1 . We all know cameras. But have you heard of Google’s new camera? It is a small, smart device, called Clips. It comes with a case that has a clip, but it’s not designed to be worn on your clothing. Most interestingly, it uses artificial intelligence to take photography out of your hands so it can capture moments on its own.
This roughly 2-inch by 2-inch camera, with a three-hour battery life and Gorilla Glass for toughness, is intended for candid moments, like when a child does something cute that may happen too quickly for you to pull out your smart phone.
Onboard the Clips device, it uses machine learning algorithms to help capture scenes. Those algorithms include face recognition. “Once it learns that there’s a face you see frequently, it’ll try to get nice photos of those faces,” said Juston Payne, the device’s product manager. And they also want it to recognize facial expressions, which involved “training it to know what happiness looks like”. The Google team also trained it to recognize what not to shoot—like when a child’s hand is over the lens, or if it is tossed in a dark purse.
The only way to see the images is by connecting the camera with your phone, as it has no screen for viewing or editing.
Did people think it was strange? Yes, Payne admitted. But they said they addressed that by making it obvious what it is. A green light on the front signals that the device is on. Besides, unlike a camera meant to monitor your home, it is not connected to the Internet.
“This product is only possible because of the way that technology has advanced,” Payne said. It was only in the past year or so that they could squeeze the technology down into a device this size. Going forward, we’re likely to get more assistance from the artificial intelligence packed into our apps and gadgets.
1. What does the underlined word “candid” in Paragraph 2 probably mean?| A．Touching | B．Brief. | C．Unforgettable | D．Embarrassing. |
| A．It is equipped with tough glass | B．It enables easy Internet access. |
| C．It can be worn on your clothing | D．It allows of hands-free photography. |
| A．The popularity of the Internet | B．The rise of the smart phone industry. |
| C．The advance in technology | D．The reduction in the price of lens. |
| A．A New Digital Camera from Google | B．New Gadgets in the Age of Apps |
| C．Artificial Intelligence in Everyday Life | D．An Alternative Way to Photograph |
2 . Days after Argentina canceled all international passenger flights to protect the country from the new coronavirus, Juan Manuel Ballestero began his journey home the only way possible: He stepped aboard his small sailboat for what turned out to be an 85-day odyssey across the Atlantic.
The 47-year-old sailor could have stayed put on the tiny Portuguese island of Porto Santo, but the idea of spending what he thought could be “the end of the world” away from his family, especially his father who was soon to turn 90, was unbearable. So he loaded his 29-foot sailboat with canned fish, fruit and rice and set sail in mid-March.
“I didn’t want to stay like a coward (懦夫) on an island where there were no cases,” Mr. Ballestero said. “I wanted to do everything possible to return home. The most important thing for me was to be with my family.”
Friends tried to dissuade Mr. Ballestero from starting the perilous journey, and the authorities in Portugal warned him he might not be allowed to re-enter if he ran into trouble and had to turn back. But he was determined, “I bought myself a one-way ticket and there was no going back,” he said.
Sailing can be a lonely passion, and it was particularly so on this voyage for Mr. Ballestero, who each night tuned into the news on a radio for 30 minutes to assess how the virus was spreading across the globe. “I kept thinking about whether this would be my last trip,” he said.
When he made it to his native Mar del Plata, on June 17, he was surprised by the hero’s welcome he received. “Entering my port where my father had his sailboat, where he taught me so many things and where I learned how to sail, gave me the taste of a mission accomplished,” he said. A medical professional administered a test for Covid-19 on the dock. Within 72 hours, after the test came back negative, he was allowed to set foot on Argentine soil.
While he didn’t get to celebrate his father’s 90th birthday in May, he did make it home in time for Father’s Day.
1. Why did Juan Manuel Ballestero start his journey?| A．To be reunited with his family. |
| B．To avoid being infected by the coronavirus. |
| C．To realize his dream of sailing. |
| D．To prove his bravery. |
| A．He was forbidden to enter Mar del Plata port. |
| B．He didn’t receive any information about the outside world during the journey. |
| C．He failed to celebrate his father’s birthday. |
| D．He was not allowed to leave Porto Santo by the authorities in Portugal. |
| A．distant | B．tiring |
| C．boring | D．adventurous |
| A．The man was born in Porto Santo in Argentina. |
| B．His friends encouraged him to start his journey. |
| C．A test for Covid-19 was given to him the moment he arrived. |
| D．The man was not worried at all during the trip. |
3 . Time and how we experience it have always puzzled us. Physicists have created fascinating theories, but their time is measured by a pendulum (钟摆) and is not psychological time, which leaps with little regard to the clock or calendar. As someone who understood the distinction observed, ''When you sit with a nice girl for two hours it seems like a minute, but when you sit on a hot stove, a minute seems like two hours. ''
Psychologists have long noticed that larger units of time, such as months and years, fly on swifter wings as we age. They also note that the more time is structured with schedules and appointments, the more rapidly it seems to pass. For example, a day at the office flies compared with a day at the beach.
Expectation and familiarity also make time seem to flow more rapidly. Almost all of us have had the experience of driving somewhere we've never been before. Surrounded by unfamiliar scenery, with no real idea of when we’ll arrive, we experience the trip as lasing a long time. But the return trip, although exactly as long, seems to take far less time. The novelty of the outward journey has become routine.
When days become as identical as beads (小珠子)on a string, they mix together, and even months become a single day. To counter this, try to find ways to interrupt the structure of your day-- to stop time, so to speak.
Learning something new is one of the ways to slow the passage of time. One of the reasons the days of our youth seems to be full and long is that these are the days of learning and discovery. For many of us, learning ends when we leave school, but this doesn't have to be.
1. What is the underlined sentence in paragraph 1 used to show?| A．Psychological time is quite puzzling. |
| B．Time should not be measured by a pendulum. |
| C．Physical time is different from psychological time |
| D．Physical theory has nothing to do with the true sense of time |
| A．Our sense of time changes. |
| B．We spend less time at the beach |
| C．More time is structured and scheduled |
| D．Time is structured with too many appointments. |
| A．excitement | B．unfamiliarity | C．imagination | D．amusement |
| A．To give various explanations about time |
| B．To describe how we experience time physically |
| C．To show the differences of two kinds of time |
| D．To explain why time flies and how to slow it down |
4 . “I believe in holding onto traditions because they helped our family flourish（兴旺）in a new country. But this concept is more concretely expressed this way: I believe in feeding monkeys on my birthday — something I’ve done without fail for 35 years.
In the Burmese jungle, monkeys are as common as pigeons. But in America, feeding monkeys means violating the rules.
As a kid, I thought that was cool. I learned English through watching bad television shows and expected that I was the chosen warrior（勇士）sent to defend my family. Dad and I would go to the zoo early in the morning, just the two of us. When the Coast was clear, I would throw my peanuts to the monkeys.
I never had to explain myself until my 18th birthday. It was the first year I didn’t go with my father. I went with my friends and arrived 10 minutes after the zoo gates closed. “Please,” I begged the zookeeper, “I feed monkeys for my family, not for me. Can’t you make an exception?” “Go find a pet store,” she said.
If only it were so easy. That time, I got lucky. I found out that a high school classmate trained the monkeys for the movie Out of Africa, so he allowed me to feed his monkeys. Once a man with a pet monkey suspected that my story was a ploy — that I was an animal rights activist out to liberate his monkey. Another time, a zoo told me that outsiders could not feed the monkeys without violating the zookeepers’ collective bargaining agreement. Once in a pet store, I managed to feed a marmoset（狨）being kept in a birdcage. Another time, I was asked to wear a special suit to feed a laboratory monkey.
It’s rarely easy and, yet, somehow I’ve found a way to feed a monkey every year since I was born.
1. Why has the author fed monkeys all these years?| A．To please his father. |
| B．To develop a new hobby. |
| C．To celebrate his birthday. |
| D．To keep up his family tradition. |
| A．They did it in a secret way. |
| B．They pretended to be warriors. |
| C．They did it with the help of friends. |
| D．They got the zookeeper’s permission. |
| A．Joke. | B．Trick. |
| C．Excuse. | D．Adventure. |
| A．By providing examples. | B．By giving explanations. |
| C．By following time order. | D．By making comparisons. |
5 . Our dog Sandy is a golden retriever（猎犬）. He sits in front of our house all day waiting for someone to come by and throw him a stick. Chasing sticks or tennis balls and bringing them back is the major activity in his life.
Once we performed an experiment to see how Sandy found these sticks and balls quickly.
There was one particular pile that must have had hundreds of sticks. We picked up one stick, walked away from the pile and then threw it back into the pile. It was impossible for us to tell with any certainty which stick we had originally chosen. So many of them looked alike to us that the best we could do was pick out seven sticks which resembled the one that had been thrown.
We tried the same thing with Sandy, only before throwing the stick we carved an X on it.
Then we threw it, not once but a dozen times into the pile. He circled the pile over and over.
Each time he brought back that stick. It wasn’ t the shape or the size or look of the stick that he used to pick it out from all the others. It was the smell we left on the stick. It is hard to imagine, but for dogs every living creature has its own distinctive smell.
The environment is the world that all living things share. It is what is — air, fire, wind, water, life, sometimes culture. Living creatures are born into the environment and are part of it too. For a dog like Sandy a book isn’ t much different than a stick, whereas for us one stick is pretty much like every other stick. There is no one world experienced by all living creatures. Though we all live in the same environment, we make many worlds.
1. What does Sandy love to do in daily life?| A．Keep the house. | B．Frighten away passers by. |
| C．Hunt for food. | D．Run to catch sticks or balls. |
| A．By its size. | B．By its shape. |
| C．By its smell. | D．By its look. |
| A．Typical. | B．Weak. |
| C．Terrible. | D．Nice. |
| A．Sandy — A Brave Retriever |
| B．One Environment, Many Worlds |
| C．The Environment Made by Animals |
| D．The Stick — A Perfect Toy for Dogs |
6 . Like clockwork, nearly every fourth February includes one extra day. February 29th, otherwise known as Leap Day, isn’t exactly a holiday. Instead, it’s there to keep your calendar consistent with the earth’s rotation (旋转) around the sun.
According to History, com, Roman emperor Julius Caesar is the “father” of Leap Year. Until he came along, people used a 355-day calendar, which was 10.25 days shorter than the solar year. Roman officials were supposed add an extra month every now and then to keep the seasons exactly where they should be. But that didn’t work out all that well. When special occasions started shifting into different seasons around 45 BCE, Caesar consulted with astronomers and decreed (下令) that the empire should use a 12-month, 365-day calendar, which he named after himself, Caesar’s Julian calendar included a Leap Day every four years.
Though Leap Day keeps your calendar in line with the earth’s rotation around the sun, it causes a different kind of problem for leapsters. When should these February 29th babies celebrate their birthdays during the other three-quarters of their lives? Some party on February 28th, while others prefer a two-day celebration that spans the last day of February and the first day of March.
Leap Day can be a nuisance in the legal system. In 2006, a court in Massachusetts was deciding whether criminal John Melo could be released a day early since his 10-year sentence included a Leap Day. In the case, the judge decided that since the man was sentenced to prison for years, not days. Leap Day didn’t make a bit of difference.
Though a few timekeepers have pushed for calendars that don’t include Leap Day, almost all astronomers and societies agree that Leap Day is the best method to keep the calendar on track.
1. Why was Leap Day created?| A．To celebrate special occasions. | B．To honor Emperor Julius Caesar. |
| C．To keep pace with the solar year. | D．To keep track of all the seasons. |
| A．It is sometimes delayed. | B．It lasts at least two days. |
| C．It has to be held every other year. | D．It may take place on different dates. |
| A．Joke. | B．Topic. |
| C．Trouble. | D．Mistake. |
| A．Critical. | B．Supportive. |
| C．Doubtful. | D．Cautious. |
7 . I realized I would not see a real person named Sophie at Sophie’s Eatery because, like most new restaurants these days, Sophie’s is a robo-restaurant.
When I walked in, a cute little manager robot appeared, looking rather like a toaster with blinking (眨) blue eyes. It escorted me to a nice table in the back. The menu monitor popped out of my table and showed me pictures of my dining choices. I tapped my choices and clicked OK, and the screen slid back down.
I watched as full plates rode the conveyer belts that moved along each aisle (过道) of tables. In just a few minutes, my dish stopped at my table, and I took it from the belt. Later, I placed my empty plate back on the conveyer belt, and it was taken away into kitchen to be cleaned.
I watched the little toaster showing customers to tables while I ate my main dish. The food was delicious, but I was starting to feel extremely angry because dealing with robots always makes me feel inhuman. Pretty soon, I wanted to talk to someone real, even if it was just a few sentences.
So when my dessert arrived, I took action. I dropped my plate on the floor with a satisfying crash. I was so happy when I saw the manager toaster’s blinking red eyes—at last, a real live person would arrive!
But instead, a crew of two robots quickly appeared. A robot broom rushed over and started to sweep the piece of the broken plate into a robot garbage can. They finished and moved back into the kitchen.
My plan to get a little reality into Sophie’s Eatery failed. I hope the robo-restaurant trend ends soon. I want to deal with people again!
1. What does the underlined word “escorted” in paragraph 2 mean?| A．Registered. | B．Guided. |
| C．Conducted. | D．Rushed |
| A．To deal with a real human. | B．To catch attention from the robots. |
| C．To play jokes on the robots. | D．To complain about the bad service. |
| A．Satisfied. | B．Shocked. |
| C．Annoyed. | D．Curious. |
| A．The trend of dining with robots. |
| B．The advantage of robo-restaurants. |
| C．The food variety of a robo-restaurant. |
| D．The dining experience at a robo-restaurant. |
Elon Musk, perhaps the world’s most famous businessman, has a habit of making statements that stretch the bounds of believability.
On July 16th, 2019, he introduced a new type of brain-machine interface (BMI), starting from the design of a “neural lace (神经织网)”, a net of thin electrodes (电极) that capture the information from the brain. However, the electrodes must be flexible, so that they do not damage brain tissue and will last for a long time. And to make the implantation (植入) of so many electrodes safe, painless and effective, the process has to be automated.
Mr. Musk’s team does indeed seem to have made progress towards these goals. Its presentation included videos of a robot that is best described as a sewing machine. This robot grabs “threads”, and shoots them deep into the brain through a hole. The firm has also designed a chip that can handle signals from as many as 3,072 electrodes.
With all these technological breakthroughs, the firm now hopes to help people overcome such illnesses as blindness and paralysis. They designed a small device that would sit behind someone’s ear, picking up signals from the implanted chip and passing them on as appropriate. In a few years, using a brain implant to control your devices may be as prevalent as wearing wireless earphones today. Finally, Musk predicts neural lace will allow humans to be combined with AI systems, thus enabling the species to survive.
Though, as this announcement shows, Mr. Musk does have a habit of presenting himself as the hero of the human race, the idea that some machines at least will come under the direct control of human brains seems possible to be carried out. The biggest barrier to this happening will probably not be writing the software needed to interpret brainwaves, but rather persuading people that the necessary surgery, whether by sewing machine or otherwise, is actually a good idea.
1. We can learn from the first two paragraphs that _____.| A．electrodes should be flexible to extend life |
| B．Elon Musk constantly comes up with unexpected ideas |
| C．a neural lace is used to store information from the brain |
| D．electrodes are implanted by top surgeons for safety reasons |
| A．Useful. | B．Common. | C．Professional. | D．Appropriate. |
| A．Convincing people to accept the surgery. |
| B．Developing devices to perform the surgery. |
| C．Writing the software to interpret brainwaves. |
| D．Informing people of the success of the surgery. |
| A．The Neural Lace, A New Type of BMI. |
| B．Elon Musk, the Hero of Human Beings. |
| C．Artificial Intelligence, the Way to Survive. |
| D．A Brain Implant, A Step to Control Machines. |
a liability.
While attractiveness is a positive factor for a man on his way up the executive ladder, it is harmful to a woman. Handsome male executives were considered as having more honesty than plain(平常的，不漂亮的) men; effort and ability were thought to lead to their success. Attractive female executives were considered to have less honesty than unattractive ones; their success was connected not with ability but with factors such as luck. All unattractive women executives were thought to have more honesty and to be more capable than the attractive female executives. Interestingly, though, the rise of the unattractive overnight successes was connected more to personal relationships and less to ability than that of the attractive overnight successes.
Why are attractive women not thought to be able? An attractive woman is considered to be more feminine and an attractive man more manly than the less attractive ones. Thus, an attractive woman has an advantage in traditionally female jobs, but an attractive woman in a traditionally manly position appears to lack the "manly" qualities required.
This is true even in politics. "When the only clue is how he or she looks, people treat men and women differently," says Anne Bowman, who recently published a study on the effects of attractiveness on political candidates. She asked 125 undergraduate students to rank two groups of photographs, one of men and one of women, of attractiveness. The students were told the photographs were of candidates for political offices. They were asked to rank them again, in the order they would vote for them.
The results showed that attractive males completely defeated unattractive men, but the women who had ranked most attractive unchangeably received the fewest votes.
1. The word "liability" most probably means __________.
| A．disadvantage | B．advantage | C．misfortune | D．trouble |
| A．makes women look more honest and capable | B．strengthens the qualifies required |
| C．is of no importance to women | D．often enables women to succeed quickly |
| A．turns out to be a disadvantage to men |
| B．is more of a disadvantage than an advantage to women |
| C．affects men and women alike |
| D．has as little effect on men as on women |
| A．practical | B．supportive | C．old-fashioned | D．one-sided |
| A．give advice to job-seekers who are attractive |
| B．discuss the disadvantages of women being attractive |
| C．demand equal rights for women |
| D．state the importance of appearance |
