1 . 选词填空

captivate     inspire     feature   fictionalize   stream   tailor obtain   decorate

The Mogao Grottoes in Dunhuang have long been considered a treasure trove of cultural and artistic heritage. The murals adorning the walls of the grottoes     1     viewers for centuries and continue to     2     contemporary works to this day.

One of the latest examples is Till the End of the Moon, a fantasy series which     3     many elements inspired by the aesthetics of Dunhuang. The series started     4     on Youku on April 6 and is adapted from a popular online novel,     5     the bittersweet love between a celestial being and a demon ruler, played by actress Bai Lu and actor Luo Yunxi.

According to Ruan Hexin, the art director, the crew spent nine months bringing the fantastic world to life by     6     12 sound stages covering an overall area of nearly 50,000 square meters, as well as     7     a total of 30,000 props.

To seek inspiration, the creators traveled to some iconic attractions in Dunhuang and Zhangye in Gansu province,     8     the inspiration to use black and grayish blue, the major hues in most Dunhuang murals, for the demon king's costumes. Besides, the costumes of the celestial being took inspiration from the murals of flying deities, which are majorly painted with the colors of straw yellow, bamboo yellow, and emerald blue.

3 . Directions: After reading the passage below, fill in each blank with a proper word given in the box. Each word can only be used once. Note that there is one word more than you need.

A. advancement       B. consumption       C. minimizes       D. specialists E. quality               F. harvesting            G. intelligent       H. avoided I. programmed        J. surgery               K. remote

Advantages of Robots

Robots are used in almost every field of life today. Robots save time and capital by delivering     1     work. That’s why Robots have started making their places everywhere.

   

Here are some of the fields where the robots are serving as helping hands for the past few years.

Such robots that operate alongside doctors in Operation Theater have been built due to the     2     in Robotics. Health     3     use Robotics for complex procedures in hospitals. The robot will even operate under the     4     control of human doctors.

Robots have altered the way     5     is performed. Now with robots the very complex surgery will easily happen.

Today the world’s top armies use robots at the battlefield. The robots are used as soldiers in space where the conditions for soldiers are not suitable. It     6     the possibility of war casualties(伤亡人数).

All police and army are using the drones for defense surveillance(监视). For safety purposes a single drone can cover a wide area.

In the field of agriculture robots are being used in developing countries. Robots minimize time     7     and increase crop yields. A robot is usable from the sowing of seeds to the harvesting of crops. Agriculture is a very essential factor for mankind, and robots are providing tremendous support in this field.

Conclusion

Robots are     8    , meaning they will continuously perform the same task until they are     9     to stop. Robots are also more reliable than humans, and can function more effectively than humans. Robots are also being used in the research sector, not only in the above-mentioned areas. Robots are also sent to different planets during space missions.

Today robots are certainly making the planet a better place to live in, and the comfort level of human life is rising. But there are advantages and disadvantages to everything, which is the same with robots. Thus the robots also have some disadvantages that can be dangerous. But by taking precautionary steps, certain dangers can be     10    .

Share this with friends, and tell us in the comment section as well. What are your opinions on robots?

4 . Directions: After reading the passage below, fill in each blank with a proper word given in the box. Each word can only be used once. Note that there is one word more than you need.

A. honors               B. elected          C. unique        D. incurable       E. chair F. progressively       G. proposed       H. primarily       I. exploding       J. occupying       K. detailed

Stephen Hawking, born on January 8, 1942, Oxford, Oxfordshire, England, died on March 14, 2018, Cambridge, Cambridgeshire, an English theoretical physicist whose theory of     1     black holes drew upon both relativity theory and quantum mechanics. He also worked with space-time singularities.

Hawking studied physics at Oxford (B.A., 1962), and Trinity Hall, Cambridge (Ph.D., 1966). He was     2     a research fellow at Gonville and Caius College at Cambridge. In the early 1960s, Hawking contracted amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, an     3     degenerative neuromuscular disease. He continued to work despite the disease’s     4     disabling effects.

Hawking worked     5     in the field of general relativity and particularly on the physics of black holes. In 1971, he suggested the formation, following the big bang, of numerous objects containing as much as one billion tons of mass but     6     only the space of a proton. These objects, called mini black holes, are     7     in that their immense mass and gravity require that they be ruled by the laws of relativity, while their minute size requires that the laws of quantum mechanics apply to them, too. In 1974, Hawking     8     that, in accordance with the predictions of quantum theory, black holes emit subatomic particles until they exhaust their energy and finally explode.

Hawking’s contributions to physics earned him many exceptional     9    . In 1974, the Royal Society elected him one of its youngest fellows. He became professor of gravitational physics at Cambridge in 1977, and in 1979, he was appointed to Cambridge’s Lucasian professorship of mathematics, a post once held by Isaac Newton. Hawking was made a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in 1982 and a Companion of Honor in 1989. He also received the Copley Medal from the Royal Society in 2006 and the US. Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2009. In 2008, he accepted a visiting research     10     at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada.

5 . Directions: After reading the passage below, fill in each blank with a proper word given in the box. Each word can only be used once. Note that there is one word more than you need.

A. diagnosed       B. applications       C. widespread       D. struggle E. cured             F. objectives          G. relatively        H. published I. occurred          J. accomplished     K. awarded

John Nash, a Nobel Prize winner and mathematical genius whose     1     with mental illness was documented in the Oscar-winning film A Beautiful Mind, was killed in a car accident on Saturday. He was 86. The accident     2     when the taxi Nash was traveling in ran into another car on the New Jersey Turnpike. Neither of the two drivers involved in the accident underwent life-threatening injuries.

At Princeton, Nash published a 27-page essay about the field of game theory, which led to     3     in economics, international politics, and evolutionary biology. His signature solution found that competition among two opponents is not necessarily governed by zero-sum logic. Two opponents can, for instance, each achieve their maximum     4     through cooperating with the other, or gain nothing at all by refusing to cooperate. This simple understanding is now regarded as one of the most important and     5     social science ideas in the 20th century, and a proof to his almost unique intellectual gifts.

But in the late 1950s, Nash was     6     with mental illness and each therapy failed to cure him, and for much of the next three decades, Nash wandered freely on the Princeton campus, scratching his hands on empty blackboards and staring blankly ahead in the library. Robert Wright remembers Nash as “some maths genius that went crazy” who wore colorful shoes and quietly watched people. His mental illness removed him completely from his work. By the time Nash was     7     the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1994, he hadn’t     8     a paper in 36 years.

But like a child    9     of a terrible dream by the switch of a light, Nash recovered from his illness seemingly by choosing not to be sick anymore. Five years later, the release of the film A Beautiful Mind, based on Sylvia Nasar’s 1998 book of the same name, expanded Nash’s extraordinary life story to an international audience. He continued to work, travel, and speak at conferences for the rest of his life.

It’s tempting to wonder what Nash might have     10     had mental illness not robbed him of so many productive years. “Because the ideas I had about supernatural beings came to me the same way that my mathematical ideas did,” said Nash. “So I took them seriously.”

6 . Directions: After reading the passage below, fill in each blank with a proper word given in the box. Each word can only be used once. Note that there is one word more than you need.

A. charity               B. conserving               C. disturb               D. launched             E. march F. primary             G. purchased          H. raise                 I. threatening            J. voluntary   K. wildlife

The National Trust in Britain plays an increasingly important part in the protection of the British countryside. Although it has received support from the government, it is not a rich governmental department. It is a     1    association of people who care for the unspoiled countryside and historic buildings of Britain. It is a     2    which depends on voluntary support from the public. Its     3    duty is to protect places of great natural beauty and places of historical interest.

The attention of the public was first drawn to the dangers     4    the great old houses and castles of Britain by the death of Lord Lothian, who left his great seventeenth-century house to the Trust. The Trust thus attracted wide publicity and     5    its "Country House Scheme", which has been able to save about one hundred and fifty of these old houses. Last year about two million people     6    tickets to visit these historic houses.

In addition to country houses and open spaces, the Trust now owns some complete villages, where no one is allowed to build, develop or     7    the old village environment in any way and all the houses are maintained in their original sixteenth-century style. These areas are accessible to the public for free to     8    their awareness to respect the peace, beauty and     9    

Over the past eighty years, the Trust has become a big and important organization and an essential part of Britain,     10    all that is of great natural beauty and of historical significance for future generations of Britons.

7 . Directions: After reading the passage below, fill in each blank with a proper word given in the box. Each word can only be used once. Note that there is one word more than you need.

A. inspired            B. detail          C. art          D. marker          E. sculptor        F. stared G. considerably     H. approach       I. worthy     J. gradually       K. widened

Tom Friedman

Those who believe that art is simply handicraft taken to the extreme might find confirmation upon a first glance at     1     and installation artist Tom Friedman’s work. He creates sculptures and drawings with obsessive attention to     2     and handiwork, and then combines them to make installations. His materials can be picked up at any supermarket: paper, wire, cardboard, foam, foil and     3     pens. Friedman is influenced by 1960s conceptual art and minimalism. The Fluxus movement is     4     of special mention here, as its humorous, art-conscious work    5     him for pieces such as 1000 Hours of Staring (1992-1997). an empty sheet of paper that — as the title suggests — the artist     6     at for 1000 hours. In his new collages and sculptures (see his 2008 Monsters and Stuff exhibition), Friedman has stayed true to his choice of materials and painstakingly elaborate production process, but the gulf between the banality of the material and the spectacular forms that emerge from it has    7     , for example in the sculpture Green Demon (2008). The field of reference is also     8     broader here, with Frankenstein and voodoo associations slotting in easily next to African sculpture, Miro and Picasso. However, the question remains as to whether the harmless material removes the horror aspect or whether the artist has drawn hidden horror out of the material. And thus the question of art as handicraft comes full circle. As soon as handicraft is supported by a conceptual    9     and — in the true spirit of the surrealist idea of the miraculous-mundane everyday material is transformed to something astounding, then you have     10     .

8 . Directions: After reading the passage below, fill in each blank with a proper word given in the box. Each word can only be used once. Note that there is one word more than you need.

A. perceived          B. tension          C. communicating       D. programmed       E. positively       F. interactions G. assigned            H. differed          I. constantly             J. reducing             K. affected

Empathy Machine

Robots are more prevalent in daily life than ever before. Digital assistants control smartphone apps, while physical bots teach students in schools and deliver food. Scientists have long been studying human-robot     1     to learn how these machines can influence individuals’ behaviour, such as altering how well someone completes a task or responds to a robotic request. But new research shows the way humans relate to other humans is also     2     by the presence and actions of robots.

“While other work has focused on how to more easily integrate robots into teams, we focused instead on how robots might     3     shape the way that people react to each other,” says Sarah Sebo, a graduate student at Yale University. To measure these changes in reactions, researchers     4     participants to teams of four — consisting of three people and one small humanoid robot(仿真机器人) — and had them play a collaborative game on Android tablets. In some groups, the robots were     5     to act “vulnerable”. These machines performed actions such as apologizing for making mistakes, admitting to self-doubt and talking about how they were “feeling”. In the control groups, the human participants teamed up with robots that made only neutral statements or remained entirely silent.

The researchers monitored how group members’ communication     6     depending on which type of robot was on each team. They found that people working with robots that showed vulnerability spent more time     7     with their fellow humans than did those in the control groups. Subjects with vulnerable robots also divided their conversation more equally between each human member of the team. These participants later reported that they     8     their experience as more positive, compared with those in the control groups. The robot’s vulnerable utterances helped the group to feel more comfortable in a task that was designed to have a high level of     9     .

Malte Jung, an assistant professor in information science at Cornell and a co-author of the study, says communicative robots could fundamentally change human behaviour for the better. Instead of merely     10     the amount of work employees do, these machines could make people more efficient, subtly influencing social dynamics to “help teams perform at their best”.

10 . Directions: Fill in each blank with a proper word chosen from the box. Each word can be used only once. Note that there is one word more than you need.

A. raise               B. involvement               C. enable               D. basic          E. constant        F. champions G. aftermath            H. engage               I. step                  J. educational            K. issues

Countless animal welfare groups, rescues and funds exist today which help animals on the     1    level—to get them out of harm’s way, fund their care and rehabilitation, and get them into caring homes or back into natural environments. On a more expansive level however, animal education foundations and charities are the     2    of promoting animal equality and compassion for all creatures, and helping us all to become more aware of our environment, and the animals that we share it with.

Animal education foundations as a whole are organizations that support animal health research, provide education to the public on animal welfare     3    , and foster the ideas of compassion and coexistence. They encourage public     4    in these humane interests, and in furthering public awareness in general. Some Foundations get involved in large-scale rescue or other local-level activity, but what these types of organizations do best is to     5    awareness, collect money through corporate, philanthropic and public donations, and fund groups that are actually out there working with the animals by rescuing, providing care and remedying their mismanagement, or by funding scientific studies that benefit animal welfare. Animal cruelty is a(n)     6    battle, with legitimate rescue groups and shelters rarely having enough money for their needs; many times it is an animal education foundation that will     7    in with a grant to help them in their missions.

Through the use of     8    material, media coverage and their support of other humane groups, animal education foundations exist to teach compassionate, humane care of all animals and to learn more about these creatures that share our world so that we can     9    them to live better lives. With a message that it is better to educate people how to prevent cruelty, than to deal with the     10    , these charitable foundations spread their messages far and wide, offering much food for thought, and providing a caring example of how all creatures and the environment should be treated so that people and animals can live together in harmony.