1 . Inconvenient Truths
If doctors lie, it is surely inexcusable. One of the basic
Mrs Walton was in her eighties and
Mrs Walton is one of the dementia (痴呆) sufferers, who lose their short-term memory and the memory of
They look at their adult children
Sometimes honesty is
A.expressions | B.expectations | C.reputations | D.regulations |
A.objected | B.contributed | C.admitted | D.appealed |
A.ashamed | B.delighted | C.nervous | D.desperate |
A.cruelty | B.kindness | C.pain | D.pleasure |
A.recent | B.popular | C.distant | D.major |
A.opposition | B.connection | C.attention | D.similarity |
A.attacked | B.isolated | C.surrounded | D.attracted |
A.puzzled | B.satisfied | C.amused | D.motivated |
A.cut off | B.thrown away | C.put down | D.left behind |
A.knowledge | B.control | C.imagination | D.record |
A.brief | B.constant | C.permanent | D.secret |
A.Competing | B.Plotting | C.Matching | D.Mixing |
A.unnecessarily | B.inaccurately | C.impatiently | D.impolitely |
A.ahead of time | B.in no time | C.for the last time | D.for the first time |
A.mostly | B.informally | C.simply | D.finally |
2 . In the days before the Internet, critical thinking was the most important skill of informed citizens. But in the digital age, according to Anastasia Kozyreva, a psychologist at the Max Planck Institute of Human Development, and her colleagues, an even more important skill is critical ignoring.
As the researchers point out, we live in an attention economy where content producers on the Internet compete for our attention. They attract us with a lot of emotional and eye-catching stories while providing little useful information, so they can expose us to profit-generating advertisements. Therefore,we are no longer customers but products, and each link we click is a sale of our time and attention. Toprotect ourselves from this, Kozyreva advocates for learning the skill of critical ignoring, in which readers intentionally control their information environment to reduce exposure to false and low-quality information.
According to Kozyreva, critical ignoring comprises three strategies. The first is to design ourenvironments, which involves the removal of low-quality yet hard-to-resist information from around. Successful dieters need to keep unhealthy food out of their homes. Likewise, we need to set up a digital environment where attention-grabbing items are kept out of sight. As with dieting, if one tries to bank onwillpower not to click eye-catching “news”, he’ll surely fail. So, it’s better to just keep them out of sightto begin with.
The next is to evaluate the reliability of information, whose purpose is to protect you from false and misleading information. It can be realized by checking the source in the mainstream news agencies which have their reputations for being trustworthy.
The last goes by the phrase “do not feed the trolls.” Trolls are actors who internationally spread false and hurtful information online to cause harm. It may be appealing to respond to them to set the facts straight, but trolls just care about annoying others rather than facts. So, it’s best not to reward their bad behaviour with our attention.
By sharpening our critical ignoring skills in these ways, we can make the most of the Internet while avoiding falling victim to those who try to control our attention, time, and minds.
1. What can we learn about the attention economy from paragraph 2?A.It offers little information. | B.It features depressing stories. |
C.It saves time for Internet users. | D.It seeks profits from each click. |
A.To discuss the quality of information |
B.To prove the benefits of healthy food. |
C.To show the importance of environments. |
D.To explain the effectiveness of willpower. |
A.Reveal their intention. | B.Turn a deaf ear to them. |
C.Correct their behaviour. | D.Send hard facts to them. |
A.Reasons for critical thinking in the attention economy. |
B.Practising the skill of critical ignoring in the digital age. |
C.Maximizing the benefits of critical ignoring on the Internet. |
D.Strategies of abandoning critical thinking for Internet users |
Anything Is Possible
When I was a little kid, I would always come in last when my friends and I ran races. I was never fast at running. I also had a hard time playing basketball because I couldn’t jump well. It’s hard to jump when your ankles don’t move. So, I was always picked last to be on a team. I used to get so frustrated and would be really upset about my prosthetic legs(假腿). But I made up for it all when I got my first pair of skating shoes.
I was born with a condition that caused me to have to be fitted with fake legs and feet. I got my first ones when I was eight months old. But for those of you who think that a person with no I was on skates, I felt like I was able to move just as fast as the other kids. So, I kept practicing —and I learned how to get up. Soon, I got better and faster. Then, when my friends were running races, I would put on a pair of skating shoes and skate the race with them. Win or lose, I was able to keep up.
Since skating had become my favorite thing to do, I signed up for the local roller hockey (曲棍球) team and then the ice hockey team. I began playing hockey year round.
When I first joined, I thought I would just skate up to the net and take a shot. But I soon found out it wasn’t so easy. I didn’t score one single goal that whole season. So, I trained hard in the off-season and the next year I signed up again and got through with the tryout(选拔赛).
注意:1.续写词数应为150左右;2.请按如下格式在答题卡的相应位置作答。
Unexpectedly, I was put into an older age group.
______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________Now, at thirteen years old, I have played in three all-star hockey games.
______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________4 . Goldfish may seem like simple creatures swimming in a glass tank, but they possess a rather complicated navigation system, as discovered by researchers at the University of Oxford Led by Dr. Adelaide Sibeaux, the study aims to shed light on our understanding of how fish, and potentially humans, estimate distances using what could be described as an internal GPS.
Writing in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B, Sibeaux and colleagues report how they created a tank in their experiment with 2cm-wide black and white vertical stripes (条纹) on the walls, connected by similar stripes across the floor. The team trained nine goldfish to swim a set distance of 70cm and then return to their starting point when waved at. The experiment aimed to investigate how the fish would estimate this distance without any gestures, under different patterns.
Over multiple trials, the goldfish averaged a swim distance of 74cm, give or take 17cm, when presented with the vertical 2cm-wide stripes. However, when the stripe pattern was altered to either narrower vertical stripes, checked patterns, or horizontal stripes, the fish’s behavior changed significantly. Narrower vertical stripes led them to overestimating the distance by 36%, while horizontal stripes resulted in highly inconsistent estimations.
According to the researchers, the goldfish appeared to be using an “optic (光学的) flow mechanism” based on the visual density of their environment. They kept track of how frequently the vertical pattern switched between black and white to estimate how far they had traveled. The study suggests that different optic flow mechanisms are used by mammals, including humans, based on angular (有角度的) motion of visual features. The study implies that the use of visually based distance information could have emerged early in the evolutionary timeline.
“This study is novel because, despite knowing that fish respond to geometric information regarding direction and distance, we don’t know how they estimate distances,” Professor Colin Lever, although not involved in the study, said, “it’s exciting to explore fish spatial mapping because fish navigation evolved earlier and better than most mammals.”
1. Why did Dr. Adelaide Sibeaux conduct the study on goldfish?A.To test the accuracy of goldfish’s internal GPS. |
B.To create an advanced navigation system for humans |
C.To uncover how an inbuilt GPS helps calculate distances. |
D.To explore the relationships between goldfish and humans |
A.People gestured the goldfish throughout the experiment |
B.The tank was decorated with colorful background patterns |
C.Goldfish tended to underestimate distances with horizontal stripes. |
D.The change in the tank setting led to the goldfish's incorrect judgment. |
A.optic flow mechanism is unique to humans |
B.mammals developed flow mechanism long before goldfish |
C.goldfish evaluated the distance with multidimensional visual information |
D.visual density of the environment strengthened the locating ability of goldfish |
A.Neutral. | B.Ambiguous. | C.Disapproving. | D.Favorable. |
Chinese Online Literature Gains in Popularity Overseas
Thanks to our country’s push to help Chinese culture go overseas, many Chinese online literature companies have been gaining influence overseas in recent years through the
Many overseas readers even write online novels by imitating Chinese online literary works. Logan,
“Human beings love stories, and some values of heroes in stories
A friend of mine whose name was Martin Brown had a bad memory, which made him really famous. He was so forgetful that he sometimes forgot what he was talking about in the middle of a sentence. His wife had to always remind him about his appointments, his classes or even his meals! Since Martin was a professor at a well-known university, his forgetfulness often caused him a lot of trouble. It wasn’t that he was unintelligent, as some critical people tended to say, he was just very, very absent-minded.
One hot summer day, Professor Brown decided to take his children to the beach. The seaside town he planned to visit was about a three-hour train ride away. To make the trip more interesting for his young children, he decided to keep the name of the town secret. Unfortunately, by the time Martin had arrived at the train station, the poor forgetful man had forgotten the name of the town. Luckily, a friend of his happened to be in the station. He offered to take care of the children while Martin went back home to find out where he was going.
The professor’s wife was surprised to see him back again so soon, but she laughed when she heard what was the matter. She distrusted his memory, so she wrote the name of the town on a piece of paper. Satisfied that she had solved the problem, she sent her husband off again. Ten minutes later, she was astonished to see him outside the house again.
注意:
1.续写词数应为150左右。
2.请按如下格式在答题卡的相应位置作答。
Para 1:
“What was the matter now?” asked his wife.
_______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Para 2:
Hearing the cry, the neighbours rushed out, trying to find out what had happened.
_______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
7 . A baby born today will be thirty-something in 2050. If all goes well, that baby will still be around in 2100, and might even be an active citizen of the 22nd century. What should we teach that baby to help them survive and flourish in the world of 2050 and beyond? What kind of skills will they need in order to get a job, understand what is happening around them, and navigate their tough life?
At present, too many schools across the world focus on providing pupils with a set of predetermined skills, such as writing computer code in C++ and conversing in Chinese. Yet since we have no idea how the world and the job market will look in 2050, we don’t really know what particular skills people will need. We might invest a lot of effort in teaching kids how to write in C++ or to speak Chinese, only to discover sooner or later that AI will have been able to code software far better than humans, and that a new translation app will have enabled you to conduct a conversation in almost flawless Mandarin, Cantonese or Hakka, even though you only know how to say ni hao.
So what should we be teaching? Many experts argue that schools should downplay technical skills and emphasize general-purpose life skills: the ability to deal with change, to learn new things, and to preserve your mental balance in unfamiliar situations. In order to keep up with the world of 2050, you will above all need to reinvent yourself again and again.
To succeed in such a demanding task, you will need to work very hard on getting to know your operating system better—to know what you are and what you want from life. This is, of course, the oldest advice in the book: know thyself. This advice was never more urgent than in the mid-21st century, because unlike in the days of Laozi or Socrates, now you have serious competition. Coca-Cola, Amazon and Facebook are all racing to hack you.
Right now, the algorithms (算法) are watching where you go, what you buy, and who you meet. Soon they will monitor all your steps, breaths and heartbeats. They are relying on big data and machine learning to get to know you better and better. And once these algorithms know you better than you know yourself, they could control and manipulate (操纵) you. In the end, authority will shift to them.
Of course, you might be perfectly happy giving up all authority to the algorithms and trusting them to make decisions for you and for the rest of the world. If, however, you want to maintain some control over your personal existence and over the future of life in general, you have to run faster than the algorithms. To run fast, don’t take much luggage with you. Leave all your illusions (幻想) behind. They are very heavy.
1. What does the underlined word “downplay” in paragraph 3 most probably mean?A.Give too much emphasis on something. |
B.Make people think that something is less important. |
C.Offer your reasons why something is right or wrong. |
D.Decide something in advance so that it does not happen. |
A.imagination | B.adaptability | C.self-discipline | D.a good sense of balance |
A.if we don’t, algorithms will hack all our devices. |
B.it is an essential skill for us to succeed in the world of 2050. |
C.we need to learn how algorithms work and make full use of them. |
D.we need to outrun algorithms to keep some control over our personal life. |
A.the importance of knowing yourself |
B.the threats and dangers of technology |
C.what kind of skills we might need in the future |
D.some potential benefits algorithms would bring to humankind |
8 . Chinese people may not be that familiar with sports tourism, but it is one of the fastest growing parts of tourism, because an increasing number of people are expressing their curiosity in sports events during their trips even if sports are not the key reason of their travel.
Sports tourism refers to tourism involving participation in or watching sports events and staying in an environment different from the usual tourist hotels or resorts.
Rural tourism, one kind of sports tourism, which consists of fishing, hiking, horse riding and other outdoor activities, is expanding quickly. This form of tourism has been attracting many tourists.
Sports tourism is a booming industry today, with an annual growth rate of about 15 percent globally.
A.It plays a vital role in rural construction. |
B.People are paying more attention to safety in travel. |
C.But sports tourism is still an emerging area in China. |
D.However, this area has long drawn people’s attention in China. |
E.The origin of sports tourism can be traced back to Ancient Greece. |
F.In China, however, the growth rate is 30 — 40 percent despite a slow start. |
G.Marathons, hiking, cycling and camping fall in the area of sports tourism. |
A music concert “Echoes of Ancient Tang Poems” jointly performed by iSING! Suzhou and the Philadelphia Orchestra was staged at Kimmel Performing Arts Center in Philadelphia on Jan. 6.
Another concert featuring Tang poetry was
The iSING! Suzhou International Young Artists Festival
The performances were also held to commemorate(纪念) the
10 . In August, Jason M. Allen’s piece “Theatre D’opéra Spatial” — which he created with Al image generator Midjourney — won first place in the emerging artist division’s “digital arts photography” category at the Colorado State Fair Fine Arts Competition. The definition for the category states that digital art refers to works that use “digital technology as part of the creative process”.
Allen’s award-winning image has led to debates about what, exactly, it means to be an artist and whether AI can truly make art. “It felt bad for the exact same reason we don’t let robots participate in the Olympics,” one Twitter user wrote. “This is the literal definition of ‘pressed a few buttons to make a digital art piece’,” another tweeted.
Yet while Allen didn’t use a paintbrush, there was plenty of work involved, he said. First, he played around with phrasing that led Midjourney to generate images of women in elegant dresses and space helmets, in an attempt to mix Victorian-style costuming with space themes. Over time, with many slight changes to his written prompt (提示符), he created 900 different versions of what led to his final image. Then he improved its resolution through Gigapixel AI and finally had the images printed.
Allen is glad the debate over whether AI can be used to make art is attracting so much attention. “Rather than hating on the technology, we need to recognize that it’s a powerful tool and use it for good so we can all move forward,” Allen said.
Cal Duran, one of the judges for the competition, said that while Allen’s piece included a mention of AI, he didn’t realize that when judging it. Still, he sticks by his decision to award it first place. “I think the AI technology may give more opportunities to people who may not find themselves artists in the conventional way,” he said.
1. Why has Jason’s work led to debates?A.It was a copy of a photograph. |
B.He challenged the older artists. |
C.It was created with the help of AI. |
D.He broke the rule of the competition. |
A.Cooperative. |
B.Energy-consuming. |
C.Straightforward. |
D.Imagination-lacking. |
A.It is a double-edged sword. |
B.It attracts conventional artists. |
C.It strikes art judges as no surprise. |
D.It may open a new world to artists. |
A.A trend to be AI artists. |
B.An AI-generated art contest. |
C.Responses to a winning AI artwork. |
D.Curiosity about an image generator. |