1 . Up until a few decades ago, our visions of the future were largely—though by no means uniformly—glowingly positive. Science and technology would cure all the ills of humanity, leading to lives of fulfillment and opportunity for all.
Now utopia has grown unfashionable, as we have gained a deeper appreciation of the range of threats facing us, from asteroid strike to epidemic flu and to climate change. You might even be tempted to assume that humanity has little future to look forward to.
But such gloominess is misplaced. The fossil record shows that many species have endured for millions of years—so why shouldn’t we? Take a broader look at our species’ place in the universe, and it becomes clear that we have an excellent chance of surviving for tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of years. Look up homo sapiens (智人) in the “Red List” of threatened species of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN), and you will read: “Listed as Least Concern as the species is very widely distributed, currently increasing, and there are no major threats resulting in an overall population decline.”
So what does our deep future hold? A growing number of researchers and institutions are now thinking seriously about that question. For example, the Long Now Foundation has its flagship project a mechanical clock that is designed to still be marking time thousands of years hence.
Perhaps willfully, it may be easier to think about such lengthy timescales than about the more immediate future. The potential evolution of today’s technology, and its social consequences, is dazzlingly complicated, and it’s perhaps best left to science fiction writers and futurologists to explore the many possibilities we can conceive (构想). That’s one reason why we have launched Arc, a new publication dedicated to the near future.
But take a longer view and there is a surprising amount that we can say with considerable assurance. As so often, the past holds the key to the future: we have now identified enough of the long-term patterns shaping the history of the planet, and our species, to make evidence-based forecasts about the situations in which our descendants (后代) will find themselves.
This long perspective makes the pessimistic view of our prospects seem more likely to be a passing fad (狂热). To be sure, the future is not all rosy. But we are now knowledgeable enough to reduce many of the risks that threatened the existence of earlier humans, and to improve the lot of those to come.
1. Our vision of the future used to be influenced by ________.| A．our desire for lives of fulfillment | B．our faith in science and technology |
| C．our awareness of potential risks | D．our belief in equal opportunity |
| A．a sustained species | B．a misplaced race |
| C．a threat to the environment | D．the world’s dominant power |
| A．Arc helps limit the scope of futurological studies. |
| B．Technology offers solutions to social problem. |
| C．The interest in science fiction is on the rise. |
| D．Our immediate future is hard to imagine. |
| A．explore our planet’s abundant resources | B．adopt an optimistic view of the world |
| C．draw on our experience from the past | D．control our ambition to reshape history |
If you woke up 20 years from now in 2042, what would be different? Here are some ideas
Before I went to middle school, I
1)未来梦想；2)努力方向；3)展望期待。
注意:1.词数100左右；
2.可以适当增加细节，以使行文连贯。
Together for a Shared Future
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5 . Unless you are like Nasty Gal’s founder Sophia Amoruso, the passwords you use to access your email and the endless other accounts you need for work aren’t filled with intention. With increasing security requirements, it’s likely your word/number combinations are becoming even less memorable. But new research suggests it may not be long before you won’t need to memorize passwords.
“Brainprint”, published in Neurocomputing, reveals that the brain’s reaction to certain words could be a unique identifying code — like a fingerprint — that could eventually replace passwords.
In a small experiment, the researchers measured the brains’ signals of 45 volunteers as they read through a list of 75 acronyms such as FBI and DVD. The word-recognition response differed so much between each participant that a second experiment using a computer program could identify each one with 94% accuracy.
It’s not enough to feel totally secure, but promising enough to hint at the future of securing sensitive information.
The advantage of using such a biometric system (生物识别系统) is that it can be used for continuous verification (验证), New Scientist points out. Passwords or fingerprints only provide a tool for one-off identification. Continuous verification could in theory allow someone to interact with many computer systems at the same time or even with a variety of intelligent objects, without having to repeatedly enter passwords for each device.
As Hollywood has illustrated, it’s simply a matter of cutting off a finger to steal that person’s identity. “Brainprints, on the other hand, are potentially cancellable,” said Sarah Laszlo, assistant professor of psychology and linguistics at Binghamton University and co-author of the study, “So, in the unlikely event that attackers were actually able to steal a brainprint from an authorized user, the authorized user could then ‘reset’ their brainprint.”
Until now, brain signals have been a challenge to understand. This experiment leaped over the obstacle by focusing on the brainwaves from the specific area that reads and recognizes words. The signal is therefore clearer and easier to measure.
The problem, so far, is that the brain signal is still not as accurate as scanning someone’s fingerprint, and initially requires sticking diodes (二极管) on your head in order to get a read. That’s ok, according to Zhanpeng Jin, assistant professor at Binghamton University and coauthor of the study, because brainprint isn’t going to be mass-produced any time soon. He says the researchers foresee its use at places such as the Pentagon, where the number of authorized users is small, and they don’t need to be continuously verified the way you do to access your mobile device or email.
Better keep your memory sharp, at least a little while longer.
1. In paragraph 5, “one-off identification” refers to the identification that _______.| A．happens as part of a regular series | B．interacts with intelligent objects |
| C．can be verified continuously | D．needs repeated verification |
| A．fingerprints can be canceled once stolen | B．brainprints are theft-proof and resettable |
| C．attackers can steal and replace brainprints | D．users have the authority to cancel brainprints |
| A．brainprints will sharpen users’ memory | B．brainprints will become easier to be measured |
| C．brainprints will receive narrow application | D．brainprints will eventually replace fingerprints |
| A．Brainprints: A New Way to Replace Passwords |
| B．Brainprints: A Unique Device to Identify Codes |
| C．Brainprints: A Quicker Way to Access Your Email |
| D．Brainprints: A Securer Device to Identify Brain Signals |
6 . Farms of the Future
Skyscrapers(摩天大楼) are the ultimate symbol of urban life. By 2050, almost 80 percent of the earth’s population could live in cities. The human population could increase to 9.1 billion people yet the amount of land available for farming will be the same.
Vertical farms, where farmers could grow crops in environmentally friendly skyscrapers, could be the solution. In spite of concerns over high costs, experts want to make these urban farms a reality and use these skyscrapers to grow crops.
Vertical farms would have many advantages, experts say. The food would be grown with minimal effects on the environment. Unlike traditional farming, vertical farming would not force animals out of their habitats by taking over large areas of land, nor would it pollute the air with the use of heavy farming equipment.
Growing prosperity has led to many people demanding that all foods are available all year round. Indoor farming could produce crops constantly and crops would not suffer from weather-related problems like drought or flooding. In addition, the use of agricultural chemicals for controlling insects would be minimal.
Experts agree that the new farming practices are needed to support the planet’s need for more and more food at affordable costs, both to the farmer and to the consumer. Vertical farms may be a small-scale answer, but the best ideas could be yet to come.
| A．Still, there are some people who are critical of vertical farms. |
| B．That is where vertical farms are often needed for year-round crops. |
| C．So how to meet the increasing food needs of our planet could be a big problem. |
| D．For these reasons, natural light cannot be a workable solution for vertical farms. |
| E．Vertically grown food is grown in environmentally controlled conditions in big cities. |
| F．Those farms would also reduce the cost and negative effects of transporting food over distances. |
| G．They believe that we can increase the food production by changing our thinking from out to up. |
7 . People have speculated (思索) for centuries about a future without work. Some imagine that the coming work-free world will be defined by inequality: A few wealthy people will own all the capital, and the masses will struggle in a wasteland. A different prediction holds that without jobs to give their lives meaning, future people will simply become lazy and depressed.
But it doesn’t necessarily follow from findings like these that a world without work would be filled with dissatisfaction. Such visions are based on the downsides of being unemployed in a society built on the concept of employment. In the absence of work, a society designed with other ends in mind could provide strikingly different circumstances for the future of labor and leisure.
These days, spare time is relatively rare for most workers. “When I come home from a hard day's work, I often feel tired,” says John Danaher, a lecturer at the National University of Ireland, adding, “In a world in which I don’t have to work, I might feel rather different — perhaps different enough to throw himself into a hobby with the enthusiasm usually reserved for professional matters.”
Daniel Everett, an anthropologist (人类学家) at Bentley University studied a group of hunter-gathers in the Amazon called the Piraha for years. According to Everett, while some might consider hunting and gathering work, hunter-gatherers don’t. “They think of it as fun,” he says. “They don’t have a concept of work the way we do.”
Everett described a typical clay for the Piraha: A man might get up, spend a few hours fishing, have a barbecue, and play until the evening. Does this relaxing life lead to the depression and purposelessness seen among so many of today’s unemployed? “I’ve never seen anything like depression there, except people who are physically ill,” Everett says. While many may consider work necessary for human life, work as it exists today is a relatively new invention in the course of human culture. “We think it’s bad to just sit around with nothing to do,” says Everett. “For the Piraha, it’s quite a desirable state.”
1. What might be some people’s attitude towards the work-free world?| A．Objective. | B．Negative. |
| C．Skeptical. | D．Cautious. |
| A．Risks. | B．Losses. |
| C．Challenges. | D．Disadvantages. |
| A．work plays an important role in our future life |
| B．people don’t know how to balance work and life |
| C．people’s work-free future life will be full of charm |
| D．higher unemployment makes life tougher for workers |
| A．To justify John Danaher’s opinion. | B．To show a future life without work. |
| C．To compare different views on work. | D．To introduce the Piraha in the Amazon. |
What do top minds from various fields think about
9 . No one knows what the future will look like. New technology and climate change might make the world more different than we can possibly imagine. So we had better keep an open mind and hope for the best.
We have no idea what the job market will look like in 2050. It is generally agreed that machine learning and robotics will change almost every line of work – from producing yoghurt to teaching yoga. However, there are conflicting views about the nature of the change and its urgency. Some believe that within a mere decade or two, billions of people will become economically redundant (多余的). Others maintain that even in the long run automation will keep creating new jobs and greater prosperity for all.
So are we on an edge of a terrifying sudden change, or are such forecasts yet another example of ill-founded Luddite hysteria(勒德分子的歇斯底里)? It is hard to say. Fears that automation will create massive unemployment go back to the nineteenth century, and so far they have never materialized. Since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, for every job lost to a machine at least one new job was created, and the average standard of living has increased dramatically.
Yet there are good reasons to think that this time it is different, and that machine learning will be a real game changer. Humans have two types of abilities – physical and cognitive(认知的). In the past, machines competed with humans mainly in raw physical abilities, while humans still had a great advantage over machines in cognition. Hence as manual jobs in agriculture and industry were automated, new service jobs emerged that required the kind of cognitive skills only humans possessed: learning, analysing, communicating and above all understanding human emotions. However, AI is now beginning to outperform humans in more and more of these skills, including in the understanding of human emotions.
We don’t know of any third field of activity — beyond the physical and the cognitive — where humans will always maintain a secure advantage. It is crucial to realize that the AI revolution is not just about computers getting faster and smarter. It is fuelled by breakthroughs in the life sciences and the social sciences as well. The better we understand the biochemical mechanisms that support human emotions, desires and choices, the better computers can become in analyzing human behavior, predicting human decisions, and replacing human drivers, bankers and lawyers.
In the last few decades, research in neuroscience and behavioural economics allowed scientists to gain a much better understanding of how humans make decisions. It turned out that our choices of everything from food to mates result not from some mysterious free will, but rather from billions of neurons calculating probabilities within a split second. Boasting ‘human intuition’(直觉) is actually pattern recognition.
1. The second paragraph tells us about ________.| A．predictions about the role of machine learning in future job market |
| B．the speed at which robotics will take the place of human beings |
| C．the urgency of creating new jobs with the help of automation |
| D．the nature of applying new technology to every line of work |
| A．unidentified | B．badly-managed |
| C．unproven | D．ill-intended |
| A．Lack of job security might force people to pick up machine learning. |
| B．There is possibility that AI can perform a consulting role as a psychologist. |
| C．The use of automation will make humans more needed than ever before. |
| D．A real game changer lies in making computers become faster and smarter. |
| A．AI revolution is similar to the industrial revolution in causing unemployment. |
| B．It’s crucial that humans maintain an advantage in the third field of activity. |
| C．The process of human decision is controlled by free will rather than neurons. |
| D．The nature of preference at first sight is the result of recognizing patterns. |
