【推荐1】Computers, smart phones, and other machines are the perfect servants. They always do what they are “told”. We usually “tell” them to do things by using a mouse or keyboard. But what if we could just talk to them normally and tell them what to do in our daily life?

This type of technology, known as voice control or voice recognition（声音识别）, has been shown in films and TV shows since the 1960s. And real-world voice recognition is used for more everyday tasks. You might be familiar with Siri and Alexa, two examples of voice recognition software made by Apple and Amazon. They can be asked to do many things, from setting alarms and playing music to placing online shopping orders and controlling household appliances（家用电器）.

One of the nice things about voice recognition is that it can be used when we’re on the go. When you’re driving a car or walking down the sidewalk, it can be inconvenient or even dangerous to pick up your smart phone and type away on the keyboard. Voice recognition allows you to focus on（专注于）whatever you’re doing at the moment while still doing other tasks. What’s more, people with hearing disabilities can also benefit（获益）, as speech recognition software can be used to “listen” to spoken words and turn them into text that deaf people can read.

【推荐2】①ChatGPT is back in news! Open AI, the company behind die popular chatbot（聊天程序）, has now introduced a powerful new language model: GPT-4.

②On March 14, 2023. GPT-4 showed the world how smarter it is than GPT-3.5. One of its best new advantages is that it can understand pictures. For example, if you show a picture of a phone using the wrong charger（充电器）, GPT-4 can tell why the picture looks strange or funny.

③_____▲____The new language model can create classic games very quickly. It can also change the tone（语气）and style based on what you ask it to do. GPT-4 is much better than the older GPT at passing tests, which may worry teachers. According to CNN, GPT-4 did really well on a law school test, with a score in the top 10 percent of test takers. But GPT-3.5 only got a score in the bottom 10 percent.

④ GPT-4 will also see greater use as a tool to power other apps and services. For example, the language learning app Duoling plan to use GPT-4. Their users can learn languages by talking with AI. Another app, Be My Eyes, will use GPT-4 to help blind people better understand the world around them. The government of Iceland also plans to use GPT-4 to protect the Icelandic language.

⑤ There are still problems with the new language model, however, GPT-4 still can’t get completely correct answers, especially with newer information after September 2021.

【推荐3】Water is the most basic building block（组成部分）of life. Just over half of our body is made up of water. We always think that we’ll always have clean water to drink. But in many parts of the word, clean water is more expensive than gold. People get sick and die every day because they don’t have enough clean drinking water. What can we do to solve the problem?

A teenager named Marcus Deans might have the answer. He has just invented（发明）NOCOS, a cheap and easy-to-make filter（过滤器）. The 17-year-old Canadian once saw a picture of an African child drinking dirty water. He then decided to find a way to solve it. But it wasn’t easy at first. Deans was just 12 years old when he started working on his filter. “It was difficult                    to find help with the project at the very start. I was lucky enough to receive help from inventors from across the world who offered me advice.” he said.

Many people before Deans have tried to find ways to bring water filtration to the people in some poor countries. The problem is that their filters were usually too expensive or needed special parts. But Deans’ filter is quite cheap—it costs just $2 to make. And it’s made out of materials like sand an sugar that are easy to find, even in poor parts of the world.

Deans has taken part in many charity（慈善）activities. Now he is preparing to make his NOCOS filter used in some developing（发展中的）countries. Probably the people living in those places will be thankful for his hard work.

【推荐1】

We’re eating more seafood than ever these days. Usually the seafood comes from the east part of China. But do you want to eat the “seafood” from Xinjiang? Xinjiang is far from the sea. In fact, many years ago, the western part of Xinjiang was a sea. Now it is famous for its local “seafood”, such as shrimps and crabs (虾蟹). At the end of October last year, they held the first-fishing festival in Xinjiang.

The most important thing for the “seafood” is water, Xinjiang has many rivers and lakes with cold, clear water. It is from the Tianshan Mountains. With the water, fishermen can build fish pools. As we know, land in Xinjiang has a lot of salt. This is not good for growing plants. But the land makes the underground water salty. People turn the salty water into “man-made seawater”. They then use it to feed shrimps and crabs and so on.

At present, some of Xinjiang’s “seafood” goes to many Chinese cities, like Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Dalian and so on. It also goes to countries in Southeast Asia.

Many people are afraid to eat the seafood because of the sea pollution. Xinjiang’s “seafood” is becoming a new choice for seafood lovers. “Fishermen” is becoming a new job for people in Xinjiang.

【推荐2】Jane, a reporter, is collecting information for the local newspaper. She is interested in the following things introduced in a magazine.

Smart Schoolbag

Do you often forget to pack the books you need into your schoolbag in the morning?

A clever boy who studies in Shanghai No.1 middle school, invents a schoolbag. It tells you which books you should put into your schoolbag. A small computer and a scanner (扫描装置) are fixed in the bag. As each book is put into the bag, it is checked by the scanner. If any book is missing, a message will be shown on the computer screen to remind you.

Weather Sweets (糖果)

Do you believe sweets can be affected (影响) by the weather?

A university makes that happen. It uses a 3D printer to create sweets based on the weather information of a certain day.

The shapes of the sweets are affected by wind speed. The colors of the sweets are decided by temperature. The sweets act as a weather record of the day when they are made.

Sunrise Bed

It’s hard for you to get up in the morning, isn’t it?

To help you get up, a company has created a “tool” — a sunrise bed.

It wakes you up gently as a sunrise does. Lights turn on and start to get brighter and brighter. When the lights are fully on, soft music will begin to play. It will be louder and louder until you turn it off. The company explains, “The gentle light tells your body that it is morning, so it stops producing a chemical that helps you sleep.”

【推荐1】A 15—year—old student who invented a flashlight（手电筒）getting power from the holder's body heat is going home today from California with a big prize and a chance to do further research.

Ann Makosinski was the only Canadian among the four winners at Google's international science competition. Thousands of young scientists from around the world took part in the competition.

Winning the science and technology competition was "a surprise". Ann said, "I think it will have a great influence on my future."

Ann thanked her family for encouraging her interest in science and said that her first toy was a box of transistors（晶体管）.

Ann's prize includes $25.000 and a "once—in—a—lifetime experience" from Google for her Hollow Flashlight, which has no moving parts or batteries.

The idea for the invention came from seeing unwanted batteries and her friend's experience. When Ann visited a friend in the Philippines, she saw the friend couldn't study when it became dark because there was no electricity or light. She saw the need for a flashlight that has no batteries —Hollow Flashlight.

In her project, Ann wrote "I made two flashlights that do not use any batteries or harmful materials. They do not create any noise and will always work. The flashlight needs at least a 5℃ temperature difference between the holder's body and the environment around to produce light."

A video of Ann explaining how she created the flashlight has been watched more than 1.4 million times on the Internet.

Though Ann was successful, she has not made a decision about her career path. Ann hopes that she can find a way to join her love of film and science together.

The four winners were chosen from 15 final competitors from eight countries. The competition attracted thousands of students in 120 countries.

【推荐3】One night in April, Corey Simmons got on the New York City subway, heading from Manhattan Brooklyn to pick up his son from the boy’s grandmother’s.

Simmons knew he needed to open the green folder（文件夹）on his legs, becauseinside lay his son’s math homework that father and son were supposed to complete together.

His son, who was in the third grade, had just failed a test on fractions（分数）.

Simmons, 40, was never great at math. He remembered little about fractions. He opened the folder and started on a problem, but wasn’t sure if he was doing it correctly. That was when a man got on the subway and sat next to him.

“He looked like a teacher or something,” Simmons thought. “He looked like he knew something about math.”

Like most New Yorkers, Simmons . But this time, he shared his problem with the stranger. To his surprise, the man offered to help. The two men talked through the man problems. The stranger helped Simmons understand them, so he could later teach his son. The moment was captured by Denise Wilson, who was heading home from her job and saw the pair doing homework. She posted the photo online. “I really love seeing things like this especially in New York,” she wrote. “To be a dad…and put down his pride and learn from a complete stranger… it was really a moving moment.”

The 20-minute subway lesson gave Simmons high hopes that his son would pass the next test. “He is going to surprise his teacher,” Simmons said.

【推荐1】Milly sat under the apple tree and watched the rain clouds over the hills. What a wet day! She never liked wet days. She ate an apple and waited for the rain to stop.

Soon it did. The sky turned blue again, and the sun shone, warm and golden. Then she saw the rainbow. The sky was filled with beautiful colors: blue, orange, green and purple. Then both ends of the rainbow began to fall to the earth.

The rainbow landed（降落）in the garden. “Wow!” Milly went closer. Then she had a thought. “GOLD! There is always gold at the end of a rainbow!” She dropped to her knees and started to dig.

She went deeper and deeper. Then she saw something shiny. She took it out. It was a gold coin. She made it clean. There were words on it: Make a wish before the rainbow fades.

“This is amazing! A wish!” Milly said. Her head began to fill with ideas. But then she saw the rainbow fading.

“No! I haven’t made up my mind! Please wait!” But the rainbow was still fading. “Oh …! Yes. YES! I have it!” Milly made her wish. VOOMF! The rainbow was gone, so was the gold coin.

Milly didn’t move. Did her wish come true?

She looked up. The sky was blue. The sun was golden and warm. Such a beautiful（美丽的）day! “Even if the wish doesn’t come true, I’m a very lucky girl,” she said. And she smiled.

A．	B．
C．	D．

【推荐2】For more than 60 years,   Lego(乐高)bricks have sparked children’s imaginations. Now, a new version of these toys is in the works. They're called Lego Braille Bricks.

Lego Braille Bricks are designed to help people learn Braille. That’s a system of writing in which letters are represented by raised dots(凸起的点). Blind people(盲人)use their fingertips to read them. According to the World Health Organization, 36 million people worldwide are blind. In the United States, however, only ten percent of blind children learn Braille. Lego Braille Bricks can help change that. The small knobs on the bricks are arranged as Braille letters. Blind children can use these knobs to learn Braille. Lego plans to launch Braille bricks next year. For some schools, kits(成套工具) will be free. Each kit will contain about250 bricks. Along with the alphabet(字母表) the bricks will feature numbers and math symbols.

The Danish Association of the Blind first came up with the idea of using Lego bricks to teach Braille. In 2011, the group shared the idea with the Lego Foundation. Thorkild Olesen is the president of the group. Olesen is blind. He says many teachers don’t have the tools and skills to help kids learn Braille. So they teach with audio tools, such as audio books.

"Like any other people, we need to express ourselves in writing," Olesen said. “Audio is great. But it can never replace Braille. Braille is the single most important tool for us in order to learn to spell correctly and write.