1 . Alexa is Amazon’s cloud-based voice service available on hundreds of millions of devices from Amazon and third-party device manufacturers. With Alexa, you can build natural voice experiences that offer customers a way to interact with the technology they use every day.
Alexa is always eavesdropping (窃听). (So are Siri, Google Assistant, and any other virtual assistant you invite into your home.) This is and isn’t as horrible as it sounds. Although it’s true that the device can hear everything you say within range of its microphones, it is listening for its wake word before it starts recording.Once it hears that —“Alexa” is the default (默认), but there are other options — everything in the following few seconds is considered to be a command or a request and is sent to (and stored on) servers in the cloud, where the correct response is triggered. Think of a smart speaker like a dog: It’s always listening, but it understands only “cookie,” “walk,” or “Buddy.” Everything else goes right over its head.
Every time Alexa hears a command, Amazon — its parent company — has just learned something about you. Maybe the company learned only that you like to listen to the Police, or that you like funny jokes, or that you turn your lights off at 11 p.m. every night. If you were to say “Alexa, where should I bury the body?” you’re not going to have the police showing up at your door. (I know because I’ve tried it.)
Alexa does make mistakes.Sometimes this can be funny, such as when Alexa hears its wake word in a TV show.Other times it’s more serious, including an instance in 2018 when Alexa mistakenly sent an entire private conversation to a random person’s Echo device. Occasionally there are even humans listening to your request for weather reports or trying to figure out what you meant when you added “mangosteens” to your shopping list. Sound disturbing? You likely already agreed to it in the app’s terms of use when you installed the device.
What bits of privacy are you willing to sacrifice for the convenience provided by a smart speaker? If you trust that Amazon’s intentions are no more immoral than getting a better idea of what you want to buy on Prime Day, then you have your answer. If you worry about your private information falling into the hands of the wrong people, then you have another answer.
1. Why does the author compare smart speakers to dogs?| A．To show smart speakers are life companions like dogs. |
| B．To show smart speakers are sensitive to users’ commands. |
| C．To show smart speakers are woken by specific words. |
| D．To show wake words for smart speakers are different. |
| A．The tech company knows less than users imagine. |
| B．The tech company is spying on users’ everyday life.. |
| C．The tech company turns a blind eye to some crimes. |
| D．The tech company is interested in users’ music taste. |
| A．All-round. |
| B．Imperfect. |
| C．Funny. |
| D．Immoral. |
| A．It is a matter of opinion. |
| B．Privacy is a high price to pay. |
| C．It is part and parcel of life. |
| D．Convenience always comes first. |
2 . When my best friend, Jane, and I were 16, we were in the same class. About a week before Thanksgiving Day, we found out our teacher Mr. Edward was having some financial (经济的)
When Jane told her family about our plan, her mother was
“Thanksgiving Day won’t be
Before
Last month
We hugged and began to speak of the last 42 years. He told me that what warmed his heart that night was to see a group of teenagers who understood the spirit of Thanksgiving Day.
1.| A．information | B．difficulties | C．money | D．food |
| A．gather | B．produce | C．buy | D．change |
| A．find out | B．make sure | C．make clear | D．point out |
| A．embarrassed | B．disappointed | C．moved | D．calm |
| A．decorated | B．sold | C．searched | D．cleaned |
| A．sell out | B．use up | C．throw away | D．give away |
| A．ordinary | B．complete | C．usual | D．important |
| A．regrets | B．thinks | C．remembers | D．explains |
| A．sending | B．receiving | C．opening | D．posting |
| A．challenge | B．impress | C．fool | D．help |
| A．anxious | B．surprised | C．charming | D．terrified |
| A．pushed | B．knocked | C．answered | D．closed |
| A．Besides | B．Therefore | C．Otherwise | D．However |
| A．while | B．after | C．before | D．since |
| A．spare | B．bring | C．save | D．award |
3 . My father used to judge restaurants by their bread baskets. His reasoning: If you can't get little things right, how can you be
I feel that way about commas (逗号). One sign that something has gone wrong in a piece of writing is the sight of commas
Such abuses usually
Then again, I shouldn't judge my students so severely. I also failed to
Well, the thing is, commas aren't so basic and learning to
| A．forced | B．trusted | C．inspired | D．persuaded |
| A．rarely | B．properly | C．carelessly | D．consistently |
| A．law | B．history | C．writing | D．engineering |
| A．found | B．ignored | C．discussed | D．removed |
| A．expect | B．ensure | C．indicate | D．deny |
| A．simple | B．strange | C．confusing | D．important |
| A．body | B．piece | C．case | D．show |
| A．prove | B．include | C．mean | D．support |
| A．progress | B．concept | C．restriction | D．presence |
| A．explain | B．question | C．possess | D．recognize |
| A．when | B．once | C．unless | D．whether |
| A．amused | B．scared | C．ashamed | D．exhausted |
| A．use | B．select | C．identify | D．remember |
| A．free | B．hard | C．short | D．common |
| A．pointing at | B．looking for | C．picking up | D．taking out |
4 . Artists always treat businessmen as money-obsessed ( 迷 恋 金 钱 的 ) bores. Or worse, many businessmen, for their part, assume that artists usually consider themselves to be more intelligent than others. Bosses may stick a few modern paintings on their office walls. But they seldom take the arts seriously as a source of inspiration.
The prejudice starts at business school, where “hard” things such as numbers rule. It is reinforced by everyday experience. Bosses constantly remind their employees that if you can't count it, it doesn't count. Few read deeply about the arts. Sun Tzu's The Art of War does not count while some tasteless business books are pleasing to them: consider Wess Roberts' Leadership Secrets of Attila the Hun.
But lately there are welcome signs of a thaw (缓和) on the business side of the great cultural divide. Business presses are publishing a series of books such as The Fine Art of Success by Jamie Anderson. Business schools such as the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto are trying to learn from the arts.
Mr. Anderson points out that many artists have also been superb enterprisers. Damien Hirst has been one of the most enterprising. He upturned the art world by selling his work directly through Sotheby's, an auction ( 拍 卖 ) house. Whatever they think of his work, businessmen cannot help admiring a man who parted art lovers from £ 75.5 million on the day that Lehman Brothers collapsed.
Studying the arts can help businessmen communicate more effectively. Most bosses spend a huge amount of time “messaging” and “reaching out”, yet few are good at it. Half an hour with George Orwell's Why I Write would work wonders.
Studying the arts can also help companies learn how to manage bright people. Rob Goffee of the London Business School points out that today's most productive companies are dominated by what they call “clevers”, who are very hard to manage. They hate being told what to do by managers, whom they regard as being stupid. They refuse to submit to performance reviews.
In short, they are prima donnas. The art world has centuries of experience in managing such difficult people.
Directors persuade actresses to cooperate with actors they hate. Their tips might be worth hearing.
1. Which book combines the arts with business?
| A．Why I Write. | B．The Art of War. |
| C．The Fine Art of Success. | D．Leadership Secrets of Attila the Hun. |
| A．An artist who is good at doing business. |
| B．A businessman who just cares about money. |
| C．An artist whose works changed the art world. |
| D．A businessman who had prejudice toward the arts. |
| A．quite stupid | B．rather proud |
| C．really bright | D．very efficient |
| A．Good management takes skill and patience. |
| B．Artists should show respect for businessmen. |
| C．Painting is a special form of communication. |
| D．Businessmen have much to learn from artists. |
5 . You can remember the face, but can't put a name to it. Many of us have been caught in this embarrassing situation. But researchers say it is often easier to remember someone's name than what they look like.
Twenty-four volunteers were shown 40 pictures of strangers, paired with random(随机的) names. They were given time to memorize the faces and names before being tested on which they thought they had seen before.
The participants could remember up to 85 percent of the names but only 73 percent of the faces. When they were shown a different picture of the same person, the participants could recall only 64 percent of faces, according to the study, led by the University of York.
That may be because faces are only recognized visually(视觉地), while names can be both spoken and written down so appear in our visual and audio memory. When people were shown famous people, they also remembered their names more accurately than their photographs. Co-author Dr Rob Jenkins, from the university’s psychology department, said, ''Our study suggests that, while many people may be bad at remembering names, they are likely to be even worse at remembering faces. This will surprise many people as it is against our initial understanding. Our life experiences with names and faces have misled us about how our minds work. '' Remembering names gets harder with age, leading to many uncomfortable moments for middle-aged people when they run into people they know.
But to study whether names are harder to recall than faces, the researchers, whose findings are published in the Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, used a ''fair test'' where the participants were presented with strangers' names and faces.
1. What can we know according to the research in Paragraph 3?| A．It is certain that names are harder to recall than faces. |
| B．Remembering names is more easily than remembering faces. |
| C．Most participants can remember the face not the name to it. |
| D．The participants can recall 73% faces of the same person. |
| A．Age will weaken the ability to remember names. |
| B．Unlike faces, names are only recognized visually. |
| C．Faces can appear in our visual and audio memory. |
| D．Rob Jenkins has proved people can remember faces better. |
| A．Clear. | B．first. |
| C．Unusual. | D．Creative. |
| A．People can't remember strangers’ names and faces. |
| B．Recalling names is more difficult than remembering faces. |
| C．The researcher uses the same method to study another problem. |
| D．Whether names are harder to recall than faces is further proved. |
6 . For several decades, there has been an organized campaign intended to produce distrust in science, funded by those whose interests are threatened by the findings of modern science. In response, scientists have tended to stress the success of science. After all, scientists have been right about most things, from the structure of the universe to the relativity of time and space.
Stressing successes isn’t wrong, but for many people it’s not persuasive. An alternative answer to the question “Why trust science?” is that scientists use the so-called scientific method. But what is called the scientific method isn’t what scientists actually do. Science is dynamic: new methods get invented; old ones get abandoned; and at any particular point, scientists can be found doing many different things. False theories sometimes lead to true results, so even if an experiment works, it doesn’t prove that the theory it was designed to test is true.
If there is no specific scientific method, then what is the basis for trust in science? The answer is the methods by which those claims are evaluated. A scientific claim is never accepted as true until it has gone through a long process of examination by fellow scientists. Scientists draft the initial version of a paper and then send it to colleagues for suggestions. Until this point, scientific feedback is typically fairly friendly. But the next step is different: the revised paper is submitted to a scientific journal, where things get a whole lot tougher. Editors deliberately send scientific papers to people who are not friends or colleagues of the authors, and the job of the reviewer is to find errors or other faults. We call this process “peer review” because the reviewers are scientific peers—experts in the same field—but they act in the role of a superior who has both the right and the responsibility to find fault. It is only after the reviewers and the editor are satisfied that any problems have been fixed that the paper will be printed in the journal and enters the body of “science.”
Some people argue that we should not trust science because scientists are “always changing their minds.” While examples of truly settled science being overturned are far fewer than is sometimes claimed, they do exist. But the beauty of this scientific process is that science produces both creativity and stability. New observations, ideas, explanations and attempts to combine competing claims introduce creativity; transformative questioning leads to collective decisions and the stability of scientific knowledge. Scientists do change their minds in the face of new evidence, but this is a strength of science, not a weakness.
1. Scientists stress the success of science in order to ________.| A．promote basic knowledge of science |
| B．remind people of scientific achievements |
| C．remove possible doubts about science |
| D．show their attitude towards the campaign |
| A．It’s an easy job to prove its existence. |
| B．It usually agrees with scientists’ ideas. |
| C．It hardly gets mixed with false theories. |
| D．It constantly changes and progresses. |
| A．It seldom gives negative evaluation of a paper. |
| B．It is usually conducted by unfriendly experts. |
| C．It aims to perfect the paper to be published. |
| D．It happens at the beginning of the evaluation process. |
| A．it is not uncommon for science to be overturned |
| B．scientists are very strong in changing their minds |
| C．people lose faith in those changeable scientists |
| D．changes bring creativity and stability to science |
7 . Everyone wants to be happy every day, but sometimes we come across some problems which make us feel bad. There are a few ways that we can use to help ourselves to be happier every day.
When looking at your goals, remember to look at how far you have come towards achieving them. When you measure yourself against your goals, you will always have a negative feeling. When you measure yourself against where you started, you will be recognizing your achievements, and those deserve to be celebrated.
Make gratitude(感恩) lists.
Expressing your appreciation for what you have is an important happiness strategy.
Help other people.
There are many benefits that come from helping others, whether helping someone you know or volunteering for a community.
Use these tips in all areas of your life, and you will have a happier life!
| A．You’ve probably heard this before. |
| B．We all have much to be grateful for. |
| C．Besides, it’s an extremely pleasing activity. |
| D．It’s one that is worth doing on a daily basis. |
| E．Measure your progress not your distance to the goal. |
| F．Be sure to make it a daily practice to celebrate your achievements. |
| G．Volunteering proves to be good for your health and your happiness. |
8 . Mark Rothko, one of the greatest painters of the twentieth century, was born in Daugavpils, Latvia in 1903. His father immigrated to the United States, fearing that his son would be drafted (招募) into the Czarist army. Mark stayed in Russia with his mother and elder sister; they joined the family later, arriving in the winter of 1913, after a 12-day voyage.
Mark moved to New York in the autumn of 1923 and found employment in the garment trade and took up residence on the Upper West Side. It was while he was visiting someone at the Art Students League that he saw students sketching a nude model. According to him, this was the start of his life as an artist. He was twenty years old and had taken some art lessons at school, so his initial experience was far from an immediate calling.
In 1936, Mark Rothko began writing a book, which he never completed about the similarities in the children’s art and the work of modern painters. The work of modernists, which was influenced by primitive (原始的) art, according to him, could be compared to that of children in that “Child art transforms itself into primitivism (原始主义), which is only the child producing a mimicry (模仿) of himself.” However, in this same work, he said that “The fact that one usually begins with drawing is already academic. We start with the colors.”
It was not long before his multiform developed into the style he is remembered for; in 1949 Rothko exhibited these new works at the Betty Parsons Gallery. For critic Harold Rosenberg, the paintings were a revelation. After painting his first multiform, Rothko withdrew himself to his home in East Hampton on Long Island. The discovery of his definitive form came at a period of great grief; his mother Kate died in October 1948 and it was at some point during that winter that Rothko chanced upon the striking symmetrical (对称的) rectangular blocks of two to three opposing or contrasting, yet complementary colors (对称). As part of this new uniformity of artistic vision, his paintings and drawings no longer had individual titles: from this point on they were simply untitled, numbered or dated. However, to assist in distinguishing one work from another, dealers would sometimes add the primary colors to the name.
1. Mark Rothko’s family have experienced all of the following except .| A．a separation from his father | B．the call up of the army |
| C．a temporary stay in Russia | D．a 12-day voyage to the United States |
| A．His move to the Upper West Side. |
| B．His visit to the Art Students League. |
| C．His sight of the students’ drawing. |
| D．His lessons took in art school. |
| A．they are both considered childish and academic |
| B．they are both ways of expressing primitivism |
| C．they are both a copy of the painters themselves |
| D．they ate both striking blocks and colors |
| A．It was inspired by Rosenberg. |
| B．It resulted from moving to Long Island. |
| C．It resulted from his grief. |
| D．It evolved (develop gradually) in 1948. |
9 . About ten men in every hundred suffer from color blindness in some way. Women are luckier; only about one in two hundred is affected in this matter. Perhaps, after all, it is safer to be driven by a woman!
There are different forms of color blindness. In some cases a man may not be able to see deep red. He may think that red, orange and yellow are all shadows of green. Sometimes a person cannot tell the difference between blue and green. In rare cases an unlucky man may see everything in shades of green -- a strange world indeed.
Color blindness in human beings is a strange thing to explain. In a single eye there are millions of very small things called "cones". These help us to see in a bright light and to tell the difference between colors. There are also millions of "rods", but these are used for seeing when it is near dark. They show us shape but no color.
Some insects have favorite colors. Mosquitoes (蚊子) prefer blue to yellow. A red light will not attract insects, but a blue lamp will. In a similar way human beings also have favorite colors. Yet we are lucky. With the aid of the cones in our eyes we can see many beautiful colors by day, and with the aid of the rods we can see shapes at night. One day we may even learn more about the invisible (看不见的) colors around us.
1. The passage is mainly about______ .| A．color and its surprising effects. |
| B．women being luckier than men. |
| C．danger caused by color blindness. |
| D．color blindness. |
| A．tell different shapes. |
| B．see in a weak light. |
| C．kill mosquitoes. |
| D．tell orange from yellow. |
| A．Women are more careful. |
| B．There are fewer color-blind women. |
| C．Women are fonder of driving than men. |
| D．Women are weaker but quicker in thinking. |
| A．red light. | B．yellow light . | C．blue light. | D．green light. |
10 . Saint Patrick’s Day is a major holiday in Ireland, but the rest of the world has influenced its celebration as much as the Irish
Saint Patrick lived in Ireland more than 2,000 years ago. He is
St. Patrick is believed
In Ireland today, Si. Patrick’s Day is a four-day public celebration
