1 . A humanoid robot can relay video and touch sensations to a person wearing a haptic (触觉内) feedback suit and a virtual reality (VR) headset hundreds of kilometres away, offering away for people to attend events without travelling.
The iCub 3 robot is a 52-kilogram, 125-centimetre-tall robot with 54 joints across its body. Its head contains two cameras where a human’s eyes would be, and an Internet-connected computer where the brain would go. Along with the cameras, sensors covering its body send data to the robot’s “brain”. These sensations are then reproduced on a suit and VR headset worn by a remote human operator.
When the operators react to what they see and feel, the suit’s sensors pick up the movements and the robot matches them. “The key is to translate every signal and bit of digital data that can be sent through the network.” says Stefano Dafarra, who was part of the iCub3 team. There can be a small delay of up to 100 milliseconds to capture and transmit the visual shots, but the operator can case this by moving slightly slower than normal.
The team demonstrated the robot at the Venice Biennale, where it wandered through an exhibition while its operator stood 290 kilometres away in Genoa. Dafarra hopes people will use the iCub3 to attend events remotely, reducing the need to travel. “But at present, a fall could be hugely damaging to the robot, and it’s uncertain whether it could stand up again on its own," he says.
“iCub3 is an interesting robot and offers clear advantages from the previous versions.” says Jonathan Aitken, whose laboratory owns a prior version of the robot. However, he is disappointed that the team wasn’t clear in its research about the data transmission requirements of the new version of the robot. “It would be good to know just how much data was required, and what the upper and lower bounds were.” he says.
1. What’s the principle behind the humanoid robot?| A．It conveys sensations to the wearer and acts accordingly. |
| B．It receives commands from an operator through the Internet. |
| C．The cameras take pictures and then interact with the sensors. |
| D．The computer in the robot processes the data and gives orders. |
| A．Medical consultation. | B．Sports events. |
| C．Outdoor workouts. | D．Virtual tourism. |
| A．It fails to appeal to potential investors. |
| B．Its performance hasn’t been evaluated clearly. |
| C．Its present version still requires to be updated. |
| D．Its transmission of data came across technical problems. |
| A．Humanoid robots with sense of touch catch on |
| B．iCub 3 robot combines with VR to benefit more people |
| C．Humanoid robots let people see and feel things remotely |
| D．New advances in technology enable people to travel at work |
2 . On Sunday, Tara VanDerveer, Stanford University’s coach, got her 1,203rd victory in a game against Oregon State University at Maples Pavilion. The
Instead of
“I just
It’s VanDerveer’s latest milestone in a
In a recent
| A．staff | B．victory | C．arrangement | D．decision |
| A．basketball | B．football | C．baseball | D．volleyball |
| A．ended | B．postponed | C．rearranged | D．begun |
| A．broke | B．played | C．equalled | D．lost |
| A．denying | B．defending | C．making | D．stressing |
| A．feeling | B．misbehavior | C．competition | D．benefit |
| A．love | B．forget | C．wonder | D．evaluate |
| A．final | B．great | C．local | D．senior |
| A．payment | B．trouble | C．support | D．work |
| A．struggling | B．long | C．political | D．new |
| A．serve as | B．argue with | C．suffer from | D．sweep away |
| A．design | B．see | C．miss | D．win |
| A．fight | B．cooperation | C．negotiation | D．interview |
| A．far | B．well | C．fast | D．hard |
| A．visited | B．joined | C．pictured | D．phoned |
| A．coaches | B．contests | C．boys | D．classes |
| A．dormitory | B．city | C．office | D．store |
| A．wash | B．buy | C．choose | D．keep |
| A．award | B．scholarship | C．treatment | D．punishment |
| A．worked out | B．worried about | C．carried out | D．dreamed of |
1. Why did the man close his Wechat Moments?
| A．He didn’t like the posts on Wechat. |
| B．He tried to focus on the real world. |
| C．He didn’t want people to know anything about him. |
| A．Through emails. |
| B．Through instant messages. |
| C．Through face-to-face conversations. |
| A．He pays more attention to work. |
| B．He spends more time with his family. |
| C．He communicates more with old friends. |
| A．Boss and secretary. | B．Old schoolmates. | C．Waiter and customer. |
4 . Styrofoam, or polystyrene, is a light-weight material, about 95 percent air, with very good insulation (隔热) properties, according to Earthsource. org. It is used in products from cups that keep your drinks hot or cold to packaging material that protects items during shipping. With the above good features, Styrofoam still enjoys a bad reputation. It cannot be recycled without releasing dangerous pollution into the air. The U. S. Environmental Protection Agency says it is the fifth-largest creator of harmful waste.
But now the common worms which are usually disgusting can come to the rescue, specifically, meal-worms. Scientists from the U. S. and China have discovered that meal-worms can digest plastic. One meal-worm can digest a pill-sized amount of plastic a day. Study co-author Wei-Min Wu says that in 24 hours, the plastic is turned into carbon dioxide.
Since Styrofoam has no nutrition at all, are the worms hurt by eating plastic? Much to the scientists’ surprise, the study found that worms eating Styrofoam were as healthy as worms eating bran (谷糠) . The researchers will study the worm’s eating habits and digesting system, looking to copy the plastic breakdown but on a larger scale. Once the way can be put into practice, it will make a revolutionary difference to the disposal of plastic.
“Solving the issue of plastic pollution is important”, says Wu, a Stanford University environmental engineering instructor. After all, our earth is small and landfill space-is becoming limited with too much garbage waiting to be dealt with, he says.
About 33-million tons of plastic are thrown away in the United States every year. Plastic plates, cups and containers take up 25 percent to 30 percent of space in America’s landfills. One Styrofoam cup takes more than 1 million years to recycle in a landfill, according to Cleveland State University.
1. What do we know about Styrofoam?| A．It can be used to cool drinks. | B．It is a weightless material. |
| C．It is harmful when recycled. | D．It is usually used on ships. |
| A．Meal-worms have amazing digesting power. | B．Meal-worms are not bad in their nature. |
| C．Meal-worms can rescue people’s lives. | D．People misunderstood meal-worms in the past. |
| A．by raising amounts of meal-worms | B．by environmental engineering instructors |
| C．using a method inspired by eating meal-worms | D．without sending out dangerous pollution |
| A．Styrofoam is widely used in daily life. | B．Meal-worms are genius at eating plastic |
| C．Plastic recycling may be no more a problem. | D．Plastic can be turned into carbon dioxide |
5 . Recently, I was walking with some parents when we came across a five-pound note lying on the ground. We stood around it for a moment, a bit awkwardly, until someone suggested putting it on a nearby bench. Then one of the parents remarked that we’d probably have behaved differently — that is, we would have just taken the money — had we been alone.
This relates to a classic question in studies of human generosity: do we behave more selfishly when we aren’t being observed? The debate goes on across the psychological and biological sciences, as well as in popular culture, about whether kindness can exist in a competitive world.
Yom Kippur is a Jewish (犹太人的) religious holiday when Jewish people fast and ask for forgiveness for the wrongs they’ve committed. One of the points of Yom Kippur is to behave better regardless of who is watching. There’s an evolutionary beauty to the teachings of Yom Kippur, which are the products of thousands of years of cultural changes and evolution.
The Maasai people of Kenya practice osotua: relationships between people that operate based on need. When someone forms an osotua relationship with another, they enter into an unwritten contract to help their partner in times of need. And hunter-gatherer groups, which can represent the circumstances our species evolved in, have many similar examples.
Cultural evolution helps to explain the existence and complexity of these systems. Cultural changes are far faster than biological evolution, allowing intelligent species like humans to develop behavioral adaptations for managing complex social environments. Osotua, or any other practice that helps to maintain good treatment of others in society, is the result of tens of thousands of years of cultural trial and error. The customs passed down over time are those that help us to develop as cultural groups.
The study of those changes has helped us to understand how we successfully spread around the world as cooperative groups. Biological evolution has helped humans be more cooperative, but cultural changes have accelerated this process.
Cultural evolution helps us to overcome our selfish natures. Try to understand rules before you ignore them — and next time you find a fiver on the ground, you might think about the awkward situation your discovery represents.
1. What made the parents feel a bit awkward?| A．The difficulty sharing the money. |
| B．The difficulty finding the owner of the money. |
| C．The thought of putting the money on the bench. |
| D．The thought of keeping the money for themselves. |
| A．To highlight a fact. | B．To draw a conclusion. |
| C．To make a comparison. | D．To support an argument. |
| A．It evolves much slower. | B．It takes much less time. |
| C．It is a more complex process. | D．It makes humans more cooperative. |
| A．How cultural evolution takes place. | B．Why people sometimes behave selfishly. |
| C．Why kindness exists in a competitive world. | D．How kindness spreads throughout the world. |
1. When and where does the reality show start?
| A．At 7:00 on channel 2. | B．At 7:00 on channel 5. | C．At 9:00 on channel 2. |
| A．He wants to go to bed. | B．He hates fixing things. | C．He watched it many times. |
| A．A TV play. | B．A reality show. | C．A sports event. |
| A．Husband and wife. | B．Father and daughter. | C．Brother and sister. |
7 . We may weep for the dodo, but could and should we bring this lovely bird back from the dead? De-extinction is the science of restoring lost species and it has been in the news for decades.
The story in modern times began in 1990 when Michael Crichton published his science fiction novel Jurassic Park, in which he imagined a world where scientists were able to bring dinosaurs back to life. Crichton imagined that polymerase chain reaction (PCR) technology could be a way to amplify (放大) tiny quantities of dinosaur DNA and thus build a living embryo.
Sadly, biologists soon realized that DNA in fact breaks down super-fast; even after 100 years, DNA from museum skins of dodos was decayed (腐烂) beyond repair. They could be sequenced (测定序列) using massive computational power, but then only with considerable uncertainty. And even if you capture a DNA sequence, there’s still the problem of how you get living cells to read that sequence and express proteins that make the dinosaur or the dodo.
But why would anyone want to see mammoths, or something like them, roaming (漫游) present-day Siberia? Well, they were undoubtedly amazing beasts. As well as hunting them, our distant ancestors painted their likenesses in caves across Europe. Fascinating as they may be, there's some ecological justification for the project too.
It was this diversity of land surface, broken up by heavy limbs and randomly fertilised by faeces (排泄物), that supported so much flora (植物群). Without the mammoths, that diversity disappeared. Return them and landscapes would once again be with a variety of species, including flowers and bushes.
True, it’s not de-extinction in the sense of bringing a long-dead species back to life. Instead it’s more like making a “dodo” by engineering a modern pigeon, its closest relative, to become huge and flightless. The result would be a big, fatty pigeon that, whether it looked like a dodo or not, would probably fulfil some of its ecological roles.
As a palaeontologist, I would of course love to see living dinosaurs, mammoths and dodos. In some ways, though, I am relieved that the optimistic claims for cloning and genetic technologies have not been borne out. The slowdown gives us time to consider the outcomes—and hopefully avoid some of Michael Crichton’s more fevered imaginings.
1. What is paragraph 2 of the text mainly about?| A．A science fiction review. | B．The development of DNA. |
| C．An inspired guess of de-extinction. | D．The application of PCR technology. |
| A．DNA is hard to keep for long. | B．Computational power is limited. |
| C．Biologists are opposed to it. | D．Living cells cant be sequenced. |
| A．They expect to seek hunt fun. | B．They lack sources of modern art. |
| C．They need them for research. | D．They want to see biodiversity. |
| A．Cautious. | B．Unclear. | C．Dismissive. | D．Approving. |
8 . A moment occurs in the exchange between professor and student when each of us adopts a look. My look says, “What, you don’t understand?” Theirs says, “We don’t. And we think you’re making it up.” We are having a problem. Basically, we’ve all read the same story, but we haven’t used the same analytical approaches. It may seem at times as if the professor is inventing interpretations out of thin air.
Actually, the truth is that as the slightly more experienced reader, the professor has acquired over the years the use of a certain “language reading”. Besides, he has grasped three professional tools-memory, symbol and pattern. These items separate the professional readers from the ordinary ones.
English professors are cursed with memory. When reading a new book, I constantly seek out connections and inferences, recalling faces and themes from past readings. I can’t not do it, although there are plenty of times when that ability is not something I want to exercise. This does not necessarily improve the experience of popular entertainment.
Professors also read and think symbolically. Everything is a symbol of something, it seems, until proven otherwise. We ask: What does the thing over there represent? The kind of mind that works its way through undergraduate and then graduate classes in literature and criticism tends to see things as existing in themselves while also representing something else. This tendency to understand the world in symbolic terms is enhanced by years of training and rewards the symbolic imagination.
A related phenomenon in professorial reading is pattern recognition. Most professional students of literature learn to take in the specific detail while seeing the patterns that the detail reveals. Experience has proved to them that life and books fall into similar patterns. Literature is full of patterns, and your reading experience will be much more rewarding when you can step back from the work, even while you are reading it, and look for those patterns.
1. How does the author introduce the topic?| A．By describing a real-life scene. | B．By using popular quotes. |
| C．By presenting conflicting ideas. | D．By raising an interesting question. |
| A．They have limited life experience. |
| B．They lack chances for sufficient reading. |
| C．They are unable to analyze the text thoroughly. |
| D．They do not trust the professor’s teaching abilities. |
| A．They have a strong desire to not have their good memory. |
| B．Their reading habit doesn’t always guarantee desirable effects. |
| C．Their memory adds to their reading pleasure of popular works. |
| D．They keep making connections with their own life while reading. |
| A．Identify the hidden text modes. | B．Perceive many things at the same time. |
| C．Look for details and language patterns. | D．Memorize patterns of symbolic meanings. |
9 . When Amelia thinks about her freshman year two years ago, she remembers being tardy to her 8 a.m. first period class from time to time. “It was so hard to wake up in the morning,” she said. “I had to bike to school and I lived on the other side of the island.”
Like other teens, mornings area struggle because she had several hours of homework and extracurricular activities the night before, but research shows that’s not the entire story. According to psychotherapists, Heather Turgeon and Julie Wright in their book Generation Sleepless, today's teens are sleepier than ever and earlier school start time is disturbing their body's circadian (昼夜节律的) rhythm.
“One of the things that happens somewhere around age 12 is that their brain clock becomes set to a later pace,” said Turgeon, which put sateen about two hours behind the sleep schedule of a young child or an adult. “That means they want to go to sleep later and they want to wake up later,” she said.
“We consider adequate sleep —the very lowest amount—to be about eight hours,” said Wright. However, the average sleep time for high school students is usually about 6.5 hours. And missing out on just a couple hours of rest each night has negative consequences for developing teenage brains.
When a teen is tired, the amygdala—which is the part of the brain that responds to danger—will become more active. And the parts of the brain that are in charge of judgment become less active. Sleep issues are commonly associated with anxiety, depression, bipolar disorder (双相情感障碍) and ADHD (多动症). “We see teens with very serious mental health issues and accidents and soon things that parents really worry about—and getting enough sleep addresses those issues.”
Even with research showing that letting students sleep well contributes to better academic performance, lower truancy (旷课) rates and improved mental health, there has been pushback from parents and school districts about delaying the start of the school day.
1. What does the underlined word “tardy” probably m can in paragraph 1?| A．Late. | B．Busy. | C．Tired. | D．Excited. |
| A．They feel more tired than ever | B．They sleep later and wakeup later. |
| C．They have about 6.5 hours of sleep | D．They sleep about two hours later than adults. |
| A．The teens are always feeling tired |
| B．The amygdala becomes more active. |
| C．The lack of sleep causes many problems. |
| D．The teenagers have trouble sleeping |
| A．Favorable | B．Doubtful | C．Ambiguous. | D．Disapproving |
10 . For many buyers, electric vehicles (EVs) are simply too expensive, their range is too limited, and charging them isn’t as quick and convenient as refueling at the gas stations. All these limitations have to do with the lithium-ion batteries (锂电池) that power the vehicles. They’re costly, heavy, and quick to run out of juice. To make matters worse, the batteries rely on liquid electrolytes (电解质) that can burn during crashes.
Making electric cars more competitive with gas-powered ones will require a breakthrough battery that overcomes those shortcomings. That, at least, is the argument of Jagdeep Singh, chief executive of QuantumScape, a Silicon Valley startup that claims to have developed just such a technology. The company says it did so by solving a chemistry puzzle: how to use lithium to boost the amount of energy that can be packed into a battery without posing a routine risk of fire or otherwise weakening performance. The company says it achieved this by developing a solid version of the flammable (易燃的) liquid electrolyte.
In an online presentation in December, QuantumScape displayed a series of charts showing that a single-layer lab version of the battery can be charged to more than 80% of its capacity in 15 minutes, last for hundreds of thousands of miles, and work fine at freezing temperatures. The company expects the batteries to be able to boost electric vehicles’ range by more than 80%: a car that can go 250 miles on a single charge today could drive 450 miles instead.
Indeed, the battery field is littered with examples of startups that promised breakthrough technologies but ultimately failed. And the challenges ahead of QuantumScape are enormous, particularly when it comes to turning its samples into commercial products that can be produced cheaply.
If the company succeeded, it could transform the EV marketplace. Cutting costs, boosting the range, and making charging convenient enough could broaden demand beyond people who can afford charging ports at home, and ease the anxieties of those who fear being left on longer trips.
1. What does the author mainly want to tell us in the first paragraph?| A．The high cost of electric vehicles. | B．The complaints of vehicle consumers. |
| C．The disadvantages of present batteries. | D．The inconvenience of charging cars. |
| A．They consume more energy than gas-powered ones. |
| B．They should reduce performance to avoid the risk of fire. |
| C．They have gained an advantage over gas-powered ones now. |
| D．They need technology improvement in batteries’ performance. |
| A．By showing lab data online. |
| B．By testing the battery capacity on site. |
| C．By challenging the previous range record. |
| D．By displaying the working principles of electric cars. |
| A．Dismissive. | B．Objective. | C．Doubtful. | D．Positive. |
