1 . A robot with a sense of touch may one day feel “pain”, both its own physical pain and sympathy for the pain of its human companions. Such touchy-feely robots are still far off, but advances in robotic touch-sensing are bringing that possibility closer to reality.
Sensors set in soft, artificial skin that can detect both a gentle touch and a painful strike have been hooked up to a robot that can then signal emotions, Asada reported February 15 at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. This artificial “pain nervous system,” as Asada calls it, may be a small building block for a machine that could ultimately experience pain. Such a feeling might also allow a robot to “sympathize” with a human companion’s suffering.
Asada, an engineer at Osaka University, and his colleagues have designed touch sensors that reliably pick up a range of touches. In a robot system named Affetto, a realistic looking child’s head, these touch and pain signals can be converted to emotional facial expressions.
A touch-sensitive, soft material, as opposed to a rigid metal surface, allows richer interactions between a machine and the world, says neuroscientist Kingson Man of the University of Southern California. Artificial skin “allows the possibility of engagement in truly intelligent ways”.
Such a system, Asada says, might ultimately lead to robots that can recognize the pain of others, a valuable skill for robots designed to help care for people in need, the elderly, for instance.
But there is an important distinction between a robot that responds in a predictable way to a painful strike and a robot that’s able to compute an internal feeling accurately, says Damasio, a neuroscientist also at the University of Southern California. A robot with sensors that can detect touch and pain is “along the lines of having a robot, for example, that smiles when you talk to it,” Damasio says. ‘It’s a device for communication of the machine to a human.” While that’s an interesting development, “it’s not the same thing” as a robot designed to compute some sort of internal experience, he says.
1. What do we know about the “pain nervous system”?| A．It is named Affetto by scientists. | B．It is a set of complicated sensors. |
| C．It is able to signal different emotions. | D．It combines sensors and artificial skin. |
| A．Delivered. | B．Translated. | C．Attached. | D．Adapted. |
| A．Robots can smile when talked to. |
| B．Robots can talk to human beings. |
| C．Robots can compute internal feelings |
| D．Robots can detect pains and respond accordingly. |
| A．Machines Become Emotional | B．Robots Inch to Feeling Pain |
| C．Human Feelings Can Be Felt | D．New Devices Touch Your Heart |
2 . Terrafugia Inc. said Monday that its new flying car has completed its first flight, bringing the company closer to its goal of selling the flying car within the next year. The vehicle—named the Transition—has two seats, four wheels and wings that fold up so it can be driven like a car. The Transition, which flew at 1,400 feet for eight minutes last month, can reach around 70 miles per hour on the road and 115 in the flies using a 23-gallon tank of gas and bums 5 gallons per hour in the air. On the ground, it gets 35 miles per gallon.
What is the first paragraph mainly about?
| A．The basic data of the Transition. | B．The advantages of flying cars. |
| C．The potential market for flying cars. | D．The designers of the Transition. |
3 . Ever wondered if dogs can learn new words? Yes, say researchers as they have found that talented dogs may have the ability to grasp new words after hearing them only four times.
While previous evidence seems to show that most dogs do not learn words, unless eventually very well trained, a few individuals have shown some extraordinary abilities, according to a study published in the journal Scientific Reports.
“We wanted to know under which conditions the gifted dogs may learn novel words,” said researcher xuekw Claudia Fugazza from the Eötvös Loránd University in Hungary. For the study, the team involved two gifted dogs, Whisky and Vicky Nina. The team exposed the dogs to the new words in two different conditions.
In the exclusion-based task, presented with seven known toys and one new toy, the dogs were able to select the new toy when presented with a new name. Researchers say this proves that dogs can choose by exclusion when faced with a new word, they selected the only toy which did not have a known name.
However, this was not the way they would learn the name of the toy. In fact, when they were presented with one more equally new name to test their ability to recognize the toy by its name, the dogs got totally confused and failed.
The other condition, the social one, where the dogs played with their owners who pronounced the name of the toy while playing with the dog, proved to be the successful way to learn the name of the toy, even after hearing it only 4 times. “The rapid learning that we observed seems to equal children’s ability to learn many new words at a fast rate around the age of 18 months,” Fugazza says. “But we do not know whether the learning mechanisms(机制) behind this learning are the same for humans and dogs. ”
To test whether most dogs would learn words this way, 20 other dogs were tested in the same condition, but none of them showed any evidence of learning the toy names, confirming that the ability to learn words rapidly in the absence of formal training is very rare and is only present in a few gifted dogs.
1. What was the purpose of the study published in Scientific Reports?| A．To better train dogs’ ability to learn new words. |
| B．To further confirm previous evidence about dogs. |
| C．To prove extraordinary memory abilities of gifted dogs. |
| D．To explore favorable conditions for gifted dogs’ new-word learning. |
| A．Slow to understand. | B．Quick to learn. | C．At a loss. | D．In a panic. |
| A．Learning through playing applied to most dogs. |
| B．The social condition helped dogs learn new words. |
| C．Dogs’ new-word learning turned out to be less effective. |
| D．Dogs shared similar learning mechanisms with children. |
| A．Gifted Dogs Can Learn New Words Rapidly. |
| B．Dogs Identify Newly-named Toys by Exclusion. |
| C．Dogs Can Acquire Vocabulary through Tons of Training. |
| D．Gifted Dogs Have Similar Learning Abilities to Humans. |
4 . Maeve Higgins once set herself a task. The Irish-born comedian wanted to see what life would be like if she stopped laughing at things that weren’t funny. Turns out it wasn’t as easy as she thought. “It was so hard,” she says. “ Laughter is a lubricant (润滑油) and is expected, and it’s really hard not to do it.”
Higgins suggests there’s something particularly special about being part of the shared experience that is live comedy — that curious magic that occurs when people come together specifically to laugh.
Comedy is more than just a pleasant way to pass an evening, humour more than something to amuse. They’re interwoven into our everyday existence. Whether you’re sharing an amusing story at a party or telling a dark joke at a funeral, humour is everywhere. But what is it for? And can humour, as comedy, change how we feel, what we think or even what we do?
As an essential part of human interaction, humour has been on the minds of thinkers for centuries. One of the most enduring theories of humour was put forward by the philosopher Thomas Hobbes. It asserts that humour appears to make fun of the weak and exert superiority. While this is clearly the function of some comedy, it’s far from a complete explanation for the overall purpose of humour.
For some comedians, it’s not just about getting laughs — it’s about changing what we think and maybe even what we do. If there’s one comic who is really typical of this, it’s Josie Long. A social justice activist and a comedian, Long has a reputation for delightful, optimistic humour and storytelling.
As her career has evolved, she has consciously put social and political topics at the heart of her act. She believes that comedians have a role to play in challenging some of the most pressing issues of the day.
British comic Stephen K Amos sells out venues seating thousands, year in, year out. Amos firmly believes that when comics consciously deal with pressing or controversial （有争议的）social issues like racism, they can reach people on a much more meaningful level than that achieved by briefly lifting someone’s mood. And while it may be difficult to quantify, he says, the social and psychological impact of comedy deserves much greater recognition.
The research backs this up. Although the role of comedy is to be entertaining first and foremost, Sharon Lockyer, a sociologist who studies humour, has identified a number of possible other functions. These include challenging stereotypes (刻板印象).
Amos’s work frequently settles the issues of race by challenging stereotypes.”I don’t do things for shock value,” he says. “ I do stuff that matters to me. In the old days it was just about doing jokes. We’ve moved on — people are talking about things that matter. ”
1. What do the first two paragraphs mainly talk about?| A．The benefits of laughing. |
| B．What a comedian’s daily work is about. |
| C．Why Maeve Higgins chose to be a comedian. |
| D．Maeve Higgins’ understanding of the appeal of comedy. |
| A．Protect the weak from the evil. |
| B．Encourage people to be stronger. |
| C．Be determined to improve oneself. |
| D．Show you are better than other people. |
| A．By gradually influencing people’s attitudes. |
| B．By urging politicians to try and solve the issues. |
| C．By quickly yet thoroughly changing people’s thinking. |
| D．By calling on the whole society to pay attention to the issues. |
| A．getting people to laugh |
| B．promoting social progress |
| C．influencing people’s ideas |
| D．making people more productive |
5 . We’re not saying that everyone needs to contribute their lives to the poor. Your lives are enough doing homework, playing sports, making friends, seeking after your dreams. But we do think that you can live a more powerful life when you devote some of your time and energy to something much la than yourself. Find an issue you are interested in and learn more. Volunteer or, if you can, contribute little money to a cause. Whatever you do, don’t be a bystander. Get involved. You may have the opportunity to make your biggest difference when you’re older. But why not start now?
What does the author stress in Paragraph 5?
| A．Learning more and contributing more to a cause. |
| B．Rising above self and acting to help others. |
| C．Working hard to get a bigger opportunity. |
| D．Trying your best to help the poor. |
6 . Not long ago, Linda Khan was sitting by a hospital bed in Houston, feeling ill at ease. Beside her lay her father who needed a heart surgery. The two of them had engaged in nothing but depressing small talk. Then, her eye fell on a pile of books. She picked up one, and started to read it out loud. "Right away it changed the mood and atmosphere," she says. Reading gave the daughter a way to connect with her father. Listening allowed the father travel on the sound of his daughter's voice into a place where he felt himself again. “From then on," Khan says, “I always read to him."
In a 2010 survey in the United Kingdom, elderly adults who joined weekly read-aloud groups reported better concentration, less anxiety, and an improved ability to socialize. The survey authors owed these improvements in large part to the “rich, varied diet of serious literature" that group members consumed, with fiction encouraging feelings of relaxation and calm, poetry fostering focused concentration, and narratives giving rise to cognitive (认知的) thoughts, feelings, and memories. In truth, almost any kind of reading to another person can be beneficial.
Readers get rewards too. For Neil Bush, the late-life hospitalizations of his famous parents, George H. W. and Barbara Bush, became opportunities to repay a debt of gratitude. “When I was a kid, they would read to me," he said. With his parents in and out of care, “We've been reading books about Dad's foreign policy and, more recently, Mom's autobiography." Bush went on, his voice thick with emotion, “And to read their amazing life to them has been a remarkable blessing to me, personally, as their son."
To many people, reading to parents may seem so far outside the normal range of regular activities, and it may even feel odd and improper. However, there are still a lot many who brave the momentary strangeness of reading to elderly adults and both reader and listeners are, to borrow a phrase from Wordsworth, surprised by the joy of it.
1. What did reading offer to Linda and her father?| A．A way to establish a bond. | B．A way to travel together in reality. |
| C．A way to treat the disease. | D．A way to engage in learning. |
| A．Improvements in mental health. | B．Benefits of reading to others. |
| C．Changes in cognitive process. | D．Development of social skills. |
| A．Reading benefits more than the listener |
| B．Parents should red more to their kids. |
| C．Children should show their gratitude. |
| D．Reading to parents is children's duty |
| A．Improper and odd. | B．Abnormal but worthy. |
| C．Rewarding and joyful. | D．Interesting but unnecessary. |
7 . A small bowl bought at a yard sale in Connecticut for just $ 35 has been identified as a rare 15th-century Chinese antique.
The blue-and-white bowl was made by China's royal court during the Ming dynasty. It is now expected to sell for up to $500,000, according to Sotheby's auction(拍卖)house in New York, where the auction will take place next month.
The purchase was made last year near New Haven, Connecticut. “I was just hanging around there aimlessly. But when I saw this bowl, I didn't even bargain over the $35 asking price,” the owner said. Shortly after the purchase, he sent photos of the bowl to auction specialists, who identified it as an item of historical significance.
Upon closer inspection, the artifact was found to have originated from the period of Yongle Emperor, who ruled from 1403 to 1424 - a period noted for its distinctive porcelain (瓷器)techniques. It's now valued between $300,000 and $500,000, with the top estimate nearly 14,300 times the amount it was purchased for.
“I was deeply attracted by the techniques. You can see why this bowl is so highly-valued from the very smooth porcelain body, silky glaze(上釉)and special blue coloring, which were never reproduced in later dynasties,” McAteer, an auction specialist, said.
“The Yongle Emperor improved the porcelain techniques and elevated the importance of porcelain from being an ordinary bowl into a true work of art. This small bowl has both practical and artistic value, ”McAteer said.
1. What can we infer about the bowl's owner?| A．He found the bowl by accident. |
| B．He hesitated during the purchase. |
| C．He doubted whether the bowl was real. |
| D．He bought the bowl because it was cheap. |
| A．The blue color on it. | B．The long history it has. |
| C．The people who made it. | D．The unique techniques used. |
| A．Forsaw. | B．Promoted. |
| C．Assessed. | D．Acknowledged. |
| A．An Amazing Bowl | B．A Special Yard Sale |
| C．The Return of Porcelains | D．A Man Making Fortune |
8 . Who're happier, men or women?Research shows it's a complex question and that asking whether males or females are happier isn't really that helpful, because basically, happiness is different for women and men.
Women's happiness has been declining for the past 30 years, according to recent statistics.And research shows that women are twice as likely to experience depression compared with men.Gender（性别） differences in depression are well confirmed and studies have found that biological, psychological and social factors contribute to the difference.
Early studies on gender and happiness found men and women were socialized to express different feelings.Women are more likely to express happiness, warmth and fear, which help with social bonding and appear more consistent with the traditional role as a primary caregiver, while men display more anger, pride and disrespect, which are more consistent with a protector and provider role.
Recent research suggests that these differences are not just socially, but also genetically related.Studies have looked into these findings further and discovered that females use more areas of the brain containing mirror neurons（镜像神经元）than males when they process feelings.Mirror neurons allow us to experience the world from other people's view, to understand their actions and intentions.This may explain why women can experience deeper sadness.Women tend to experience more negative feelings, such as more guilt, shame and to a lesser degree, embarrassment.
Psychologically it seems men and women differ in the way they process and express feelings.With the exception of anger, women experience feelings more strongly and share their feelings more openly with others.Studies have found in particular that women express more appreciation﹣which has been linked to greater happiness.This supports the theory that women's happiness is more dependent on relationships than men's.
1. Which feeling are men more likely to show compared with women?| A．Warmth. |
| B．Depression. |
| C．Happiness. |
| D．Disrespect. |
| A．Psychological factors. |
| B．Biological factors. |
| C．Educational factors. |
| D．Social factors. |
| A．a science fiction |
| B．a culture brochure |
| C．a nursery guide |
| D．a health magazine |
| A．Men and women differ in biology and psychology. |
| B．Men and women experience happiness differently. |
| C．Social roles have a great effect on men and women. |
| D．Women's happiness has declined in the past years. |
9 . It might seem strange to be making predictions about 2021, but one thing is clear: technology has been affected just as much as every other part of our lives. Another clear thing is that today’s most important technology trends will play a big part in helping us deal with and adapt to the many challenges facing us. From the shift to working from home to new rules about how we meet and interact in public spaces, technology trends will be the driving force in managing the change.
One of the major technology trends that are likely to play out this year is 5G and enhanced connectivity. Each successive advance in mobile connectivity from 3G onwards has unlocked new use cases for the Internet. 3G made web browsing and data-driven services useful on mobile devices, 4G led to the growth of streaming video and music platforms as bandwidths (宽带) increased, and 5G, similarly, will open more doors in terms of what is possible.
5G means that services relying on advanced technologies such as augmented (增强的) reality and virtual reality, as well as cloud-based gaming platforms like Google’s Stadia, become a practical thing, anywhere at any time. They also threaten to make cable and fiber-based (光纤) networks redundant, with their need for us to be tied to a particular location.
In short, 5G and other advanced, high-speed networks make other new technologies available anywhere, any time. A great example is Norwegian fishery operator Salmar that uses a 5G network to automate the care and feeding of its fish. Image recognition algorithms (算法) are used to detect which fish are over or under-feeding, and automatically distribute food and medicine needed to keep them healthy. Initiatives like this will become increasingly important during 2021, where businesses look to increase automation across their workforces.
1. Which of the following is highly influenced by 5G technology?| A．Data-driven services. | B．Streaming video. |
| C．Music platforms. | D．Google’s Stadia. |
| A．Useful. | B．Unnecessary. | C．Expensive. | D．Special. |
| A．To show the development of Norwegian fishery. |
| B．To explain how to keep fish healthy. |
| C．To present the application of 5G technology. |
| D．To propose new initiatives for businesses. |
| A．Different predictions of technology trends. |
| B．Successive advances in mobile technology. |
| C．One of the technological highlights of the year. |
| D．The driving force in managing changes. |
10 . When I was a kid, my sister and I would fight all the time over nearly everything. But as we grew older, our bond strengthened by sharing secrets, offering advice and trading clothes. Having a sister by my side while growing up taught me many lessons about the unique bond.
And now, thanks to an 8-year long study that’s making the rounds on the Internet again, science is confirming what I know is true. In the study, researchers discovered that having an older or younger sister can help ease the anxiety for kids between the ages of 10 and 14 years. They also found that people with sisters can “learn how to make up and to have control over their emotions again, which are skills that undoubtedly serve children well.
The revival of this study actually comes on the heels of another newer study, which shows that it’s not just the older kids and parents who influence and shape children as they grow. It turns out that younger siblings(兄弟姐妹) do too, and what’s more, they may also give their older siblings a greater chance of developing empathy (同情).
The Canadian study followed 452 pairs of siblings, all between a year-and-a-half and 4 years old. The researchers found that having a younger sibling increased the older sibling's level of empathy.
This research confirms that sisters are pretty amazing in making the world a much lovely place. As the mom of two boys, I often wonder what kinds of lessons they will learn from their younger sister. Perhaps they will be the same lessons I learned from mine that cooler heads always win. This study gives me hope that all those endless arguments between my kids may actually be laying the groundwork for conflict-settlement skills.
1. What can we learn from the study?| A．Children under four develop empathy fastest. |
| B．It is normal for siblings to quarrel. |
| C．Having siblings is not always a headache. |
| D．Having sisters is helpful to mental health. |
| A．Result | B．Beginning. |
| C．Reappearance. | D．Significance. |
| A．They love their mom very much. |
| B．They have a higher level of empathy. |
| C．They often quarrel with one another. |
| D．They have learned the same lessons as the the author. |
| A．Siblings have a unique bond. |
| B．Siblings have something in common. |
| C．Having siblings is good to children. |
| D．Children having siblings are considerate. |
