【推荐1】Plastic is easy, convenient, cheap and long-lasting, but it does great harm to the environment.

Since plastic entered mass production, 8 billion tons have been produced – and we aren’t very good at recycling. By 2015, 6,945 tons of plastic waste had formed, with around 9 percent of it getting recycled. About 79 percent of it ends up in landfills or around the environment, including the ocean. We may end up drowning in plastic before long.

Chemists at Colorado State University have found a polymer（聚酯）that has many of the qualities of plastics – it’s light, strong, durable and heat-resistant – but that can be changed back to its original small-molecule（分子）state for complete recycling. Even after being recycled, the polymer can be turned back into its plastic-like state, and this can be done quickly and cheaply.

This new polymer has all the good qualities of plastics, yet it is relatively easy to make and to recycle. Making it requires room temperature conditions, a short reaction time to bond the monomer（单体）into polymers and only a small amount of the catalyst（催化剂）remains in the end product. It has a high molecular weight, stands up to heat and generally behaves like plastic. Recycling it requires similarly little effort. Mild lab conditions are required and so is a catalyst. Once applied, the polymers are once again monomers in a matter of minutes and can be used to create another product.

But don’t get too excited about this just yet. Scientists stressed that the polymer isn’t ready for mass products just yet. There’s still plenty of development to do, including making it more economical to produce and recycle.

1. What can we infer from the second paragraph?

A．It is impossible to recycle old plastics.

B．79 percent of plastics has been recycled.

C．Small quantities of plastics get recycled.

D．Landfills aren’t enough to handle plastics.

2. What aspect of the new polymer is the third paragraph mainly about?

A．Its purposes.	B．Its qualities.
C．Its structures.	D．Its applications.

3. What conditions are needed when making the new polymer?

A．Mild temperature.	B．Cold temperature.
C．Body temperature.	D．Room temperature.

4. The new polymer isn’t mass-produced probably because ________.

A．it is not very cheap	B．it seems too light
C．it is hard to recycle	D．it can’t stand cold

【推荐2】People who have trouble walking or moving around often have a hard time enjoying the beach. But hundreds of beaches in Greece now offer a new way for people in wheelchairs to get into the water by themselves. It’s called Seatrac.

Seatrac is basically a chair on a moving ramp (坡道) that can carry a disabled person into the sea. It is operated by remote (远程的) control. Once in the sea, the person can either remain in the chair, enjoying the water, or go for a swim. When the person is ready to get out of the water, the Seatrac system brings the chair back to the top the ramp.

Seatrac was invented and developed in Greece. When one of the inventors, Ignatios Fotiou, was talking with a friend who used a wheelchair, the friend said he enjoyed the sea, but didn’t like having to be carried into the ocean. Mr Fotiou realized there must be a way to make it easier for wheelchair users to get into the water. Mr Fotiou worked with his partner and a professor at a Greek university to design the system. Finnally, they formed a company called TOBEA to build and sell the systems.

The company worked hard to make the system simple enough to be put in place and easy to run. A wooden walkway allows wheerchair users to reach the Seatrac. The system uses solar (太阳能的) power. It doesn’t require outside power, and can continue to run even if the electricity goes out. The Seatrac system can easily be packed up and stored when the swimming season ends.

The Seatrac system is being used at over 220 beaches in Greece, Cypris, Italy, and Latvia. TOBEA hopes to offer Seatrac in other countries. TOBEA has created a website showing where beaches with these special services can be found. The Greek govenment hopes that Seatrac will help attract more tourists to the country.

1. What is Seatrac able to do?

A．Watch out of the disabled in the sea.

B．Choose the suitable beach for the disabled.

C．Help the disabled get in and out of the sea safely.

D．Enable the disabled to move around the beach freely.

2. What made Mr Fotiou decide to develop Seatrac?

A．His partner’s advice.	B．His love for the sea.
C．his wish to start a company.	D．The difficulty his friend faced.

3. What does the author mention about the Seatrac system?

A．It is becoming more popular.	B．It should be well protected.
C．It needs to be fully introduced to the public.	D．It is environmentally friendly and convenient.

4. What does the last paragraph mainly talk about?

A．Expectations for Seatrac.	B．The practical application of Seatrac.
C．The popularity of Seatrac.	D．Special services Seatrac provides.

【推荐3】Alexa is a form of artificial intelligence, or AI for short. Many people start their mornings by asking Alexa for the weather forecast or the latest news. A device(设备) that houses Alexa can also play music from your favorite playlists, keep a shopping list, order takeout food, answer questions, send messages and even run “smart” home controls.

Training AI systems to respond to problems with human-like intelligence and learn from their mistakes can take months, or even years. Consider Alexa and similar software, such as Apple’s Siri. To do the tasks its human owners ask, these systems must make sense of and then respond to sentences such as, “Alexa, play my Ed Sheeran playlist” or “Siri, what is the capital of India?”

Computers can’ t understand language as it is spoken by people. So AI researchers must find a way to help humans communicate with computers. The technology used to get computers to “understand” human speech or text is known as natural language processing. By natural language, computer scientists refer to the way people naturally talk or write. To teach an AI system a task like comprehending(理解) a sentence or responding to a person ’s last move in a board game, scientists need to feed it lots of examples.

AlphaGo is an AI system designed by Google that has beaten a human champion, Lee Sedol, at the strategy(策略) board game Go. To train AlphaGo, Google had to show it 30 million Go moves that people had made while playing the game. Then AlphaGo used what it learned to analyze those plays as it played against different versions (版本) of itself. During this practice, the program came up with new moves---ones never seen in games between people.

1. What does the example of Alexa show?

A．AI may replace humans one day.	B．AI is playing a role in our modern life.
C．AI has been widely used around the world.	D．AI has totally changed people’s bad habits.

2. How do scientists train AI systems?

A．By testing them thousands of times.	B．By teaching them almost everything.
C．By giving them quite a lot of tasks to do.	D．By providing them with large amounts of data.

3. What can we learn about AlphaGo?

A．It has become very skillful and intelligent	B．It is the most convenient AI system.
C．It avoids making any mistakes	D．It just follows human orders

【推荐1】When “irregardless” was included in Merriam-Webster dictionary, it caused wide disagreements. “Irregardless” has been in widespread and near-constant use since 1795, when a newspaper called The Charleston City Gazelle of Charleston Ga first used it. “We do not make the English language, and we merely record it,” the dictionary’s staff wrote in “Words of the Week”.

The word’s definition, when we read it, would seem to be without regard. However, Merriam-Webster defines “irregardless” as “nonstandard” but meaning the same as “regardless”. According to Merriam-Webster, “Many people find ‘irregardless’ to be a ridiculous word, as the ir-prefix usually indicates negative meaning; however, in this case it appears to make the meaning of ‘regardless’ stronger.”

“It’s not a real word. I don’t care what the dictionary says.” responds author Michelle Ray, who teaches English in Silver Spring, Md. And she says she’s still planning to mark “irregardless” as incorrect on her students’ work.

An American newspaper the Baltimore Sun published the word in editor John McIntyre’s commentary on Saturday: “‘Irregardless is too a word; you just don’t understand dictionaries. People get upset about the dictionary because they think it is some sort of official document. But actually, it’s not. It’s just lexicographers identifying words that people use and trying to find out how they are spelled, how they are pronounced, what meanings they have and where they came from.”

“The dictionary’s recognition doesn’t enroll a word as correct in the English language,” McIntyre says. “It just says this is a word that a lot of people use in English. And here’s what we know about it.” So it’s a word, but its use is still discouraged in formal writing.

1. What’s the function of the first paragraph?

A．To lead in the topic.	B．To criticize the use of “irregardless”.
C．To introduce a new word.	D．To make a definition of “irregardless”.

2. What can we learn from the passage?

A．The dictionary’s staff rarely record the English language.

B．Michelle Ray thinks the use of “irregardless” formal but incorrect.

C．People are still not encouraged to use “irregardless” in formal writing.

D．“Irregardless” had been in widespread and near-constant use before 1975.

3. What is the attitude of McIntyre to the appearance of “irregardless” in Merriam-Webster dictionary?

A．Conservative.

B．Favorable.

C．Indifferent.

D．Ambiguous.

4. What can be the best title for the passage?

A．“Irregardless” Is Frequently Used in Formal Writing

B．“Irregardless” Shouldn’t Be Included in the Dictionary

C．Experts Can’t Agree on the Meaning of “Irregardless”

D．Regardless of What You Think, “Irregardless” Is a Word

【推荐2】A serious problem for today's society is who should be responsible for our elderly and how to improve their lives. It is not only a financial problem but also a question of the system we want for our society. I would like to suggest several possible solutions to this problem.
First, employers should take the responsibility for their retired employees. To make this possible, a percentage of profits should be set aside for this purpose. But when a company must take life-long responsibility for its employees, it may suffer from a commercial disadvantage due to higher employee costs.
Another way of solving the problem is to return the responsibility to the individual. This means each person must save during his working years to pay for his years of retirement. This does not seem a very fair model since some people have enough trouble paying for their daily life without trying to earn extra to cover their retirement years. This means the government might have to step in to care for the poor.
In addition, the government could take responsibility for the care of the elderly. This could be financed through government taxes to increase the level of pensions. Furthermore, some institutions should be created for senior citizens, which can help provide a comfortable life for them. Unfortunately, as the present situation in our country shows, this is not a truly____answer. The government can seldom afford to care for the elderly, particularly when it is busy trying to care for the young.
One further solution is that the government or social organizations establish some working places especially for the elderly where they are independent.
To sum up, all these options have advantages and disadvantages. Therefore, it is reasonable to expect that some combination of these options may be needed to provide the care we hope to give to our elderly generations.
1. What is the passage mainly about?

A．The problems faced by the old in society.

B．Why we should take responsibility for the old.

C．How we can improve the lives of the old.

D．Where the old can go to get their pensions.

2. The underlined word "viable" most probably means"       ".

A．impossible

B．practical

C．useful

D．important

3. What is the writer's main purpose in writing this article?

A．To point out the need for government support for old people.

B．To make general readers aware of the problems of retired people.

C．To discuss some possible solutions to an important social problem.

D．To instruct retired people on how they can have a happier life.

4. The text is most likely to be found in a book about____.

A．social science	B．historical events
C．political problem	D．political systems

【推荐3】Psychopaths, by definition, have problems understanding the emotions of other people, which partly explains why they are so selfish and why they commit violent crimes at up to three times the rate of other people.

But curiously, they seem to have no difficulty in understanding what other people think, want, or believe."Their behavior seems to suggest that they don't consider the thoughts of others," says ArielleBaskin-Sommers from Yale University, but their performance on experiments suggests otherwise. When they hear a story and are asked to say what a character is thinking, they can.

On the face of it, this makes sense: Here are people who can understand what their victims are thinking but just don't care. Hence their actions. But Baskin-Sommers found that there's more to their minds than it seems.

Bakin-Sommers managed to persuade a maximum-security prison in Connecticut to let her work with their prisoners. First, Baskin-Sommers administered a standard test to 106 male prisoners from the Connecticut prison to assess psychopathy. Of them, 22 proved to be psychopaths, 28 were not, and the rest fell in a gray zone.

After assessing the 106 volunteers, she then gave them a computer-based task. They saw a picture of a human avatar (化身) in prison uniforms, standing in a room and facing either right or left. There were either two red dots on the wall in front of the avatar, or one dot in front of it and one dot behind it, The prisoners’ job was to figure out how many dots either they or the avatar could see.

Normally, people can accurately say how many dots the avatar sees, but they're slower if there are dots behind the avatar. Thar's because what they see (two dots) affects their ability to see through the avatar's eyes(one dot), This is called egocentric interference. But they're also slower to say how many dots they can see if that number differs from the avatar's count. People are automatically affected by the avatar's perspective, even when it hurts their own performance. This is called altercentic interference.

Baskin-Sommers found that the psychopathic prisoners showed the usual level of egocentric interference-that is, their own perspective was muscling in on the avatar's, But they showed much less altercentric interference than the other prisoners- the avatar's perspective wasn't messing with their own, as it would for most other people.

Of course, not all psychopaths are the same, and they vary considerably in their behavior. But Baskin-Sommers also found fhat the higher their score on the psychopathy assessment test, the less they were affected by what the avatar saw. And the less affected they were, the more charges they had on their record.

To her, the results show that psychopaths do not automatically take the perspective of other people. That helps to explain why they behave so cruelly and even violently.

1. What does "otherwise" (in paragraph 2) refer to ?

A．Pychopaths' behavior is not worth studying

B．Psychopaths can understand others' thoughts

C．Psychopaths have trouble knowing about others.

D．Psychopaths' perfomance on experiments is unbelievable

2. Baskin-Sommers's research with the prisoners involved.

A．asking them to say the number of the dots they or the avatar could see

B．reading their medical records to see whether they were psychopaths.

C．requiring them to figure out which avatar messed in with them

D．decreasing the effect of the avatar on their performance

3. What can be inferred from the results of Baskin Sommers's work the prisoners?

A．It's more difficult for psychopaths to work out what they themselves are thinking about.

B．Egocentric interference are more related to criminal acts than altercentric imerference.

C．People showing more altercentric interference are less likely to be psychopaths.

D．Psychopaths tend to be affected by the avatar to the same degree.

4. Which of the following might be the best title of this passage?

A．Varieties of Psychopaths

B．How Psychopaths See the World

C．Psychopaths and Their Perspectives

D．Why Psychopaths Need More Understanding