In the near future, life is filled with amazing wonders.
Mornings are a delight as the delicious breakfast takes center stage. Helpful robots with advanced AI offer assistance gracefully. Transportation has become super fast with hyper loop trains that travel through tunnels
As twilight sets in, streets come alive with holographic(全息的) displays
Yet among these technological wonders, the core of humanity
As the day draws to
2 . What will our world really be like 20 years from now? What does the future hold for the food we eat, the technology we use and the homes we live in? It would be beyond imagination--food pills, flying cars and bases on the moon--but the reality will probably be less exciting. The world in 2040 will probably be much like it is today, but smarter.
The future of food
The next major food change will be vertical farming (垂直农业) in which we grow food in AI-controlled vertical buildings rather than horizontal land. We could be eating insects in 2040. Insects are rich in proteins, low in fat and a good source of calcium.
The future of love
The Internet has forever changed the way people meet and fall in love. Online dating and location-based services have opened up possibilities that allow people to look beyond their friends, friends of friends, and co-workers.
The future of technology
We’re heading into a future where improved battery technology will make better electric cars, personal flying machines, and private space tourism possible.
The future of work
Rather than humans working with machines, robots are likely to reduce some jobs. Taxi drivers will be replaced by self-driving cars, for example. Clearly, there will also be new jobs created: the computer engineer, mechanics who fix the self-driving taxis, programmers, space tour guides and vertical farmers. Technology will continue to disturb businesses and get rid of some jobs, creating new professions we can’t yet imagine.
The future of health
Hospitals are the costliest part in the health system, Prevention will become the center of attention as we gain greater control of our health information.
1. What is the food in 2040 like?| A．People will not eat pork or beef then. |
| B．Insects will become the main food then. |
| C．The food will mainly exist in the form of pills. |
| D．Part of the food will come from vertical farming. |
| A．New professions will appear. | B．Boring jobs will be abandoned. |
| C．Most jobs will be done by robots. | D．Humans will work with machines. |
| A．Hospital treatment. | B．Health systems. |
| C．Prevention. | D．Health information. |
Have you ever forgotten to lock the door of your house or switch off the TV? These kinds of things often happen to us,
Your home will learn your daily routine and
This smart technology is not
4 . One morning soon, you’ll get on your bike and ride from one end of America to the other, because the Great American Rail Trail is 53% complete, making a cross-country bike ride closer to a reality.
The idea of a bike trail(小路) made up of scenic paths, trails and former rail lines from Washington DC to Washington State has been 30 years in the making. Now, with more than 50% of the trail up and running, the project, run by the Rails to Trails in cooperation with local authorities, is building up, with hundreds of miles of trails in development now. Though not entirely complete, the rail trail has drawn people of all types.
Last August, Ryan Gardill and a colleague biked 350 miles from Pittsburgh to Washington DC. Their travels took them through some beautiful and historical parts of the American East. “The trail connected me to our revolutionary and industrial history. Most of the towns on the trail were once important to America.”
The major goal of the trail is to provide the American public with the opportunity to explore their beautiful country, without getting in their car. A secondary objective is to bring prosperity(繁荣) back to the small towns and cities that once prospered along the country’s now diminished rail system, according to National Geographic.
One of these is Muncie, Indiana, a city located on a former rail system and a part of the Rail Trail. The city is already seeing the economic benefits of the trail. “A large majority of our customers are local, but the Rail Trail could help grow tourism,” said Jason Allardt, owner of the historic Kirk’s Bike Shop.
This is the hope for many once-prosperous towns and cities all throughout America, though it may take nearly 20 years to get the entire trail up and running.
1. What has made the trail attractive to people?| A．It’s a bike trail with good scenery. | B．It’s a rail line across the country. |
| C．It offers good adventurous paths. | D．Its construction lasted 30 years. |
| A．They were the basic part of the U.S. railways. |
| B．They are mostly located in the mountains. |
| C．They enjoy great popularity as destinations. |
| D．They’re no longer important towns in America. |
| A．Enlarged. | B．Protected. | C．Decreased. | D．Destroyed. |
| A．The Trail will link its scenery to the outside. | B．The Trail will help its economic recovery. |
| C．It has bike paths designed for local citizens. | D．The railway has brought about its prosperity. |
5 . Whenever humans consider the future of AI, they have one big question in mind: will robots take my job? While it’s true that some jobs will disappear, new ones that involve working specifically with AI will arise.
AI has already changed almost every industry, but the future of AI promises to revolutionize even more businesses.
Health care:
Service industry: In the future, robots and machines run by AI could replace customer service representatives and cashiers.
Law enforcement: Some day soon, intelligent robots could even replace police officers to catch potential criminals.
Transportation: Say goodbye to taxi and drivers. In the future, cars will be able to drive themselves (some already do).
Marketing: AI already targets you with customized ads on social media sites, but soon it may even be able to create the ads you see or articles you read.
| A．We can also have AI-equipped robot cooks. |
| B．We may also see automated trains and airplanes. |
| C．The biggest change may be in what we get from work. |
| D．With AI, doctors will be able to better diagnose illnesses. |
| E．AI-run robots are already used as security officers in some businesses. |
| F．There are already articles that are almost as good as what a human creates. |
| G．You use AI when you use Google Maps to find your way to an off-site meeting. |
6 . What will higher education look like in 2050? That was the question addressed Tuesday night by Michael Crow, president of Arizona State University.
“We’re at the end of the fourth wave of change in higher education,” Crow began, arguing that research universities followed the initial establishment of higher education, public colleges, and land-grant schools in the timeline of America.
In less than a half-century, he said, global market competition will be at its fastest rates of change ever, with several multi-trillion-dollar economies worldwide. According to a recent projection, the nation’s population could reach 435 million, with a large percentage of those residents economically disadvantaged. In addition, climate change will be “meaningfully uncontrollable” in many parts of the world.
The everyday trends seen today, such as declining performance of students at all levels, particularly in math and science, and declining wages and employment among the less educated, will only continue, Crow maintained, and are, to say the least, not contributing to fulfilling the dream of climbing the social ladder mobility, quality of life, sustainable environment, and longer life spans that most Americans share.
“How is it that we can have these great research universities and have negative-trending outcomes?” Crow said in a talk “I hold the universities accountable. … We are part of the problem.”
Among the “things that we do that make the things that we teach less learnable,” Crow said, are the strict separation of disciplines, academic rigidity, and conservatism, the desire of universities to imitate schools at the top of the social ranks, and the lack of the computer system ability that would allow a large number of students to be educated for a small amount of money.
Since 2002, when Crow started being in charge at Arizona State — which he calls the “new American university” — he has led more than three dozen initiatives that aim to make the school “inclusive, scalable, fast, adaptive, challenge-focused, and willing to take risks.”
Among those initiatives were a restructuring of the engineering and life sciences schools to create more linkages between disciplines; the launch of the School of Earth and Space Exploration and the School of Sustainability; the start of a Teachers College to address K-12 performance and increase the status of the Education Department at the university; and broadened access, increasing the freshman class size by 42 percent and the enrollment of students living below the poverty line by 500 percent.
Universities must start, Crow noted, “by becoming self-reflective architects, figuring out what we have and what we actually need instead of what legend tells us we have to be.” Research universities today have “run their course,” he added. “Now is the time for variety.”
During a discussion afterward, Crow clarified and expanded on some of his points. He discussed, for example, the school’s distance-learning program. “Nearly 40 percent of undergraduates are taking at least one course online,” he said, which helps the school to keep costs down while advancing interactive learning technologies.
He said that Arizona State is working to increase the transfer and completion rates of community-college students, of whom only about 15 percent, historically, complete their later degrees. “We’ve built a system that will allow them to track into universities,” particularly where “culturally complex barriers” beyond finances limit even the most gifted students.
1. The fourth wave of change in America’s higher education refers to _______.| A．public colleges | B．land-grant schools |
| C．initial higher education | D．research universities |
| A．People enjoy a quality life. | B．People live longer and longer. |
| C．The freedom to move around. | D．An environment that is sustainable. |
| A．Restructuring the teachers College. |
| B．Launching the School of Life Sciences. |
| C．Ignoring the linkages between disciplines. |
| D．Enrolling more students from poor families. |
| A．enroll 40% of its students online |
| B．provide an even greater number of courses |
| C．attract the most gifted students all over the world |
| D．keep costs down without a loss of quality |
1. What did the program say about the life in the future?
| A．People’s way of consumption will change. |
| B．More supermarkets will come into existence. |
| C．More free time will be available for people. |
| A．Doubtful. | B．Supportive. | C．Dismissive. |
8 . New Scientist magazine’s chief reporter Adam recently published “Net-zero living: how your day will look in a carbon-neutral (碳中和) world”. Here, he imagines what a typical day would be like in the future — through the eyes of Isla, a child in 2050.
Isla lives in the south of the United Kingdom and her life looks pretty much like life does today: she has a house, a car, a job, and a cup of tea in the morning. There are great forests, and giant machines sucking carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere. It all sounds like a green and pleasant land, but it didn’t sound like the future to me.
It’s an interesting exercise, imagining what it will be like in about 30 years. I thought I would give it a try: here is some speculative fiction about Edie, living in Toronto, Canada in 2050.
Edie lives in the garage in an old house that is her apartment and workshop. She considers herself to be very lucky to have this garage in what was her grandparents’ house. The only people who live in houses these days either get the houses from their parents or are multi-millionaires from all over the world, desperate to move to Canada with its cooler climate and plentiful water and are able to afford the million-dollar immigrant visa fee.
Edie is lucky to be working. There are no office or industrial jobs anymore: Artificial Intelligence and robots took care of that. The few jobs left are in service, culture, craft, health care, or real estate (房地产). In fact, selling real estate has become the nation’s biggest industry.
There may be lots of electricity from wind and solar farms, but even running tiny heat pumps for cooling is really expensive at peak times. The streets are unpleasantly hot, so many people sleep through the midday.
Now Edie is checking the balance in her Personal Carbon Allowance (PCA) account to see if she has enough to buy another imported battery for her e-bike. If she doesn’t have enough then, she will have to buy carbon credits, and they are expensive. She sets her alarm for 6:00 p.m. when the streets of Toronto will come alive again on this hot November day.
1. What does the author think of Isla’s life?| A．Desirable. | B．Unappealing. |
| C．Unachievable. | D．Exciting. |
| A．Many people will immigrate abroad. | B．Its climate will get colder and colder. |
| C．Electricity will be very cheap to use. | D．The house prices will be extremely high. |
| A．The house problem. | B．Being out of work. |
| C．The balance of her bank account. | D．The energy consumption. |
| A．To point out Adam’s unreasonable thinking. |
| B．To compare the present life and the future life. |
| C．To imagine the life after reducing carbon emissions. |
| D．To raise people’s awareness of environmental protection. |
要点：1. 家庭；
2.工作；
3.生活。
注意：1. 词数100左右
2.可以适当增加细节，以使行文连贯。
Me in Ten Years
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10 . In the near future, IoT (Internet of Things) will drive huge innovation (革新) in the way our food is grown. Plants will have a “voice”, not a human voice, but a voice based on data that can tell people, computers, and machines when, for example, they are thirsty, or need more sun, medicine, etc.
Take vertical (垂直的) farms, for example. Farming is moving indoors where the growth of plants can be monitored and controlled. The facilities are built vertically, so growing areas can be put in piles. This greatly reduces the amount of land needed for farming.
From an IoT point of view, vertical farms are connected in two ways. First, small sensors (传感器) in the soil or connected to plants tell a control system exactly how much light, water, and nutrients are needed to grow the healthiest crops. Sensors will also tell vertical farmers when crops are nearing their peak for harvesting at just the right time to make sure it’s still fresh when it reaches its final destination.
Second, vertical farms will be connected to other networks and information systems, including databases that track local demand. For example, local restaurants may input when they need fresh food supplies. And vertical farmers could get that information so they know which crops to grow in what quantities. This type of IoT system would have been unimaginable a generation ago.
Today, vertical farms are being experimented. Yet, the numbers point to a bright future for the industry, especially as the world’s population continues to grow. For example, Green Sense Farms in Chicago is able to harvest crops 26 times a year using 85 percent less energy, one-tenth the water, and no pesticides. A side benefit of lower energy use is lower CO2 output of two tons per month, with the added benefit of creating 46 pounds of oxygen every day.
1. What is the main idea of the text?| A．Voice machines help plants speak up. |
| B．Farmers are all turning to vertical farming. |
| C．IoT has brought great innovation to our future life. |
| D．Vertical farms driven by IoT are a future for agriculture. |
| A．By recording farmers harvesting crops. |
| B．By monitoring farmers working their fields. |
| C．By analyzing information to preserve crops. |
| D．By passing information on to a control system. |
| A．expand the output of crops | B．match supply with demand |
| C．determine the needs of farmers | D．move restaurants onto farms |
| A．Negative. | B．Indifferent. | C．Optimistic. | D．Doubtful. |
