1 . Directions: After reading the passage below, fill in the blanks to make the passage coherent and grammatically correct. For the blanks with a given word, fill in each blank with the proper form of the given word; for the other blanks, use one word that best fits each blank.

The Mystery is No Mystery

The area of ocean between Florida, Puerto Rico, and Bermuda, known as the Bermuda Triangle, is the source of much mystery. Over the centuries, reports of ships and planes disappearing     1     a trace have seized the public attention, leading the zone     2     (nickname) “The Devil’s Triangle.” Suggested causes for these mysterious disappearances range front supernatural powers to underwater alien bases. However, there is a more basic question to ask: Do more craft really disappear in the Bermuda Triangle than in any similarly trafficked area? The answer,     3     it turns out, is no.

The Bermuda Triangle covers a vast 700,000 square-kilometer swathe of ocean. Close to the equator(赤道)and near the United States, it is a particularly busy patch of sea with heavy traffic. According to Lloyd’s of London and the U. S. Coast Guard,     4     you were to compare the number of disappearances to the large quantity of ships and planes that have passed through the Bermuda Triangle, you would find that there     5     (be) nothing out of the ordinary about the area.

These days, new theories are being put forward, with a bit of scientific truth to them. Some have attributed Bermuda Triangle disappearances to explosive releases of methane (甲烷) gas,     6     (trap) as methane hydrate inside water molecules beneath the cold seabed of the deep ocean. Such blowouts could potentially release a giant amount of gas that could cause the sea to bubble like it was boiling, which could possibly sink ships because the resulting bubbles would be much     7     (thick) than the water on which large ships normally float. The gas could also rise into the sky,     8     (produce) a mixture of five to 15 percent methane which could explode on contact with the engine exhaust of a hot airplane.

The only problem with this theory is that scientists won’t be able to tell with much certainty if this is a factor       9     the ocean floor is mapped in greater detail. It remains to be seen     10     they will succeed in their attempt to clear up the Bermuda Triangle “mystery” this time around.

2 . History has not yet _______ what we will definitively call the postmillennial cohort (2000年后出生的人) that now _______ more than 60 million people in the U.S. These kids and _______ with no concept of life _______ the Internet have so far been called the App Generation and Generation Z. They’ve been referred to as Homelanders, having grown up under the ghost of terorism. They’ve also been _______ the Plurals, for their historic diversity, as well as the Founders, at least by MTV.

Whatever we _______ naming them, marketers and academies are turning their attention to this group, which has billions in _______ and is already shaping the culture. This generation is growing up “totally and utterly connected,” says California State University psychologist Larry Rosen. Experts like Rosen have concerns about these kids’ Google-inspired expectations that everything be _______. They worry about their inability to _______ even five seconds of boredom. And they worry about the demands that come with ________ several identities online, from Facebook to Twitter to Snapchat. “There’s so much pressure on young people, who are still ________ their identities, to present this crystallized, idealized identity online,” says the University of Washington’s Katie Davis.

Historian Neil Howe sees ________ with the Silent Generation, the spoilt, risk-avoiding, “nice” generation of kids who grew up during the Great Depression and World War II, although some marked differences are found. Today’s youths are also coming of age among geopolitical trouble and fears about the economy, he says, ________ schools emphasize an intense far-reaching sensitivity to other kids. He suspects this ________ will be known for being well behaved and perhaps boring the culture by playing it safe. “There are typical examples that occur repeatedly,” Howe says, “even if they go by different ________.”

4 . On March 7, 1907, the English statistician Francis Galton published a paper which illustrated what has come to be known as the “wisdom of crowds” effect. The experiment of estimation he conducted showed that in some cases, the average of a large number of independent estimates could be quite accurate.

This effect capitalizes on the fact that when people make errors, those errors aren’t always the same. Some people will tend to overestimate, and some to underestimate. When enough of these errors are averaged together, they cancel each other out, resulting in a more accurate estimate. If people are similar and tend to make the same errors, then their errors won’t cancel each other out. In more technical terms, the wisdom of crowds requires that people’s estimates be independent. If for whatever reasons, people’s errors become correlated or dependent, the accuracy of the estimate will go down.

But a new study led by Joaquin Navajas offered an interesting twist (转折) on this classic phenomenon. The key finding of the study was that when crowds were further divided into smaller groups that were allowed to have a discussion, the averages from these groups were more accurate than those from an equal number of independent individuals. For instance, the average obtained from the estimates of four discussion groups of five was significantly more accurate than the average obtained from 20 independent individuals.

In a follow-up study with 100 university students, the researchers tried to get a better sense of what the group members actually did in their discussion. Did they tend to go with those most confident about their estimates? Did they follow those least willing to change their minds? This happened some of the time, but it wasn’t the dominant response. Most frequently, the groups reported that they “shared arguments and reasoned together”. Somehow, these arguments and reasoning resulted in a global reduction in error. Although the studies led by Navajas have limitations and many questions remain, the potential implications for group discussion and decision-making are enormous.

Global Cooperation

In the 21st century, we’ve seen a new trend that is pushing the boundaries of human invention and innovation—global cooperation. Scientific and technical research and development is now so complicated that no one scientist can know it all. So, increasingly, innovation is coming from the combining of cutting-edge expertise (专业知识) from different scientific fields.

There are now over 8, 000 scientific journals worldwide and it is impossible to be an expert in all areas. Therefore, in this highly specialized world, scientists, medics and engineers have to cooperate in order to innovate. Professor Bob Langer at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) has made significant breakthroughs in the field of biomedical engineering. But he hasn’t done it on his own. He has invited experts from around the world in different fields to form a global team to design new substances which can go inside the body, deliver medicines and then dissolve. Also at MIT, when Cesar Harada heard about the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010, he quit his dream job there and tried to develop a more efficient way to remove the oil. But rather than focusing on profit, he decided to ‘open-source’ the design. He shared his own ideas on the web for free and then got experts from all around the world to contribute ideas and even donations. Thanks to this free, not-for-profit way of sharing ideas and intellectual property on the internet, a boat capable of cleaning oil quickly came into being. Obviously, international cooperation based on sharing information freely has produced innovative approaches to solving problems.

It appears that the days of brilliant individuals working in their garages on their own are over. Global teams with a united purpose building on everyone’s expertise can collectively do far more than one brilliant individual. Today’s world calls for global cooperators, sharers, and not protectors of ideas.

7 . If We Are Not Just Animals, What Are We?

Philosophers and theologians (神学家) in the Christian tradition have long regarded human beings as separate from the other animals by the presence of the divine spark (神圣的火花) that is believed to exist within them. This inner source of illumination, the soul, is something that can never be grasped from without, and, as such, must be something that is detached in some fundamental manner from the natural order of things such that the soul continues to exist even after the death of the body, perhaps taking wing for some supernatural place following its demise (死亡).

Recent advances in genetics, neuroscience and evolutionary psychology have all but killed off this idea.     1     For quite clearly, although we are animals, bound in the web of causality (因果关系) that joins us to the zoosphere, we are not just animals.

This fundamental question is as relevant to the philosophical inquiry of today as it had been for the ancient Greeks. In a thousand different ways, we have drawn and continue to draw distinctions between ourselves and the rest of nature.     2     We believe that people have rights, that they have sovereignty (完全独立的) over their own lives, and that those who live by enslaving (使成为奴隶) or abusing others are denying their own humanity.

Evolutionary psychologists tell another story. Morality, they argue, is an adaptation. If organisms (生物体) compete for resources, a strategy of cooperation will be more successful in the long run than a strategy of pure selfishness. Cooperative features of an organism will therefore be selected over time. And all that is special in the human condition can be understood in this way — as the outcome of a long process of adaptation that has given us the unbeatable advantage of morality, whereby we can resolve our conflicts without fighting and adjust to the demands that upset us from every side.

The astonishing moral equipment of the human being — including rights and duties, personal obligations, justice, resentment (憎恨), judgment, forgiveness — is the deposit (沉积物) left by millenniums of conflict.     3     It is an evolved mechanism whereby the human organism proceeds through life sustained on every side by bonds of mutual interest.

I am fairly confident that the picture painted by the evolutionary psychologists is true, but I am also convinced that this is not the whole truth.     4     We human beings do not see one another as animals see one another, as fellow members of a species. We relate to one another not as objects but as subjects, as creatures who address one another “I” to “you.”

By speaking in the first person, we can make statements about ourselves, answer questions, and engage in reasoning and advice in ways that avoid all the normal methods of discovery. As a result, we can participate in dialogues founded on the assurance that, when you and I both speak sincerely, what we say is trustworthy: We are “speaking our minds.” This is the heart of the I-You encounter. Hence as persons we live in a life-world that is not reducible (可简化的) to the world of nature, any more than the life in a painting is reducible to the lines and colors from which it is composed.

8 . Group-Centered Societies Have Just as Much Creativity

What does culture have to do with creativity? The answer could be “a lot”. For decades, psychologists trying to understand the roots of creative imaginations have looked at the ways in which two different types of cultures can come to have an effect over its artistic and _________ output. Individualistic cultures encourage people to be unique and to _________ their own interests even if doing so comes at a cost to the group overall. Collectivistic cultures are based on relationships and duties to other people. These types of cultures often _________ the individual’s wants for the needs of those who are close to them or for those in their community.

Individualism has long been thought to have a creative _________. Individualists _________ social convention, the logic goes, and that pushback supports innovation. For instance, around the world, individualistic cultures have more patents than collectivistic cultures do. _________, a new study suggests that these ideas about culture and creativity could be off base. People in collectivistic cultures actually do better with a particular type of creative thinking than those in individualistic cultures. And the findings overall reveal the shortcomings of thinking about innovation too _________.

The new work comes from comparing communities in different parts of China. Though it scores high, as a nation, on measures of cultural _________, China’s 1.4 billion people are more than just a single culture. People from areas north of the Yangtze River tend to be more _________, open to strangers and self-confident, whereas people along the river and farther south are often more inter-dependent, partial to friends over strangers and likely to try harder to __________.

In the new creativity study, researchers investigated innovation with these two groups in mind. The team used a drawing test that had been created by psychologists. They gave kids a sheet of paper with just a few basic elements printed on it: some dots here, squiggles (弯曲的线条) there, and a rectangle that suggested a drawing frame. The children got 15 minutes to use the elements already on the page to draw whatever they wanted. They could get “adaptive creativity” points for doodling in ways that connected the squiggles and lines into an original and __________ image. In addition, a judge checked whether the children chose to incorporate a small shape that could be found just outside the rectangular. This element was easy to __________, so those who included this outside-the-box detail could get points for “boundary-breaking creativity.”

The researchers gave the test to 683 middle school students from north and south of the Yangtze River. When the scientists got the scores back, they discovered that there were no differences in the children’s overall creativity. When they broke down the results into components, they found that students from collectivistic regions scored __________ in adaptive creativity while those from individualistic areas did better in boundary-breaking creativity.

The findings are also a warning against cultural chauvinism (极端民族主义). Western countries have tended to lead the way in innovation — at least as defined by the metrics (指标) we Westerners have created. Perhaps we have been __________ China’s adaptive creativity. For example, while the country may not have invented the assembly line, it is largely thanks to the __________ its people have made to this system that the country has such a thriving manufacturing sector today.

10 . ‘Small Data’ Are Also Crucial for Machine Learning

Many people relate “artificial intelligence” with “big data.” There’s a reason for that: some of the most prominent AI breakthroughs in the past decade have relied on enormous data sets. Image _________ made great progress in the 2010s thanks to the development of ImageNet, a data set containing millions of images hand sorted into thousands of categories. More recently, GPT-3, a language model, was trained on _________ online texts to produce humanlike text in Jan, 2021. So it is not surprising to see AI being tightly connected with “big data” in the _________ imagination. But AI is not only about large data sets, and research in “small data” approaches has grown extensively over the past decade. The so-called transfer learning serves as an especially _________ example.

Also known as “fine-tuning,” transfer learning is helpful in settings where you have _________ data on the task of interest but abundant data on a related problem. You need to first train a model using a big data set and then retrain slightly using a smaller one related to your _________ problem. A research team working on German-language speech recognition, _________, showed that they could improve their results by starting with an English-language speech model trained on a larger data set. Then, they used transfer learning to _________ that model for a smaller data set of German-language audio.

Small data approaches such as transfer learning are more _________ than more data-intensive methods. They can promote progress in areas where little or no data exist, such as in forecasting natural hazards that occur relatively __________. In this context, small data approaches will become increasingly important as more organizations look to diversify AI application areas and invest in previously __________ fields.

Despite the progress in research, transfer learning has received relatively little __________. While many machine learning experts are likely familiar with it at this point, the existence of techniques such as transfer learning does not seem to have reached the awareness of the broader space of policymakers in positions of making important decisions about AI funding and __________.

As long as the success of small data technique like transfer learning is __________, resources can be allocated to support their widespread use. In that case, we can help correct the popular __________ regarding the role of data in AI and foster innovation in new directions.