1 . Welcome to your future life!
You get up in the morning and look into the mirror. Your face is firm and young-looking. In 2045, medical technology is better than ever. Many people at your age could live to be 150, so at 40, you’re not old at all. And your parents just had an anti-aging (抗衰老的) treatment. Now, all three of you look the same age!
You say to your shirt, “Turn red.” It changes from blue to red. In 2045, “smart clothes” contain particles (粒子) much smaller than the cells in your body. The particles can be programmed to change clothes’ color or pattern.
You walk into the kitchen. You pick up the milk, but a voice says, “You shouldn’t drink that!” Your fridge has read the chip (芯片) that contains information about the milk, and it knows the milk is old. In 2045, every article of food in the grocery store has such a chip.
It’s time to go to work. In 2045, cars drive themselves. Just tell your “smart car” where to go. On the way, you can call a friend using your jacket sleeve. Such “smart technology” is all around you.
So will all these things come true? “For new technology to succeed,” says scientist Andrew Zolli, “it has to be so much better that it replaces what we have already.” The Internet is one example—what will be the next?
1. What can we learn from the text that in the future?| A．People will never get old. | B．Everyone will look the same. |
| C．Red will be the most popular color. | D．Clothes will change their pattern. |
| A．Milk will be harmful to health. |
| B．More drinks will be available for sale. |
| C．Food in the grocery store will carry electronic information. |
| D．Milk and meat in the grocery store will stay fresh much longer. |
| A．Nothing can replace the Internet. |
| B．Fridges will know what people need. |
| C．Jacket sleeves can be used as a guide. |
| D．Cars will be able to drive automatically (自动地). |
| A．Future technology in daily life. |
| B．Medical treatment of the future. |
| C．Food and clothing in many years later. |
| D．The reason for the success of new technology. |
2 . When drones (无人机) first became widely available around 15 years ago, it wasn’t uncommon to find tech people painting dramatic pictures of how they were soon going to change the world. However, if you look up into the largely empty sky, you can see that hasn’t happened yet.
Sure, drones are useful for taking aerial (空中的) photos, but we’re a long way away from aerial superhighways, packed with autonomous drones carrying parcels at speeds that are near-impossible on the ground.
In 2016, Amazon announced it had completed its first ever aerial delivery. In a video, we saw an Amazon “Prime Air” drone pick up a parcel and fly it across the countryside landing in the buyer’s garden, dropping the parcel, and then returning to its home base. But Amazon still hasn’t completed its second drone delivery. In fact, it has reportedly downsized the drone program.
So, will drone delivery ever be a thing? There are some indications of a possible drone delivery future not in Britain, but in Africa. Because also since 2016, rural hospitals in Rwanda have been receiving regular shipments of medical supplies by drone thanks to a company called Zipline. It surely has saved lives, thanks to the speed at which blood can be delivered in a country with a poorly developed road network. So could we ever expect such a system here?
Unfortunately, there’s a big difference between rural Africa and thickly populated Britain. British homes don’t have large gardens where to land and nobody wants loud large drones constantly landing around the neighbourhood. Another reality is that British cities may still have security and safety concerns about routinely having drones carrying stuff over our heads.
That’s why I wonder if the real drone future could be crawling (爬) along the ground. For a few years, “autonomous delivery robots” with wheels have been walking on the pavements. So perhaps we’re not so far away from a drone delivery future, but the reality might be a little bit more down to earth.
1. What can we learn from the first two paragraphs?
| A．Drones are widely used in daily life. |
| B．Drones have made delivery efficient. |
| C．Drones are designed to take aerial photos. |
| D．Drones haven’t changed the world as expected. |
| A．To explain the process of drone delivery. |
| B．To stress the profits brought by drone delivery. |
| C．To discuss the possibility of a drone delivery future. |
| D．To show its advantages over Amazon’s drone delivery. |
| A．The security and safety concerns about drones. |
| B．The ways that British people react to drone delivery. |
| C．The differences between African countries and Britain. |
| D．The reasons why drone delivery isn’t suitable for Britain. |
| A．Drone Delivery Future: Pie in the Sky | B．A Bright Future for Drone Delivery |
| C．Change the World with Drones | D．Drone Applications at Risk Worldwide |
3 . Children’s Sci-fi Art Predicts Extraordinary Future
More than 80 sci-fi artworks are on display at the Shanghai Science and Technology Museum, showing a beautiful yet puzzling future. The “Brave New Sci-Fi World” exhibition features paintings and art installations (设备) by students from Shanghai, Beijing, Chongqing and other cities. They imagine the future as a world where robots and human beings co-exist.
Ru Chen, from Shanghai New Putuo Primary School, has pictured a robot chameleon (变色龙) to be used in outer space to aid in the search and rescue of human beings in case of danger.
Li Jiaqi from Guangzhou Dongfeng East Road Primary School has painted a city where advanced technologies are everywhere, and even the city itself turns into a large robot.
Huang Yanrui from Beijing Shijingshan Gucheng No. 2 Primary School imagines his rubber, pencil box and such stationery (文具) becoming conscious robots, and beginning to design future human beings.
Wang Zhihan, from Shanghai Shangde Experimental School and her schoolmates, stick electronic components on stone faces as a metaphor (隐喻) for the increasingly unclear boundaries between the reality and virtual world. “We hope to remind people never lose yourself in a world with advanced technologies,” she said.
The exhibition will last till November 4.
Opening hours:
Tuesdays-Sundays 9: 00- 17: 15; legal holidays 8: 45- 18: 30.
Transportation Guide:
Metro: Metro Line 2: Shanghai Science and Technology Museum Station.
Metro Line 4, Metro Line 6 and Metro Line 9: change to Metro Line 2 at the Century Avenue Station.
Bus Routes: Bus 184, 640, 794, 983, 984, 987, 1023, 640 inter-zonal bus will take you there.
1. Whose artwork is related with space?| A．Ru Chen’s. | B．Li Jiaqi’s. | C．Huang Yanrui’s. | D．Wang Zhihan’s. |
| A．Shanghai. | B．Guangzhou. | C．Chongqing. | D．Beijing. |
| A．Metro Line 2. | B．Metro Line 4. | C．Metro Line 6. | D．Metro Line 9. |
4 . If you could travel in time, where would you go? Perhaps you would watch an original performance of a Shakespeare’s play in Elizabethan England? What about hanging out with Laozi in the Spring and Autumn Period? Or maybe you’d voyage far ahead of the present day to see what the future holds.
The possibility of time travel is indeed appealing. Stories exploring the subject have been around for hundreds of years. Perhaps the best known example is the science fiction novel The Time Machine, which was written by H. G. Wells and published in 1895 for the first time. It was adapted into at least two feature films of the same name, as well as two television versions, and a large number of comic book adaptations. It is generally credited with the popularization of the concept of time travel using a vehicle that allows an operator to travel purposefully and selectively. The term “time machine”, coined by Wells, is now universally used to refer to a vehicle transporting people into the far future.
But could time travel actually be possible? Some scientists say yes, in theory. They propose using cracks in time and space called “wormholes”, which could be used as shortcuts to other periods. Einstein’s theory of relativity allows time travel in extreme circumstances. And British physicist Stephen Hawking said you could travel into the future with a really fast spaceship—going at nearly the speed of light. Though building such a spaceship would of course be no simple task.
Even if you could travel into the past, there is something called the “grandfather paradox”. It asks what would happen if a time traveller were to go back in time and have his own grandfather killed for some reason, and therefore prevent himself from being born. If the time traveller wasn’t born, how would he travel back in time?
And would you really like to visit the future? In H. G. Wells’ book, the main character travels into distant time where he arrives at a beach and is attacked by giant crabs. He then voyages 30 million years into the future where the only living thing is a black object with tentacles (触角). If that’s what’s in store, maybe we are better just living in the present day after all.
1. The novel The Time Machine mentioned in Paragraph 2 aims to show .| A．people’s interest in time travel |
| B．the special features of the book |
| C．the long history of time travel |
| D．the contribution of H. G. Wells |
| A．have similarities in many ways |
| B．push the invention of the first spaceship |
| C．have proved wrong by some time travellers |
| D．suggest the possibility to invent the time machine |
| A．the traveller is prevented from meeting his grandfather |
| B．the traveller goes back in time to seek for his grandfather |
| C．the grandfather’s death makes the traveller’s birth impossible |
| D．The reunion of the traveller and his grandfather brings happiness |
| A．Unclear. | B．Skeptical. |
| C．Supportive. | D．Unconcerned. |
5 . When I was a boy growing up in New Jersey in the 1960s, we had a milkman delivering milk to our doorstep. His name was Mr. Basille. He wore a white cap and drove a white truck. As a 5-year-old boy, I couldn’t take my eyes off the coin changer fixed to his belt. He noticed this one day during a delivery and gave me a quarter out of his coin changer.
Of course, he delivered more than milk. There was cheese, eggs and so on. If we needed to change our order, my mother would pen a note — “Please add a bottle of buttermilk next delivery” — and place it in the box along with the empty bottles. And then, the buttermilk would magically (魔术般) appear.
All of this was about more than convenience. There existed a close relationship between families and their milkmen. Mr. Basille even had a key to our house, for those times when it was so cold outside that we put the box indoors, so that the milk wouldn’t freeze. And I remember Mr. Basille from time to time taking a break at our kitchen table, having a cup of tea and telling stories about his delivery.
There is sadly no home milk delivery today. Big companies allowed the production of cheaper milk, thus making it difficult for milkmen to compete. Besides, milk is for sale everywhere, and it may just not have been practical to have a delivery service.
Recently, an old milk box in the countryside I saw brought back my childhood memories. I took it home and planted it on the back porch (门廊) . Every so often my son’s friends will ask what it is. So I start telling stories of my boyhood, and of the milkman who brought us friendship along with his milk.
1. Mr. Basille gave the boy a quarter out of his coin changer to __________.| A．show his magical power | B．pay for the delivery |
| C．satisfy his curiosity | D．please his mother |
| A．He wanted to have tea there. | B．He was a respectable person. |
| C．He was treated as a family member. | D．He was fully trusted by the family. |
| A．Nobody wants to be a milkman now. | B．It has been driven out of the market. |
| C．Its service is getting poor. | D．It is not allowed by law. |
| A．He missed the good old days. | B．He wanted to tell interesting stories. |
| C．He needed it for his milk bottles. | D．He planted flowers in it. |
The term “nostalgia” was first coined in 1688 and was defined as a mental illness of soldiers continually thinking about their homeland and longing for return. However, today we have a much more positive attitude to nostalgia. It’s a great example of the benefits of a strong memory.
In numerous scientific experiments, researchers have found that subjects are much more likely to report positive feelings from a given piece of music if they’ve heard it before. But there’s also a growing body of research into time travel “the other way”, because memory skills can take people into the future, too. Decades of studies have shown that time travel into the future can bring a whole new set of rewards. For example, athletes who practice by mentally visualizing and imagining successful performances in the future do perform better.
All these findings are inspiring and attractive. How could you become a confident time traveler to the past or into the future? Here are some tips for you:
·To take pleasure in helpful memories, maybe to reawaken happy feelings, use all your senses—not just sight. Smell, taste, touch and sound will also help you to recreate the past in rich clarity.
·If you find a memory that’s particularly helpful—for reassurance, say—keep using it!
You’ll get faster at finding it, and add extra layers of detail each time.
·When you’re procrastinating (拖延), visualize an end result. Flash forward to see the floor swept or the essay finished, and use that positive image to drive you into action.
·Ahead of major challenges, imagine the full impact of success. Don’t just picture yourself getting that great job: fill your mind with the really big ways it’s going to change your life.
There’ll still be times when old thoughts remind you of sadness, or you’re anxious about what’s next. But the more you learn to control your memory, the better you’ll be at mining your past, and shaping your future, to be your best self now.
1. What did nostalgia originally mean?2. What have the researchers found about time travel?
3. Please decide which part is false in the following statement, then underline it and explain why.
➢Memory skills can bring us into the future, so we should imagine a negative end result to drive us into action when procrastinating.
4. Describe one of the helpful time-travel experiences in your life. (In about 40 words)
7 . There was a time, Wang Fuchun remembered, when all the people on Chinese trains looked more or less the same. In the late 1970s, when he started taking his photographs, everyone seemed to wear green suits and caps. The “green-skinned” trains crept between China’s main towns and cities. On board, all was chaos. Life seemed to explode on the train as if it were a stage. He did not care what seat he had, for he was on the move.
China, too, was on the move. China was rushing to the modern world, and the trains, showed it. Steam was fading; the green-skinned trains acquired fans, then air-conditioning. Then came express trains, then high-speed rail. And the passengers, too, changed. They began to wear jeans; by the 1980s they let their hair grow. The 1990s brought in a fashion for T-shirts with favourite stars. People wanted a look that was unique; they became individuals. His book Chinese on the Train, published in 2001, caught the brief span when old and new crashed.
Many slow trains had been replaced by high-speed models, as comfortable and quiet as hotels. The aisles were clear, the windows sealed. In the ordinary seats, everyone’s nose was buried in their tablets and their phones.
Over 40 years he reckoned he had ridden on 1,000 trains and covered more than 100,000 kilometres, on every line in China. He found he could not sleep properly without the clank of rails beneath him. He took about 200,000 pictures. He liked to place two of his photographs side by side. One was of a green-skinned train in 1998, with a merry line of passengers grinning out of the window. The second picture showed a pair of newly-weds (新婚夫妇) in 2015 in front of a Harmony high-speed train, holding the character for “double happiness”. He liked the message of hope. He was proud of what China had achieved.
1. What does the second paragraph mainly talk about?| A．The development of trains in China. |
| B．The changes that took place in China. |
| C．The publication of an influential book. |
| D．Chinese people’s habits of dressing in the past. |
| A．He set about photographing in 1970. |
| B．His book featured green-skinned trains. |
| C．His photos focused on ordinary people. |
| D．He suffered from sleep disorder on the train. |
| A．The great changes of trains. | B．The pride in rapid development. |
| C．The happy life of train passengers. | D．The breakthrough in his photographing |
| A．Ambitious. | B．Outgoing. | C．Determined. | D．Talented. |
8 . Holding the large and heavy “brick” cellphone he’s credited with inventing 50 years ago,Martin Cooper talks about the future.
Little did he know when he made the first call on a New York City street from a heavy Motorola prototype(原型)that our world would come to be encapsulated on a sleek glass sheath where we search，connect,like and buy.
Cooper says he is an optimist. He believes that advances in mobile technology will continue to transform lives but he is worried about risks smartphones pose to privacy and young people.
“My most negative opinion is we don’t have any privacy anymore because everything about us is now recorded someplace and accessible to somebody who has enough intense desire to get it,” the 94-year-old said in an interview in Barcelona at MWC, the Mobile World Congress, the world’s biggest wireless trade show, where he was getting a lifetime award.
Cooper sees a dark side to the advances, including the risk to children. One idea, he said, is to have“various Internets intended for different audiences.”
Cooper made the first public call from a handheld portable telephone on a Manhattan street on April 3,1973,using a prototype device his team at Motorola had started designing just five months earlier.
Cooper used the Dyna-TAC phone to famously call his opponent at Bell Labs, owned by AT&T. It was literally the world’s first brick phone,weighing 2.5 pounds and measuring 11 inches.
Cooper spent the best part of the next decade working to bring a commercial version of the device to market.
The call helped kick-start the cellphone revolution (革命).
Cooper said he’s “not crazy” about the shape of modern smartphones. He thinks they will develop so that they’ll be “distributed on your body,” possibly as sensors“measuring your health at all times.”
Batteries, he said, might be replaced by human energy.The body makes energy from food,he argues, so it could possibly also power a phone.Instead of holding the phone in the hand, for example, the device could be placed under the skin.
1. What does the underlined part “a sleek glass sheath” in paragraph 2 refer to?| A．A smartphone. | B．A Motorola prototype. |
| C．A “brick” cellphone. | D．An original cellphone. |
| A．Most negative. | B．Very subjective. |
| C．Doubtful and Disapproving. | D．Optimistic but also concerned. |
| A．They should be provided with a different Internet from adults. |
| B．They should have easy access to various Internets. |
| C．They should be introduced to different audiences. |
| D．They should use various Internets for learning materials. |
| A．By body sensors. | B．By human body. |
| C．By solar energy. | D．By advanced batteries. |
9 . Futurologists are making a lot of predictions about our future life and they are predicting how we will travel, work and live in the future. By 2049, some futurologists foresee that some “talking” buildings will appear in our life.
By the middle of the century, it’s believed that buildings will be able to “talk” to people through various sensors when the heating needs to be turned on. As a result, there will be no switches. Instead, a lot of networks will appear, which can be compared to a human nervous system. In the future, buildings will be made from concrete plastics and shape-changing materials. All of them can heal themselves at that time. As architects are racing to develop the world’s tallest buildings, there will be a need for new kinds of elevators, through which vehicles could even travel into the buildings. German engineers have already started working on such technology called Multi.
By mid-century, scientists believe that buildings will be miles tall. Some of them may be very large and they can function as small cities. By comparison, at present, the world’s tallest building, the Burj Khalifa in Dubai, measures 829.8 metres high. As the future building can rise through the clouds, their windows will be replaced by virtual screens. In this way, people can choose any view as they like.
A London Spaceport is also likely to come into being by 2049 as the space industry develops very quickly. There is a huge cost advantage in going to space from a base as high as possible, so a spaceport is very likely to be over 10 km and even as much as 30 km, using carbon-based materials.
1. How will the heating system be controlled in the future?| A．Through the net. | B．Through mobiles. |
| C．Through sensors. | D．Through switches. |
| A．They can recover by themselves. |
| B．They can seek help automatically. |
| C．They can transport people to space. |
| D．They can protect people against harm. |
| A．Seeing the beautiful scenery. |
| B．Allowing vehicles to enter buildings. |
| C．Connecting the earth with space. |
| D．Making it possible to build high buildings. |
10 . Given how valuable intelligence and automation are, we will continue to improve our technology if we are at all able to. At a certain point, we will build machines that are smarter than we are. Once we have machines that are smarter than we are, they will begin to improve themselves. The concern is really that we will build machines that are much more competent than we are. And the slightest divergence (分歧) between their goals and our own could destroy us.
Just think about how we relate to ants. We don’t hate them. We don’t go out of our way to harm them. In fact, sometimes we take pains not to harm them. We step over them on the sidewalk. But whenever their presence seriously conflicts with one of our goals, we will kill them without hesitation. The concern is that we will one day build machines that, whether they’re conscious or not, could treat us with similar disregard.
The bare fact is that we will continue to improve our intelligent machines. We have problems that we desperately need to solve. So we will do this, if we can. The train is already out of the station, and there’s no brake to pull. If we build machines that are more intelligent than we are, they will very likely develop in ways that we can’t imagine, and transcend us in ways that we can’t imagine.
So imagine we hit upon a design of super intelligent AI that has no safety concerns. This machine would be the perfect labor-saving device. It can design the machine that can build the machine which can do any physical work, powered by sunlight, more or less for the cost of raw materials. So we’re talking bout the end of human labour. We’re also talking about the end of most intellectual work. So what would apes like ourselves do in these circumstances?
But the moment we admit that information processing is the source of intelligence, we have to admit that we are in the process of building some sort of god. Now would be a good time to make sure it’s a god we can live with.
1. Why does the author mention ants in Paragraph 2?| A．To compare intelligent machines to ants. |
| B．To show improved machines will get away from us. |
| C．To stress the presence of machines does conflict with our goals. |
| D．To explain future intelligent machines could treat us without mercy |
| A．Disable. | B．Inspire. | C．Disappoint. | D．Outpace. |
| A．By making comparisons. |
| B．By giving assumptions. |
| C．By showing valid evidence. |
| D．By analyzing statistics |
| A．Human beings will no doubt be destroyed by AI in the future |
| B．Super intelligent AI will put an end to human labour eventually. |
| C．We should keep the development of AI within humans’ control. |
| D．Human beings should stop the development of super intelligent AL. |
