1 . The connection between people and plants has long been the subject of scientific research. Recent studies have found positive effects. A study conducted in Youngstown，Ohio，for example, discovered that greener areas of the city experienced less crime. In another，employees were shown to be 15% more productive when their workplaces were decorated with houseplants.

The engineers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology(MIT)have taken it a step further changing the actual composition of plants in order to get them to perform diverse，even unusual functions. These include plants that have sensors printed onto their leaves to show when they’re short of water and a plant that can detect harmful chemicals in groundwater. ＂We’re thinking about how we can engineer plants to replace functions of the things that we use every day,＂explained Michael Strano, a professor of chemical engineering at MIT.

One of his latest projects has been to make plants glow(发光)in experiments using some common vegetables. Strano’s team found that they could create a faint light for three-and-a-half hours. The light，about one-thousandth of the amount needed to read by，is just a start. The technology, Strano said, could one day be used to light the rooms or even to turn trees into self-powered street lamps.

In the future，the team hopes to develop a version of the technology that can be sprayed onto plant leaves in a one-off treatment that would last the plant’s lifetime. The engineers are also trying to develop an on and off＂switch＂where the glow would fade when exposed to daylight.

Lighting accounts for about 7% of the total electricity consumed in the US. Since lighting is often far removed from the power source(电源)-such as the distance from a power plant to street lamps on a remote highway-a lot of energy is lost during transmission(传输).Glowing plants could reduce this distance and therefore help save energy.

1. What is the first paragraph mainly about?

A．A new study of different plants.

B．A big fall in crime rates.

C．Employees from various workplaces.

D．Benefits from green plants.

2. What is the function of the sensors printed on plant leaves by MIT engineer?

A．To detect plants’ lack of water

B．To change compositions of plants

C．To make the life of plants longer.

D．To test chemicals in plants.

3. What can we expect of the glowing plants in the future?

A．They will speed up energy production.

B．They may transmit electricity to the home.

C．They might help reduce energy consumption.

D．They could take the place of power plants.

4. Which of the following can be the best title for the text?

A．Can we grow more glowing plants?

B．How do we live with glowing plants?

C．Could glowing plants replace lamps?

D．How are glowing plants made pollution-free?

2 . Race walking shares many fitness benefits with running, research shows, while most likely contributing to fewer injuries. It does, however, have its own problem.

Race walkers are conditioned athletes. The longest track and field event at the Summer Olympics is the 50-kilometer race walk, which is about five miles longer than the marathon. But the sport’s rules require that a race walker’s knees stay straight through most of the leg swing and one foot remain in contact (接触) with the ground at all times. It’s this strange form that makes race walking such an attractive activity, however, says Jaclyn Norberg, an assistant professor of exercise science at Salem State University in Salem, Mass.

Like running, race walking is physically demanding, she says, According to most calculations, race walkers moving at a pace of six miles per hour would burn about 800 calories(卡路里) per hour, which is approximately twice as many as they would burn walking, although fewer than running, which would probably burn about 1,000 or more calories per hour.

However, race walking does not pound the body as much as running does, Dr. Norberg says. According to her research, runners hit the ground with as much as four times their body weight per step, while race walkers, who do not leave the ground, create only about 1.4 times their body weight with each step.

As a result, she says, some of the injuries associated with running, such as runner’s knee, are uncommon among race walkers. But the sport’s strange form does place considerable stress on the ankles and hips, so people with a history of such injuries might want to be cautious in adopting the sport. In fact, anyone wishing to try race walking should probably first consult a coach or experienced racer to learn proper technique, she says. It takes some practice.

1. Why are race walkers conditioned athletes?

A．They must run long distances.

B．They are qualified for the marathon.

C．They have to follow special rules.

D．They are good at swinging their legs.

2. What advantage does race walking have over running?

A．It’s more popular at the Olympics.

B．It’s less challenging physically.

C．It’s more effective in body building.

D．It’s less likely to cause knee injuries.

3. What is Dr. Norberg’s suggestion for someone trying race walking?

A．Getting experts’ opinions.

B．Having a medical checkup.

C．Hiring an experienced coach.

D．Doing regular exercises.

4. Which word best describes the author’s attitude to race walking?

A．Skeptical.	B．Objective.
C．Tolerant.	D．Conservative.

3 . According to a recent study in the Journal of Consumer Research, both the size and consumption habits of our eating companions can influence our food intake. And contrary to existing research that says you should avoid eating with heavier people who order large portions(份), it's the beanpoles with big appetites you really need to avoid.

To test the effect of social influence on eating habits, the researchers conducted two experiments. In the first, 95 undergraduate women were individually invited into a lab to ostensibly(表面上)participate in a study about movie viewership. Before the film began, each woman was asked to help herself to a snack. An actor hired by the researchers grabbed her food first. In her natural state, the actor weighed 105 pounds. But in half the cases she wore a specially designed fat suit which increased her weight to 180 pounds.

Both the fat and thin versions of the actor took a large amount of food. The participants followed suit, taking more food than they normally would have. However, they took significantly more when the actor was thin.

For the second test, in one case the thin actor took two pieces of candy from the snack bowls. In the other case, she took 30 pieces. The results were similar to the first test: the participants followed suit but took significantly more candy when the thin actor took 30 pieces.

The tests show that the social environment is extremely influential when we're making decisions. If this fellow participant is going to eat more, so will I. Call it the “I’ll have what she's having” effect. However, we'll adjust the influence. If an overweight person is having a large portion, I'll hold back a bit because I see the results of his eating habits. But if a thin person eats a lot, I'll follow suit. If he can eat much and keep slim, why can't I?

1. What is the recent study mainly about?

A．Food safety.	B．Movie viewership.
C．Consumer demand.	D．Eating behavior.

2. What does the underlined word “beanpoles” in paragraph 1 refer to?

A．Big eaters.	B．Overweight persons.
C．Picky eaters.	D．Tall thin persons.

3. Why did the researchers hire the actor?

A．To see how she would affect the participants.

B．To test if the participants could recognize her.

C．To find out what she would do in the two tests.

D．To study why she could keep her weight down.

4. On what basis do we “adjust the influence” according to the last paragraph?

A．How hungry we are.	B．How slim we want to be.
C．How we perceive others.	D．How we feel about the food.

4 . I work with Volunteers for Wildlife, a rescue and education organization at Bailey Arboretum in Locust Valley. Trying to help injured, displaced or sick creatures can be heartbreaking; survival is never certain. However, when it works, it is simply beautiful.

I got a rescue call from a woman in Muttontown. She had found a young owl(猫头鹰) on the ground. When I arrived, I saw a 2-to 3-week-old owl. It had already been placed in a carrier for safety.

I examined the chick(雏鸟) and it seemed fine. If I could locate the nest, I might have been able to put it back, but no luck. My next work was to construct a nest and anchor it in a tree.

The homeowner was very helpful. A wire basket was found. I put some pine branches into the basket to make this nest safe and comfortable. I placed the chick in the nest, and it quickly calmed down.

Now all that was needed were the parents, but they were absent. I gave the homeowner a recording of the hunger screams of owl chicks. These advertise the presence of chicks to adults; they might also encourage our chick to start calling as well. I gave the owner as much information as possible and headed home to see what news the night might bring.

A nervous night to be sure, but sometimes the spirits of nature smile on us all! The homeowner called to say that the parents had responded to the recordings. I drove over and saw the chick in the nest looking healthy and active. And it was accompanied in the nest by the greatest sight of all — LUNCH! The parents had done their duty and would probably continue to do so.

1. What is unavoidable in the author’s rescue work according to paragraph 1?

A．Efforts made in vain.

B．Getting injured in his work.

C．Feeling uncertain about his future.

D．Creatures forced out of their homes.

2. Why was the author called to Muttontown?

A．To rescue a woman.

B．To take care of a woman.

C．To look at a baby owl.

D．To cure a young owl.

3. What made the chick calm down?

A．A new nest.

B．Some food.

C．A recording.

D．Its parents.

4. How would the author feel about the outcome of the event?

A．It’s unexpected.

B．It’s beautiful.

C．It’s humorous.

D．It’s discouraging.

5 . A build-it-yourself solar still(蒸馏器) is one of the best ways to obtain drinking water in areas where the liquid is not readily available. Developed by two doctors in the U.S. Department of Agriculture, it’s an excellent water collector. Unfortunately, you must carry the necessary equipment with you, since it’s all but impossible to find natural substitutes. The only components required, though, are a 5＇×5＇ sheet of clear or slightly milky plastic, six feet of plastic tube, and a container— perhaps just a drinking cup — to catch the water. These pieces can be folded into a neat little pack and fastened on your belt.

To construct a working still, use a sharp stick or rock to dig a hole four feet across and three feet deep. Try to make the hole in a damp area to increase the water catcher’s productivity. Place your cup in the deepest part of the hole. Then lay the tube in place so that one end rests all the way in the cup and the rest of the line runs up — and out — the side of the hole.

Next, cover the hole with the plastic sheet, securing the edges of the plastic with dirt and weighting the sheet’s center down with a rock. The plastic should now form a cone(圆锥体) with 45-degree-angled sides. The low point of the sheet must be centered directly over, and no more than three inches above, the cup.

The solar still works by creating a greenhouse under the plastic. Ground water evaporates (蒸发) and collects on the sheet until small drops of water form, run down the material and fall off into the cup. When the container is full, you can suck the refreshment out through the tube, and won’t have to break down the still every time you need a drink.

1. What do we know about the solar still equipment from the first paragraph?

A．It’s delicate.	B．It’s expensive.
C．It’s complex.	D．It’s portable.

2. What does the underlined phrase “the water catcher” in paragraph 2 refer to?

A．The tube.	B．The still.
C．The hole.	D．The cup.

3. What’s the last step of constructing a working solar still?

A．Dig a hole of a certain size.	B．Put the cup in place.
C．Weight the sheet’s center down.	D．Cover the hole with the plastic sheet.

4. When a solar still works, drops of water come into the cup from ________.

A．the plastic tube	B．outside the hole
C．the open air	D．beneath the sheet

6 . Elizabeth Spelke, a cognitive (认知的) psychologist at Harvard, has spent her career testing the world's most complex learning system-the mind of a baby. Babies might seem like no match for artificial intelligence (AI). They are terrible at labeling images, hopeless at mining text, and awful at video games. Then again, babies can do things beyond the reach of any AI. By just a few months old, they’ve begun to grasp the foundations of language, such as grammar. They’ve started to understand how to adapt to unfamiliar situations.

Yet even experts like Spelke don’t understand precisely how babies — or adults, for that matter — learn. That gap points to a puzzle at the heart of modern artificial intelligence: We're not sure what to aim for.

Consider one of the most impressive examples of AI, Alpha Zero, a programme that plays board games with superhuman skill. After playing thousands of games against itself at a super speed, and learning from winning positions, Alpha Zero independently discovered several famous chess strategies and even invented new ones. It certainly seems like a machine eclipsing human cognitive abilities. But Alpha Zero needs to play millions more games than a person during practice to learn a game. Most importantly, it cannot take what it has learned from the game and apply it to another area.

To some AI experts, that calls for a new approach. In a November research paper, Francois Chollet, a well-known AI engineer, argued that it’s misguided to measure machine intelligence just according to its skills at specific tasks. “Humans don’t start out with skills; they start out with a broad ability to acquire new skills,” he says. “What a strong human chess player is demonstrating is not only the ability to play chess, but the potential to fulfill any task of a similar difficulty.” Chollet posed a set of problems, each of which requires an AI programme to arrange colored squares on a grid (格栅) based on just a few prior examples. It’s not hard for a person. But modern machine-learning programmes-trained on huge amounts of data — cannot learn from so few examples.

Josh Tenenbaum, a professor in MIT's Center for Brains, Minds & Machines, works closely with Spelke and uses insights from cognitive science as inspiration for his programmes. He says much of modern AI misses the bigger picture, comparing it to a cartoon about a two-dimensional world populated by simple geometrical (几何形的) people. AI programmes will need to learn in new ways — for example, by drawing causal inferences rather than simply finding patterns. “At some point — you know, if you’re intelligent — you realize maybe there's something else out there,” he says.

1. Compared to an advanced AI programme, a baby might be better at _______________.

A．labeling images	B．identifying locations
C．playing games	D．making adjustments

2. What does the underlined word “eclipsing” in Paragraph 3 probably mean?

A．Stimulating.

B．Measuring.

C．Beating.

D．Limiting.

3. Both Francois Chollet and Josh Tenenbaum may agree that _______________.

A．AI is good at finding similar patterns

B．AI should gain abilities with less training

C．AI lacks the ability of generalizing a skill

D．AI will match humans in cognitive ability

4. Which would be the best title for this passage?

A．What is exactly intelligence?

B．Why is modern AI advanced?

C．Where is human intelligence going?

D．How do humans tackle the challenge of AI?

7 . Boston wants to be smarter. The city has taken advantage of technologies to become more responsive to its residents' needs. But technology alone is not sufficient to make today's cities liveable. Boston has discovered that it also needs to reach the old-fashioned low-tech community and integrate that technology with city life.

Kris Carter rolled out Boston's smart city program in 2014. It started with an App that residents could download to report locations where sidewalks needed repair. The city sorted out those reports and ranked them in a database, which repair crews used to prioritize their work.

The system worked beautifully, except for one problem: most of the alerts(警报) came from wealthier neighborhoods, where the concentration of smartphone - equipped residents was highest. ＂The complaints from the App didn't always correlate with the greatest community need for repairs, " explains Carter.

Carter's group has moved away from the model common to many smart city initiatives of letting tech-savvy(精通技术的）residents drive the process. Instead, they run meetings to find out what problems people in different neighborhoods care about solving. When it came to sidewalks, Boston introduced a second method of collecting repair tips, hiring people to get out and walk the city's 1,700 miles of sidewalks to take notes on their condition.

Whether using low-tech or high-tech approaches, says Carter, to stay smart, a city needs to continually reassess its options to spot opportunities to improve residents' lives. Take the sidewalk repair program, walking on the streets was proved a useful, if inefficient way to prioritize repair needs. But last year the group found that walkers' mobile phones could be tracked as they moved along the streets, and that data could be analyzed to identify sidewalk routes which are most often used by neighborhoods.

“Combined with our other sidewalk information, that gave us an even better way to predict where faster repairs would do the most good," says Carter,"We're really always looking for whatever mix of approaches best solves the problem."

1. What is the first paragraph mainly about?

A．The citizens' life.	B．The city's reputation.
C．The city's management.	D．The benefits of technology.

2. What problem did Kris Carter's team meet when carrying out their program?

A．They faced many technical obstacles.

B．They couldn't serve all residents well.

C．They were not supported by residents.

D．They were annoyed by being short-staffed.

3. Which of the following might Kris Carter most agree with?

A．Maximizing the benefits of technology.

B．Mixing approaches for solving problems.

C．Giving full play to the power of residents.

D．Letting tech companies be a leading role.

4. What can be a suitable title for the text?

A．A Smart City: More Than Just Tech

B．A City with Intelligent Facilities

C．Joint-effort in City Construction

D．The Modernization of a City

8 . As the effects of climate change become more disastrous, well-known research institutions and government agencies are focusing new money and attention on an idea: artificially cooling the planet, in the hopes of buying humanity more time to cut greenhouse gas emissions.

That strategy, called solar climate intervention (干预) or solar geoengineering, involves reflecting more of the sun’s energy back into space — abruptly reducing global temperatures in a way that imitates the effects of ash clouds flowing out from the volcanic eruptions. The idea has been considered as a dangerous and fancied solution, one that would encourage people to keep burning fossil fuels while exposing the planet to unexpected and potentially threatening side effects, producing more destructive hurricanes, wildfires floods and other disasters.

But. as global warming continues, producing more destructive hurricanes, wildfires floods and other disasters, some researchers and policy experts say that concerns about geoengineering should be outweighed by the imperative to better understand it, in case the consequence of climate change become so terrible that the world can’t wait for better solutions.

One way to cool the earth is by injecting aerosols (气溶胶) into the upper layer of the atmosphere. where those particles reflect sunlight away from the earth. That process works, according to Douglas MacMartin, a researcher at Cornell University.

“We know with 100% certainty that we can cool the planet,” he said in an interview. What’s still unclear, he added, is what happens next. Temperature, MacMartin said, is an indicator for a lot of climate effects. “What does it do to the strength of hurricanes?” he asked, “What does it do to agriculture production? What does it do to the risk of forest fires?”

Another institution funded by the National Science Foundation will analyze hundreds of simulations of aerosol injection, testing the effects on weather extremes around the world. One goal of the research is to look for a sweet spot: the amount of artificial cooling that can reduce extreme weather events without causing broader changes in regional rainfall patterns or similar impacts.

1. Why do researchers and government agencies work on cooling the earth?

A．To prevent natural disasters.	B．To win more time to reduce gas emissions.
C．To imitate volcanic eruptions.	D．To encourage more people to bur fossil fuels.

2. What are researchers worried about in terms of global warming?

A．More volcanoes will throw out.

B．More solar energy will go into space.

C．More disasters will endanger the future of the world.

D．People will keep burning fossil fuels to keep warm.

3. What can be inferred from Douglas’ words in an interview?

A．He thinks more research remains to be done.

B．He is optimistic about the effect of cooling the earth.

C．He is concerned about the reduction in agriculture production.

D．He disapproves of the practice of solar climate intervention.

4. What does the underlined words “sweet spot” in the last paragraph mean?

A．The rainfall pattern of a region.

B．The modest drop in temperature.

C．The number of extreme weather events.

D．The injection amount of aerosol.

10 . In a study published in Nature Machine Intelligence, researchers at Ohio State University show how artificial intelligence（AI）can follow clinical trials to identify drugs for repurposing, a solution that can help advance innovative treatments.

Repurposing drugs is legal and not unusual. When doctors prescribe(开处方)drugs that have been approved by the Food and Drug Administration(FDA)for purposes different from what is printed on the labels, the drugs are being used “off-label” Just because a drug is FDA-approved for a specific type of disease does not prevent it from having possible benefits for other purposes.

For example, Metformin, a drug that is FDA-approved for treating type 2 diabetes, is also used to treat PCOS(a disease of women), and other diseases. Trazodone, an anti-depressant with FDA-approval to treat depression, is also prescribed by doctors to help treat patients with sleep issues.

The Ohio State University research team created an AI deep learning model for predicting treatment probability with patient data including the treatment, outcomes, and potential confounders(干扰因素).

Confounders are related to the exposure and outcome. For example, a connection is identified between music festivals and increases in skin rashes(红疹). Music festivals do not directly cause skin rashes. In this case, one possible confounding factor between the two may be outdoor heat, as music festivals tend to run outdoors when the temperature is high, and heat is a known cause for rashes. When working with real-world data, confounders could number in the thousands. AI deep learning is well-suited to find patterns in the complexity of potentially thousands of confounders.

The researcher team used confounders including population data and co-prescribed drugs. With this proof-of-concept, now clinicians have a powerful AI tool to rapidly discover new treatments by repurposing existing medications.

1. What do we know about a drug used off-label?

A．It is sold without a label.

B．It is available at a low price.

C．Its uses extend beyond the original ones.

D．Its clinical trials are rejected by doctors.

2. Metformin and Trazodone are similar as both of them________.

A．are used off-label

B．treat rare diseases

C．result in sleep issues

D．are medical breakthroughs

3. What can be inferred about “confounders”?

A．They are possible treatments.

B．They are environmental factors.

C．They can be easily recognized in real-world data.

D．They should be taken into serious consideration.

4. What is the main idea of the text?

A．AI examines benefits of existing drugs.

B．AI identifies off-label uses for drugs.

C．AI finds new drugs for common diseases.

D．AI proves the power of drug research.