone may suggest one disease, but a high level of calcium along with another hormone might indicate a completely different condition.
To be more practical, biological computer need to be able to perform more complex mathematics. However, it is hard to pack multiple calculations into a single cell. To get around this, Fussenegger and his team have engineered a multicellular system, in which different cells each perform a separate calculation and pass on the results to each other.
The system has nine cells, each containing a biochemical reaction that responds to three chemical inputs—similar to an AND, NOT and OR system in a traditional electronic circuit. These cells coordinate their activities by releasing chemicals that pass from one cell to the other. Together, they form a fully biological circuit that can respond to multiple inputs.
“Although it is not at a stage yet where we can test on animals, we believe it is the most complex biological computer ever assembled,” says Fussenegger. “This work addresses one of the major limitations in synthetic biology(合成生物学)-a lack of programmable devices,” says Angel Goni-Moreno, a synthetic biologist at Newcastle University, UK. He says dial Fussenegger’s multicellular approach enables you to programme the circuit and achieve different calculations just by connecting the nine cells in different configurations(设置).
In the future, a biological computer like this could be used to monitor more complex medical conditions. For example, it could respond to a rise in calcium, a drop in a hormone and an increase in a biomarker, which together would signal the presence of a specific type of cancer, help diagnose it and alert the user to seek appropriate treatment.
1. The underlined word “subtract” in Paragraph 2 is closest in meaning to ______.| A．take away | B．split up | C．add up | D．give away |
| A．The indication of infectious substances became a reality. |
| B．A biological circuit was implanted in one of kidney cells. |
| C．Engineered kidney cells could switch on biological reactions, |
| D．Certain cells were made capable of performing mathematics. |
| A．It has all the functions of a traditional electronic circuit. |
| B．It is programmable and able to perform different mathematics. |
| C．It has successfully packed multiple calculations into a single cell. |
| D．It has been tested through a series of complex medical conditions. |
| A．Programmable cells implanted in human bodies |
| B．Biological computer intended for health care |
| C．Electronic circuit made from multi-cells |
| D．Smart cells indicating various cancers |
