1 . ①We have a problem, and the strange thing is that we not only know about it but also celebrate it. Just today, someone boasted to me that she was so busy she’s averaged four hours of sleep a night for the last two weeks. She wasn’t complaining; she was proud of the fact. She is not alone.
②Why are typically rational (理智的) people so irrational in their behavior? The answer is that we’re in the midst of a bubble. I call it “The More Bubble.”
③The nature of bubbles is that something is absurdly overvalued until-eventually-the bubble bursts, and we’re left wondering why we were so irrationally animated in the first place. The thing we’re overvaluing now is the opinion of doing it all, having it all, achieving it all.
④This bubble is being enabled by a combination of three powerful trends: smart phones, social media, and extreme consumerism. The result is not just information overload, but opinion overload. We are more aware than at any time in history of what everyone else is doing and therefore, what we should be doing. In the process, we have been sold a bill of goods: that success means being supermen and superwomen who can get it all done. Of course we boasted about being busy—it’s code for being successful and important.
⑤And our answer to the problem of more is always more. We need more technology to help us create more technologies. We need to shift our workload to free up our own time to do yet even more.
⑥Luckily, there is a solution to the pursuit of more: the pursuit of less, but better. A growing number of people are making this change. I call these people Essentialists.
⑦These people are designing their lives around what is essential and removing everything else. These people arrange to have actual weekends (during which they are not working). They create technology-free zones in their homes. They trade time on Facebook with calling those few friends who really matter to them. Instead of running to different meetings, they put space on their calendars to get important work done.
⑧So we have two choices: we can be among the last people caught up in “The More Bubble” or we can join the growing community of Essentialists and get more of what matters in our one precious life.
1. When the woman said she only slept for four hours a night for two weeks, she “_________”.A.took pride in doing so | B.was asking for suggestions |
C.was unsatisfied with her lifestyle | D.knew few people were like her |
A.The solutions to “The More Bubble”. |
B.The advantages of “The More Bubble”. |
C.The cause and result of “The More Bubble”. |
D.The disadvantages of “The More Bubble”. |
A.are tired of information and opinions |
B.prefer not to rely on technology at their homes |
C.give up certain things for what matters in life |
D.are not interested in becoming successful and important |
A.Disapproval. | B.Indifferent. | C.Supportive. | D.Skeptical. |
Remote Work Slows Senior Housing Market Recovery
With the rise of remote work, the market for senior housing has met with problems in its recovery. Only a few old people choose to live in senior-living communities
When more adults began working remotely during the pandemic (流行病), they were able to check in on aging parents easily — they
Experts have been analyzing the phenomenon in different ways. Some found that the greater flexibility to care for parents
The age at which people enter senior housing is also increasing,
Still, many senior-housing operators are optimistic. When
3 . Pricing is managers’ biggest marketing headache. It’s where they feel the most pressure to perform and the least certain that they are doing a good job. All successful pricing efforts share two qualities: The policy combines well with the company’s overall marketing strategy, and the process is well-organized as a whole.
A company’s pricing policy sends a message to the market—it gives customers an important sense of a company’s philosophy. Consider Saturn Corporation (a wholly owned company of General Motors). Saturn wants to let consumers know that it is friendly and easy to do business with. Part of this concept is conveyed through initiatives such as inviting customers to the factory to see where the cars are made and sponsoring evenings at the dealership that combine a social event with training on car maintenance. But Saturn’s pricing policy sends a strong message as well. Can a friendly, trusting relationship be established with customers if a salesperson uses all the negotiating tricks in the book to try to separate them from that last $100? Of course not. Saturn has a “no hassle, no haggle” policy which removes the possibility of conflicts between dealer and potential customer. Customers have an easier time buying a car knowing that the next person in the door won’t negotiate a better deal.
Of course, there are typically many participants in the pricing process: Accounting provides cost estimates; marketing communicates the pricing strategy; sales provides specific customer input; production sets supply boundaries; and finance establishes the requirements for the entire company’s financial health. Input from diverse sources is necessary. However, problems arise when the philosophy of wide participation is carried over to the price-setting process without strong coordinating mechanisms (协调机制). For example, if the marketing department sets list prices, the salespeople negotiate discounts in the field, the legal department adjusts prices if necessary to prevent breaking the laws or contractual agreements, and the people filling orders negotiate price adjustments for delays in shipment, everybody’s best intentions usually end up bringing about less than the best results. In fact, the company may actually lose money on some orders.
1. Why is it essential for a company’s pricing policy to combine with its overall marketing strategy?A.To maximize possible returns and profits. |
B.To maintain consistency in business operations. |
C.To eliminate the need for diverse sales inputs. |
D.To attract customers to social events and trainings. |
A.Saturn trains its dealers to treat customers sincerely. |
B.Saturn offers discounts to some loyal customers. |
C.Saturn cars are at least $100 cheaper than other cars. |
D.Saturn cars are sold at fixed, non-negotiable prices. |
A.Decision making requires gathering comprehensive information. |
B.The coordinating mechanism won’t work without a lot of input. |
C.Potential customers are easily upset at any stage of the process. |
D.The company loses money unless everyone intends for the best. |
A.The art of coordinating pricing processes |
B.The best sales negotiation techniques |
C.Getting one step closer toward better pricing |
D.Maximizing profits through pricing policies |
It Takes at Least 200 Hours to Make a Close Friendship, and More to Maintain It
Many of us worry that we don’t put in enough time to maintain close friendships. But how much is enough? Unfortunately, there’s no magic formula (公式) for how much time you need to spend on your friends to keep them. Each friendship and friend are unique and develops or ends depending on how we interact.
Forming a friendship in the first place takes a certain number of hours of being together. We need between 40 and 60 hours together for a person we know slightly to become a casual friend. In order to move from casual friends to close friends, we need to spend an additional 140 to 160 hours together for a total of about 200 hours.
However, deeper interactions can quicken that timeline. We can form a close bond in less than 200 hours with meaningful conversations. Contrarily, spending 200 hours together doesn’t necessarily mean a person will become a close friend. They have to want to be your friends. Some co-workers can spend 300 hours together and never become close friends.
When it comes to maintaining friendships, it’s not just the number of hours spent together, but what we do that matters. Engaging in passive activity with friends — like watching a TV series — is fun and enjoyable, but it doesn’t do as much to maintain friendship as having deep conversations, sharing feelings, and being a good listener. And routinely checking in with people we choose to connect with, through calls and texts or in person, helps maintain relationships and leads to higher scores of positive feelings, like happiness.
The key point is that sharing things about ourselves can lead to close friendships. Once that closeness is established, some ways to maintain closeness are supporting friends when things go wrong for them and celebrating their achievements.
_____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________5 . The emergence of black holes undoubtedly marks the beginning of a revolution. Black holes have many peculiar properties, such as the alteration of space and time, the radiation of gravitational waves and so on. Scientists are still trying to study the properties and evolution of black holes in order to better understand the origin and evolution of the universe.
Recently, a team of astronomers may have found a solo-wandering black hole using a strange trick of gravity called microlensing (微透镜效应), but the results still have to be confirmed.
Sometimes it’s tough being an astronomer. Nature likes to hide the most interesting things from easy observation. Take, for example, black holes. Except for the strange quantum (量子) phenomenon of Hawking radiation, black holes are completely black. They don’t emit a single bit of radiation – they only absorb, hence their name.
To date, the only way astronomers have been able to spot black holes is through their influence on their environments. For example, if an orbiting star gets a little too close, the black hole can absorb the gas from that star, causing it to heat up as it falls. We can watch as stars dance around the giant black hole at the center of the Milky Way.
Even the famed pictures of the black holes in the center of the Milky Way and the M87 galaxy(星系) aren’t photographs of the black holes themselves. Instead, they are radio images of everything around them.
But surely not all black holes have other light-emitting objects around them to help us find them. To find these wanderers, astronomers have tried their luck with microlensing. We know that heavy objects can bend the path of light around them. This is a prediction of Einstein’s general theory of relativity, and the slight bending of starlight around our own sun was one of the first successful tests of the theory.
Microlensing is pretty much what the name suggests. When astronomers get extremely lucky, a wandering black hole and pass between us and a random distant star. The light from that star bends around the black hole because of its gravity, and from our point of view, the star will appear to temporarily flare in brightness.
And when I say “extremely lucky” I mean it. Despite trying this technique for over a decade, it is only now that astronomers have found a candidate black hole through microlensing. Two teams used the same data, a microlensing event recorded from both the OGLE (Optical Gravitational Lensing Experiment) telescope in Chile and the MOA (Microlensing Observations in Astrophysics) telescope in New Zealand. One team found that the mass was somewhere around seven times the mass of the sun – definitely black hole territory. But the other team estimated a much smaller mass, around 2-4 times the mass of the Sun. If the true mass of the object is at the lower end of that spectrum (光谱), then the wanderer is probably not a black hole.
1. Why does the author say it is hard to be an astronomer?A.Einstein’s theory is hard to understand. |
B.Many things in nature are not easy to observe. |
C.Understanding the evolution of the universe is not easy. |
D.Whether the black hole has been found remains to be seen. |
A.Stars’ wandering in black holes. |
B.Black holes’ absorbing the star’s gas. |
C.The relationship between stars’ heating and black holes. |
D.Finding black holes by observing environmental changes. |
A.People can often find black holes with glowing objects. |
B.Research groups can work together to find black holes. |
C.Glowing objects around black holes help us find them sometimes. |
D.Understanding the properties of black holes helps find them. |
A.To persevere in the end is to win. |
B.Facts speak louder than words. |
C.Failure is the mother of success. |
D.Things are not always what they seem. |
6 . Why Are You Still Coughing?
Have you caught a cold recently — but can’t get rid of the cough? You’re not alone. The symptom can stick around for weeks after our bodies have cleared a virus. Michael Shiloh, a physician specializing in infectious disease research at UT Southwestern Medical Center, says coughing patients often report that they were sick as many as eight weeks prior to seeing him. He says, “
The United States saw a sharp rise in cases of influenza in late 2023 that’s dragged on into 2024. And though positive tests for the illness have leveled off or decreased countrywide over the past weeks, the number of people seeking healthcare for respiratory (呼吸的) diseases is still elevated across much of the U.S.
Coughing is an important reaction that protects the airway from dangers like water or bits of mis-swallowed food, says doctor and researcher Lorcan McGarvey of Queen’s University Belfast.
While it may seem obvious that coughing is meant to clear our throats, it’s also possible that viruses cause the reaction to help themselves spread.
“We don’t know,” says electrophysiologist Thomas Taylor-Clark of the University of South Florida. “But what we can say is that we do know some things, one being that viruses cause infection.”
A.The reaction is caused by nerves that reach into the airway. |
B.Scientists know about many different stimuli that can cause cough. |
C.Many infections involve dry coughs that don’t produce phlegm (痰) at all. |
D.We can’t really detect virus any more in these individuals, and yet they’re still coughing. |
E.But at least temporarily, they can send us into coughing even when we’re no longer sick. |
F.Scientists still aren’t sure exactly why otherwise healthy people experience this kind of persistent cough. |
A. emerge B. absorbing C. subject D. defining E. movement F. originally G. course H. universally I. happens J. constant K. corresponds |
How Long Is a Second?
The length of a second depends on how you’re measuring it. There are 24 hours in a day, 60 minutes in an hour, and 60 seconds in a minute — so surely a second is 1/86400, of a day, right? Well, it turns out that
“The second was
In the 16th century, people turned to technological solutions to this problem, and the first recognizable mechanical clocks began to
By around 1940, quartz crystal clocks (石英钟) had become the new gold standard. However, problems arose, and this was where atomic clocks came in. “Atoms exist only in particular energy states and can only change from one state to another by
In fact, scientists are discussing whether it’s time to redefine the second again. But while several important questions still need to be answered before this
8 . Flinging brightly coloured objects around a screen at high speed is not what computers’ central processing units were designed for. So manufacturers of arcade machines invented the graphics-processing unit (GPU), a set of circuits to handle video games’ visuals in parallel to the work done by the central processor. The GPU’s ability to speed up complex tasks has since found wider uses: video editing, cryptocurrency mining and most recently, the training of artificial intelligence.
AI is now disrupting the industry that helped bring it into being. Every part of entertainment stands to be affected by generative AI, which digests inputs of text, image, audio or video to create new outputs of the same. But the games business will change the most, argues Andreessen Horowitz, a venture-capital (VC) firm. Games interactivity requires them to be stuffed with laboriously designed content: consider the 30 square miles of landscape or 60 hours of music in “Red Dead Redemption 2”, a recent cowboy adventure. Enlisting AI assistants to churn it out could drastically shrink timescales and budgets.
AI represents an “explosion of opportunity” and could drastically change the landscape of game development. Making a game is already easier than it was: nearly 13,000 titles were published last year on Steam, a games platform, almost double the number in 2017. Gaming may soon resemble the music and video industries in which most new content on Spotify or YouTube is user-generated. One games executive predicts that small firms will be the quickest to work out what new genres are made possible by AI. Last month Raja Koduri, an executive at Intel, left the chip maker to found an AI-gaming startup.
Don’t count the big studios out, though. If they can release half a dozen high-quality titles a year instead of a couple, it might chip away at the hit-driven nature of their business, says Josh Chapman of Konvoy, a gaming focused VC firm. A world of more choices also favors those with big marketing budgets. And the giants may have better answers to the mounting copyright questions around AI. If generative models have to be trained on data to which the developer has the rights, those with big back-catalogues will be better placed than startups. Trent Kaniuga, an artist who has worked on games like “Fortnite”, said last month that several clients had updated their contracts to ban AI-generated art.
If the lawyers don’t intervene, unions might. Studios diplomatically refer to AI assistants as “co-pilots”, not replacements for humans.
1. The original purpose behind the invention of the graphics-processing unit (GPU) was to ________.A.speed up complex tasks in video editing and cryptocurrency mining |
B.assist in the developing and training of artificial intelligence |
C.disrupt the industry and create new outputs using generative AI |
D.offload game visual tasks from the central processor |
A.It contributes to the growth of user-generated content. |
B.It facilitates blockbuster dependency on big studios. |
C.It decreases collaboration between different stakeholders in the industry. |
D.It may help to consolidate the gaming market under major corporations. |
A.AI favors the businesses with small marketing budgets. |
B.AI is expected to simplify game development processes. |
C.AI allows startups to gain an edge over big firms with authorized data. |
D.AI assistants may serve as human substitutes for studios. |
A.The evolution of graphics-processing units (GPUs). |
B.The impact of generative AI on the gaming industry. |
C.The societal significance of graphics-processing units (GPUs). |
D.The challenges generative AI presents to gaming studios. |
9 . Imagine this. You need an image of a balloon for a work presentation and turn to an AI text-to- image generator, like Midjourney or DALL-E, to create a suitable image. You enter the prompt (提示词) “red balloon against a blue sky” but the generator returns an image of an egg instead.
What’s going on? The generator you’re using may have been “poisoned”. What does this mean? Text-to-image generators work by being trained on large datasets that include millions or billions of images. Some of the generators have been trained by indiscriminately scraping online images, many of which may be under copyright. This has led to many copyright infringement (侵害) cases where artists have accused big tech companies of stealing and profiting from their work.
This is also where the idea of “poison” comes in. Researchers who want to empower individual artists have recently created a tool named “Nightshade” to fight back against unauthorised image scraping. The tool works by slightly altering an image’s pixels (像素) in a way that confuses the computer vision system but leaves the image unaltered to a human’s eyes. If an organization then scrapes one of these images to train a future AI model, its data pool becomes “poisoned”. This can result in mistaken learning, which makes the generator return unintended results. As in our earlier example, a balloon might become an egg.
The higher the number of “poisoned” images in the training data, the greater the impact. Because of how generative AI works, the damage from “poisoned” images also affects related prompt keywords. For example, if a “poisoned” image of a Picasso work is used in training data, prompt results for masterpieces from other artists can also be affected.
Possibly, tools like Nightshade can be abused by some users to intentionally upload “poisoned” images in order to confuse AI generators. But the Nightshade’s developer hopes the tool will make big tech companies more respectful of copyright. It does challenge a common belief among computer scientists that data found online can be used for any purpose they see fit.
Human rights activists, for example, have been concerned for some time about the indiscriminate use of machine vision in wider society. This concern is particularly serious concerning facial recognition. There is a clear connection between facial recognition cases and data poisoning, as both relate to larger questions around technological governance. It may be better to see data poisoning as an innovative solution to the denial of some fundamental human rights.
1. The underlined word “scraping” (para. 2) is closest in meaning to ____.A.facilitating | B.collecting | C.damaging | D.polishing |
A.increase the accuracy of returned information |
B.cause users to forget the prompt key words |
C.interfere with the training of generative AI |
D.discriminate against great masterpieces |
A.Data poisoning is somehow justified to direct attention to human rights. |
B.Computer scientists has learned to respect the copyright of most artists. |
C.Nightshade is being abused by human rights activists to recognize faces. |
D.The issue of technological governance has aroused the lawyers’ interest. |
A.Data Poisoning: Government Empowering Citizens to Protect Themselves |
B.Data Poisoning: Addressing Facial Recognition Issues Among Artists |
C.Data Poisoning: Risks and Rewards of Generative AI Data Training |
D.Data Poisoning: Restricting Innovation or Empowering Artists |
10 . Maps, number lines, shapes, artwork and other materials tend to cover elementary classroom walls. However, too much of a good thing may end up
Psychology researchers Anna V. Fisher, Karrie E. Godwin and Howard Seltman of Carnegie Mellon University looked at whether classroom displays affected children’s ability to maintain
“Young children spend a lot of time — usually the whole day — in the same classroom, and we have shown that a classroom’s
Should teachers
“We do not suggest by any means that this is the answer to all
For the study, 24 kindergarten students were placed in
“We were also interested in finding out if the visual displays were removed, whether the children’s attention would
However, when the researchers totaled all of the time children spent off-task in both types of classrooms, the rate of off-task
The researchers hope these findings will lead to further studies into developing guidelines to help teachers design classrooms
A.attracting | B.distracting | C.holding | D.paying |
A.confidence | B.relationship | C.consistency | D.focus |
A.gains | B.opportunities | C.needs | D.disabilities |
A.social | B.natural | C.physical | D.visual |
A.turn over | B.take down | C.try out | D.look into |
A.athletic | B.environmental | C.educational | D.communicative |
A.additional | B.prior | C.national | D.independent |
A.However | B.Besides | C.Therefore | D.Meanwhile |
A.stretch | B.adapt | C.concentrate | D.explore |
A.decorated | B.empty | C.transitional | D.laboratory |
A.teaching | B.classroom | C.school | D.personality |
A.accuracy | B.emphasis | C.impact | D.perspective |
A.refer | B.listen | C.respond | D.shift |
A.questions | B.behaviors | C.incidents | D.tasks |
A.originally | B.innovatively | C.appropriately | D.exclusively |