2 . 阅读下面短文，在空白处填入1个适当的单词或括号内单词的正确形式。

It took 25 long years, but 52-year-old Xie Kefeng was finally reunited with his son, who had been snatched as a baby. The power of technology,     1    (specific)a facial comparison algorithm played a major role in bringing about the happy outcome.

In 1998, Xie’s wife stepped out of home to buy groceries, leaving their three-month-old second son, Xie Qingshuai, on the bed     2     the door unlocked. When she returned 10 minutes later, the child     3    (disappear). The couple reported the incident to the police, but the child could not be found.

In late November this year, Xie Kefeng received a call from the police informing him that a facial comparison had led to Xie Qingshuai     4    (find). A DNA comparison confirmed that it was indeed his long-lost son.

Xie Qingshuai, who now     5    (prove)outgoing, positive and diligent, was reunited with his family for the first time. Unknown to his family, he had been sold to a couple     6     lived in Xingtai as well. After the man he knew as his father died, his wife remarried and moved away, leaving Xie Qingshuai to be brought up by his adoptive grandparents.

On Sunday, Beijing DeepGlint Technology Co,     7     artificial intelligence technology company, announced that a facial comparison algorithm developed by it had played a vital role in the reunion.

    8    (base)on the principle that facial features among relatives tend to be similar, the company’s algorithm can identify highly relevant potential     9    (match), significantly improving the     10    (efficient)of the search process.

3 . In an era where data centers are becoming increasingly vital for our digital society, China has begun a groundbreaking endeavor to push the boundaries of innovation and sustainability.

Nestled off the coast of Sanya, Hainan province, China is in the process of constructing the world’s first commercial underwater data center. This project aims to revolutionize the industry by using the power of the ocean depths while saving a significant amount of energy and land. With the potential to equal the computational (计算的) abilities of about 6 million conventional personal computers, this underwater data center is bound to be a game-changer.

The data center modules (模块) of China’s underwater facility are being carefully installed on the seafloor at depths of around 35 meters. Designed to withstand the harsh underwater conditions, these modules are expected to operate sustainably for up to 25 years. Each watertight storage module weighs an impressive 1,300 tons and boasts the capability to process over 4 million high-definition images every 30 seconds. When combined, the entire facility is projected to match the computational power of surprising 6 million conventional PCs working together.

The construction of the underwater data center is a result of collaboration between Sanya officials and several Chinese tech firms. With the initial deployment of one storage module in April and the recent addition of a second module, the project is well underway. The ambitious plan aims to have a total of 100 modules fully operational by 2025, marking a significant milestone in sustainable data center development.

The motivation behind this pioneering project extends beyond technological advancement. By choosing an underwater data center, China is actively addressing the challenges of land conservation. Traditional data centers can occupy vast amounts of land, often equal to the size of multiple soccer fields. In contrast, this underwater marvel takes up minimal dry space, preserving land for other essential purposes. Additionally, the use of natural seawater cooling reduces the strain on traditional energy sources, leading to a significant reduction in carbon emissions. This environmentally conscious approach agree with global sustainability goals and sets an example for the industry to follow.

5 . Is there a friend of yours who always sings out of tune (曲调) but never realizes it? Don’t be so hard on them — they may have amusia — the inability to tell the difference in tunes.

Apart from singing out of tune, people with amusia may also find it hard to recognize music they’ve heard before without the help of song lyrics. Besides, people who suffer from Amusia can have difficulty in recognizing melodies and a total inability to tell between different musical sounds, according to Live Science. However, people with amusia can recognize common environmental sounds as well as the high and lows sounds in human voices, meaning that this inability can be specially related to music.

In many cases, people who have amusia are born with it, as 46 percent of these individuals’ family members were found to have similar conditions, according to a 2017 study. Brain imaging shows that their brains receive and respond to music pitch (音高) information, but it is not reaching conscious awareness, meaning that the mind can’t understand the information.

Scientists at the University of Otago in New Zealand also think that amusia is related to people’s special processing skills. They invited people with amusia, musicians and students from non-musical backgrounds to perform a task related to spacial imagination. They were asked to decide whether pairs of images are the same object moving around or mirror images.

The result showed that the amusia group made more mistakes than the other two groups. Amusia might be related to the way brain stores information about the high and low sounds in songs, according to the study.

Although those who aren’t confident about their singing skills often say they’re “tune-deaf”, people with amusia only make up about 1.5 percent of the population, as shown in the 2017 study. “Like dyslexics (诵读困难者) can learn how to read, those with amusia should be able to better their ability to recognize tunes if they start early enough,” Isabelle Peretz, a professor of psychology from the University of Montreal in Canada, told Live Science.

6 . How was your sleep last night? As is known to us all, sleep habits have a significant effect on our health.     1    

Jump scares from alarms

A young woman recently shared online that she felt dizzy and threw up after her loud alarm woke her up.     2     The body changes during sleep, making people vulnerable in the early hours, Chris Idzikowski of the Edinburgh Sleep Center told Daily Mail. During the later part of the night, the nervous system is less active and most of the body processes slow down. When a sudden noise occurs, blood pressure, heart rate and breathing will react more rapidly.

Waking up suddenly is not desirable, but it’s difficult for most people to wake up by themselves naturally.     3     Another way can be leaving the curtains half open before sleep-the sunshine in the morning can slowly wake you up.

    4    

Although valuing the 8-hour golden rule of sleeping, some young people may go to bed late and then get up late, such as sleeping from 2 am to 10 am. However, this can be problematic since human bodies can tell the time.

“Environmental cues such as temperature and light levels tell the body what time it is,” expert Nerina Ramlakhan wrote in a book about sleep. Ramlakhan added that waking up late the next day could also lead to sleep inertia, which is a state between sleep and waking.     5    

The habit may turn into a disorder called delayed sleep phase syndrome if it is serious enough to affect a person’s study, work and other aspects of life. Special treatments have already been developed to treat the disorder, such as using light to gradually change sleeping patterns.

7 . “I never thought that I would beat the tumor.” says a cancer patient in Lanzhou in Northwest China’s Gansu province. The man adds that he is particularly grateful for heavy ion therapy he received, at a follow-up visit following several rounds of treatment revealing that his cancer cells had disappeared.

A research team from the Institute of Modern Physics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences has developed the country’s first medical heavy ion accelerator with independent intellectual property rights, and put it into clinical application. Cancer treatments employing heavy ion accelerators can bombard a target with high-energy electrons to kill cancer cells. Compared to traditional therapy such as radiation, heavy ion treatment is considered to be more balanced, exposing healthy cells to less radiation. The treatment period is shorter and the therapy can more effectively control cancer cells.

In 1993, researchers proposed to carry out basic research on heavy ion cancer treatment during an academic conference held in Tianshui, Gansu. In 2006, China followed the United States, Japan and Germany to become the fourth country to successfully carry out heavy ion clinical treatment, when four cancer patients participated in preliminary clinical trials for heavy ion therapy. In 2015, China’s first such accelerator, with independent intellectual property rights, rolled off the production line in Wuwei, in Gansu. On March 26, 2020, the accelerator was put into operation, and by the end of June this year, more than 750 patients completed their therapy at Wuwei’s heavy ion treatment center, with remarkable curative effects. The follow-up statistics showed that the three-year local tumor control rate reached 84 percent among 46 clinical trial participants.

Heavy ion therapy is highly effective in treating a wide range of solid tumors and can be used in cases where surgery is not possible or unsuitable, when a patient is sensitive to conventional radiation therapy, or prone to relapse following such therapy. This includes tumors located in the central nervous system, head, neck, skull base, chest and abdomen. So far there have been several cases where people have recovered from cancers by the therapy.

9 . Whenever we are planning to buy something online, most of us prefer to look at the reviews first. We imagine that they have been left by shoppers like us who want to share their knowledge with others, so the reviews would be of great value to us.     1     Some of them are writing positive review s in return for a payment or gifts from the maker. How do we know this?

A careful study of thousands of reviews on a popular shopping website showed that a surprisingly large number of reviewers gave either four-or five-star ratings to the product. Two-or three-star ratings both accounted for less than ten percent of the total, which looked suspicious (可疑的).     2     Not everything being sold on the shopping website could be first class! We all know that some false information is provided. Some products that you buy on shopping website can be terrible. You would expect therefore to see a variety of scores.     3    

It seems that anyone who writes a large number of good review s is given a special treat by the shopping website.     4     How should a shopper reply to all these “wonderful” reviews? The best thing to do is to have access to a website run by some organizations such as Which in the UK. The Which product evaluation is based on strict tests carried out by experts and then on reviews by trusted shoppers who are Which members. They are not allowed to take free gifts from makers.

    5     So, a good and responsible organization seems to be the best answer.