Recently, a primary school in Changsha, has put Virtual Reality（VR）technology（虚拟现实技术）to good use in an English class. When the students put on the VR glasses, it seemed that they were taken into a new world where they could see for themselves. They could enjoy the views along the way, allowing more knowledge to be kept in mind.
VR language learning is now starting to be widely used in many schools. Think of it like this. Now you are learning English in China, you don’t have enough chances to use English if you are not in English classes, but if you learn English in English-speaking countries like America or the UK, it’ll be much easier for you to make progress.
Nowadays, a lot of apps have also been designed to serve VR language learning. The app “House of Languages” is one of them. It is already available on the Samsung（三星）VR. It can sense your movement and the acts of your eyeballs, arms and hands.
When you are learning English on it, lovely racoon（浣熊）called “Mr. Woo”, will guide you to communicate in English. You can use English by finishing tasks Mr. Woo gives you. For example, you will be asked to find certain things at your home according to the English words that Mr. Woo gives you. After you’ve found these things, you should “take” them, “come back” to Mr. Woo and “give” them to him. Then he will say “thanks” to you. Sometimes, Mr. Woo may have some activities like family party so that you will have more tasks to finish in that situation.
You will learn English so quickly that you will even forget you are learning.
Virtual Reality is showing increasing promise in language education and the day isn’t far away when it will become, one of the main media in education. What about you? Would you learn a new language in Virtual Reality?
1. Was it easier for the students in Changsha to learn English with VR?2. What can Samsung VR sense?
3. Why can the VR help students learn English better?
4. If you are the writer, what will you write next? Finish the ending.
How are you? I’m having a lot of fun here in New York with my family. Yesterday morning, we went to Central Park. In the afternoon, we visited the Statue of Liberty. And tomorrow we will visit the Brooklyn Bridge.
Today we went to a science festival. All my family enjoyed it. Dad liked it because it was free to go in! There were many interesting activities. That’s why I liked it. We tried on a space suit (穿航天服)，and we made lots of model planes! Mom’s favorite was the clocks and she bought a beautiful one at the shop.
There were young people from many different countries at the festival. I met a boy called Alex. He comes from Australia and he is good at making robots. And he started his company (公司) to sell them! I want to start my company, but Mom says I need to finish school first.
The festival gave me lots of ideas for my high school science homework. I could do something about electricity (电) or about ice, but I think I’ll write about robots, because I’m interested in robots now.
See you soon!
Yours,
Robert
1. 文中划线单词“activities’”的中文意思是 ________.| A．生意 | B．措施 | C．活动 | D．玩具 |
| A．bought a clock | B．visited many shops |
| C．tried on a space suit | D．got a free model plane |
| A．He has a company. | B．He is from New York. |
| C．He finished school last year. | D．He is learning to make robots. |
| A．Ice. | B．Robots. | C．Clocks. | D．Electricity. |
3 . It might be strange to wear clothes made out of plastic bottles. But in fact, some clothing companies are already making such clothes.
Fashion（时尚）brand JUMA recently showed its newest collection at a workshop in Shanghai. Eighteen clothing items from the collection, including jumpsuits, shirts and dresses, were made from recycled plastic bottles.
“We realized that billions of water bottles were being thrown into landfills and oceans every year and that these bottles take hundreds of years to decompose （分解）. We thought we should use them to create our clothes and help the environment,” said Alia Juma.
Many other fashion companies are finding similar ways to save our planet these days. The process is rather simple. First, the plastic bottles are washed and cut into small pieces. Then they are melted（融化）and shaped into small balls. The balls are melted again to form thread（线）. People can use the thread to make different kinds of clothes.
According to Juma, it takes 67, 000 bottles to create one ton of thread. This cuts down carbon emission（碳排放）.
“Three bottles can make one glove. Five can make a skirt, ten a dress, and twenty a short coat.”
Some people might have doubts about wearing something made out of plastic bottles. But according to Causeartist, a website that focuses on innovation（创新）, clothes made from plastics could even be better than nylon and polyester（涤纶）. Plastic thread can be made into different textures（质地）, such as cotton, silk, or even wool. It seem that this innovation may lead to a greener future of fashion.
1. The underlined word “landfills” probably mean “________” in Chinese.| A．填埋池 | B．游乐场 | C．栖息地 | D．风景区 |
| A．To compete with other companies. |
| B．To create a new fashion. |
| C．To meet the needs of the design director. |
| D．To help improve the environment and cut down pollution. |
| A．How plastic bottles are collected. |
| B．How plastic bottles are turned into thread. |
| C．How other fashion companies make clothes. |
| D．How other fashion companies melt the bottles. |
| A．Food and Health |
| B．Sports and Fashion |
| C．Environment and Technology |
| D．History and Culture |
4 . Scientists from Washington State University invented a robot. It could help old people with dementia (痴呆) or people who have difficulty living by themselves in their own homes.
The Robot Activity Support System, or RAS, uses sensors (传感器) to find out where its owners are, what they are doing and when they need help with daily activities. It runs around rooms to find people on its own and can even lead them to things like medicine or snacks in the kitchen.
At present, about 50% of the adults over the age of 85 in the US need help with daily activities such as cooking meals and taking medicine. The cost for this help is nearly $2, 000 billion every year. That’s why scientists invented RAS. Scientists did a study to show how RAS could make life easier for older adults. In the study, they asked 26 young participants (参与者) to complete three activities in a smart home with RAS. The participants needed to walk the dog, take medicine and water house plants. When the sensors found someone was struggling (挣扎) with one of the things, RAS received a message to help. The robot then used its sensors to find the person and provide help.
When scientists asked the participants about the robot, someone said, “When I get older, I prefer to have one in my home.” Others also thought so.
1. Which is NOT mentioned (提到) about RAS in the first two paragraphs?| A．Who invented it. | B．Who might need it. |
| C．How people invented it. | D．How it helps its owners. |
| A．Easy. | B．Difficult. | C．Useless. | D．Expensive. |
| A．When they forgot to take medicine. |
| B．When they went out to walk the dog. |
| C．When they watered the plants too much. |
| D．When they had difficulty doing a thing. |
| A．They thought it could be better. |
| B．They thought it could help people a lot. |
| C．They thought it was not useful. |
| D．They thought they didn’t need it. |
| A．Home robots are very popular. |
| B．Aging will bring many problems soon. |
| C．Old people will look after themselves in the future. |
| D．Smart robots could help old people live easier. |
5 . Sending astronauts to Mars is a big challenge. Astronauts will have to take everything they need, including food, air and water. The room inside the spaceship is too limited to hold many things. So packing a spaceship is a huge challenge for a trip to Mars.
Six astronauts on an eight-month trip to Mars will need at least 18,000 kilograms of water for drinking and washing. They’ll also need water to protect themselves from space rays which can pass right through spaceship walls and harm astronauts’ living cells. But a layer of water placed around the ship can stop the harm.
That’s a lot of water. And sending water into space is too expensive. It costs $33,000 to send one cup of water to Mars. The more you take, the more it costs. We have the technology to get to Mars, but the problem is that it’s too expensive.
But Flynn, an engineer at NASA, thinks he has a way of solving the problem. Instead of building a heavy spaceship and packing it full of stuff (物料), why not use the stuff as part of the spaceship?
Imagine a spaceship that blows up like a balloon. Inside, the walls have pockets like a big honeycomb (蜂巢). These hold lots of plastic bags filled with water, dried food and algae (水藻). All these make hard walls and great radiation (辐射) protection. And stopping radiation doesn’t influence the food or water itself—it’s safe to eat and drink. And what if the same water could be reused again and again? Flynn and his team call their packed-pocket idea Water Walls.
Making oxygen and taking away CO2—the waste gas you breathe out—is another problem in space. “Water Walls will take away CO2 the same way it’s done here on our Earth—with living plants,” Flynn says. Living plants take in CO2 to make their food, and give off oxygen. “Plants are hard to grow in a spacecraft, so we use algae,” he says.
Algae are tiny plants that live in water. The algae will live in bags in the walls too, fed by human waste and sunlight, eating up CO2 and making oxygen for the astronauts to breathe.
Flynn thinks his onboard recycling system has many advantages. He hopes it will help make flying to Mars a reality very soon.
1. What does the underlined phrase “packing a spaceship” in paragraph 1 most probably mean?| A．repairing things in a spaceship | B．recycling things in a spaceship |
| C．checking things in a spaceship | D．putting things into a spaceship |
| A．Cost is saved. | B．Travelling time is saved. |
| C．Plastic bags are saved. | D．Food is saved. |
| A．To prevent space rays during the space trip. | B．To make the whole spaceship stronger. |
| C．To control the temperature in the spaceship. | D．To produce water in the spaceship. |
| A．To prevent water from being polluted. | B．To serve as food for astronauts. |
| C．To provide oxygen for astronauts. | D．To help other plants grow in a spaceship. |
6 . The Drama Festival will run in and outside China from June 20 to July 7. Sixty-five works will be put on both in theaters and online. “The festival is all about imagination connecting drama with the latest technology,” says Liu Chang, manager of the festival, who is also a drama director. Technology has improved design, performances and so on. Artists like Liu aren’t sure if the new technology can take drama to the future.
A Chinese play directed by Meng Jinghui, inspired (赋予灵感) by the two-part drama Faust by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, will be on as the opening play of the festival. In the first half of the play, Meng introduces the story to 400 real audiences (观众) sitting in the Fengchao Theater in Beijing. The second half of the play will have more audiences, who use their cellphones, computers and headsets to be part of the play online.
Zhang Zhouxiang is a director full of imagination. His work, inspired by Hieronymus Bosch’s painting The Garden of Earthly Delights, will be shown from June 30 to July 2. Supported by AI, audiences can explore the fictitious scene, similar to the feeling in the real world, as the painting describes.
“The stage (舞台) design is done by AI, which is like an assistant realizing the ideas of me and my team,” says Liu, “Now I try to use the latest technology, such as ChatGPT, to write the script, and I am still working on it because the language model is difficult to understand.”
Now technology is playing a more and more important role. Many artists want to use it to improve drama. They are very interested in the relationship between people and the latest technology, especially when connected in drama—a scene to dream.
1. Which of the following is true according to this passage?| A．Liu doubts whether technology can greatly improve drama. |
| B．Meng’s two-part drama Faust will be on at the opening. |
| C．Audiences can explore the scene of Liu’s work by AI. |
| D．Liu has managed to write the script by ChatGPT. |
| A．colorful | B．unreal | C．fantastic | D．boring |
A． | B． | C． | D． |
| A．A drama festival | B．Human imagination |
| C．Drama of the future | D．AI-assisted technology |
7 . The development of science and technology makes a difference to people’s life. The creation of special robots has helped farmers a lot.
The population on the earth grows larger each year. As a result, more and more food needs to be grown in order to feed everyone. Because climate (气候) changes all the time, it’s becoming even more difficult to grow more food. When farmers tried to grow more food in the past, some farming methods were used. However, those farming methods weren’t always healthy for the environment. In fact, they were harmful to the environment sometimes.
Could this problem be solved? Some scientists spent several years talking to farmers. They wanted to see what problems farmers were having and how these problems could be solved. This led to the creation of special robots. These special robots move around on farms and collect information about crops (庄稼). They can take pictures of plants and track (追踪) each plant’s growth.
By collecting information about plants, the robots can help farmers predict the growth of the plants. That means farmers can know how their plants will grow. By studying each plant, the robots can also help farmers look after plants better. For example, if the robots find out which plants get sick, farmers can quickly throw them away before they are about to influence other plants beside them. With the help of these robots, farmers can take better care of the plants in need.
根据短文内容选择最佳答案。
1. Farmers need to grow more and more food because ________.
| A．climate changes all the time |
| B．there are more and more people on the earth |
| C．farmers try to grow more food |
| A．farmers | B．scientists | C．farming methods |
| A．The special robots can track the growth of each plant. |
| B．The farmers spent several years creating special robots. |
| C．Thanks to the robots, none of the plants gets sick. |
| A．回顾 | B．照料 | C．预测 |
| A．Farmers have information about weather and the earth. |
| B．The special robots can help farmers grow plants well. |
| C．Scientists can grow healthy crops. |
Today’s students are really good at improving themselves online. Here are three apps the students like using to help their study.
Duolingo
“I love using Duolingo to learn foreign languages. I’m using it to learn French, while some of my classmates are learning Russian and Italian,” said 14-year-old Zhang Qi from Tianjin. Students can learn foreign languages in a fun way by using Duolingo. “The teachers are very cute cartoon characters. It makes the learning process interesting,” he added.
wikiHow
Li Shuhe, a 14-year-old girl from Hunan, used wikiHow a lot. “This app has over 160,000 articles that teach you how to solve all kinds of problems, from fixing a toilet to dealing with someone’s hurtful words. It even teaches you how to have fun by yourself. I find it is quite creative and useful,” she said.
Douyin
Surprisingly, many students use Douyin to study today. Zhou Caiyan, a 15-year-old boy from Zhejiang, said, “I followed a Douyin account, which includes all the important points of our biology lessons. Before the exam, I just spent one hour reviewing those videos. Thanks to Douyin, I got the fourth place in my class during the recent biology examination!”
Three | |
Duolingo | Students can use it to learn |
wikiHow | It teaches students how to solve all kinds of It teaches students how to have fun by themselves, which is quite |
Douyin | Many students use it to |
9 . The warm climate, water plants and wetland in nature reserves provide an ideal living environment for wild animals. This makes them feel like going back to nature. In reserves, people watch and study animals’ living habits, activities and so on.
Now, the AI system in reserves plays an important role in studying wildlife. Instead of using binoculars, people just sit in front of a big screen and then they can watch every move the animals make. The AI system helps in many ways. First, the AI system can tell the differences between different types of wild animals and record the changes in numbers based on their tails, feet and beaks. Second, it can keep recording animal behaviours for researchers day and night, while in the past, such recording could not last. Moreover, it can check unusual behaviours among the animals. If an animal walks or flies in an unusual way or lies on the ground for a while, the system can help find out what happens. So researchers can take quick actions to save it in time. Besides its main functions, the system can help to warn the unauthorized (未经许可的) people away from the protected areas. The AI system is also served as an educational platform (平台) for the people. By using it, visitors can watch and learn more about the wild animals living in the reserve.
However, there are problems. On one hand, the AI system itself sometimes mistakes an animal for another, or a plant for an animal. On the other hand, people still need to go around to get a whole understanding of wildlife because the AI system has not been put in at every corner of the reserves. To further develop the AI system, the reserves are now working with more high-tech companies.
阅读以上信息，用恰当的单词完成下面的表格，每空一词。| The functions of reserves | ●The reserves help wild animals feel like ●Researchers can watch and study wildlife in reserves. | |
| The AI system used in reserves | The advantages | ●It can tell the differences of wild animals and record the changes in numbers based on their looks. ●It can help researchers keep recording animal behaviours without considering ●By using it, the risk of wild animals’ getting hurt and deaths will be quite ●It warns unauthorized people not to enter the protected area. ●It increases visitors’ |
| The problems | ●It sometimes makes mistakes. ●It hasn’t | |
10 . Today, we often see delivery men(送货员) taking food to people. Do you believe that self-driving cars—cars without drivers will bring food to you in the near future? That sounds interesting, doesn’t it?
Now Baidu and Meituan are working together to use self-driving cars to deliver(配送) food. These companies use them to send group orders. For example, when a company orders food for people working there, a self-driving car will bring all of their orders to the company quickly and safely.
Online food ordering is becoming popular all around China, even in small villages. Till now, about 300 million users use different apps to order food online. Some researchers(研究人员) say that using self-driving cars will be a revolution(变革) in the food delivery. They will make a great difference in the future.
At the same time, some people think there must be some problems. For example, self-driving cars can drive well on flat(平坦的) roads, but what will happen when the road is not flat? Some other people worry that most of the delivery men will lose their jobs in the future.
What do you think of using self-driving cars to deliver food?
1. Baidu and Meituan are working together to ________.| A．use self-driving cars to deliver food | B．ask more companies to order food |
| C．use more Chinese cars in their work | D．find more and more delivery men |
| A．Some researchers | B．About 300 million users |
| C．Different apps | D．Self-driving cars |
| A．Self-driving cars only can drive on flat roads. |
| B．There are still some problems in using self-driving cars. |
| C．All of the delivery men will lose their jobs in the future. |
| D．Some other people don’t like using self-driving cars. |
| A．Some researchers think self-driving cars are safer and quicker. |
| B．Many villages are using self-driving cars to deliver food. |
| C．About 300 million users order food online till now. |
| D．People will use self-driving cars to send every order. |
| A．The introduction of self-driving cars |
| B．The problems of using self-driving cars |
| C．Online food orderings from apps |
| D．The worries from delivery men |
