1 . Both misinformation, which includes honest mistakes, and disinformation, which involves an intention to mislead, have had a growing impact on teenage students over the past 20 years. One tool that schools can use to deal with this problem is called media literacy education. The idea is to teach teenage students how to evaluate and think critically about the messages they receive. Yet there is profound disagreement about what to teach.
Some approaches teach students to distinguish the quality of the information in part by learning how responsible journalism works. Yet some scholars argue that these methods overstate journalism and do little to cultivate critical thinking skills. Other approaches teach students methods for evaluating the credibility of news and information sources, in part by determining the incentive of those sources. They teach students to ask: What encouraged them to create it and why? But even if these approaches teach students specific skills well, some experts argue that determining credibility of the news is just the first step. Once students figure out if it’s true or false, what is the other assessment and the other analysis they need to do?
Worse still, some approaches to media literacy education not only don’t work but might actually backfire by increasing students’ skepticism about the way the media work. Students may begin to read all kinds of immoral motives into everything. It is good to educate students to challenge their assumptions, but it’s very easy for students to go from healthy critical thinking to unhealthy skepticism and the idea that everyone is lying all the time.
To avoid these potential problems, broad approaches that help students develop mindsets in which they become comfortable with uncertainty are in need. According to educational psychologist William Perry of Harvard University, students go through various stages of learning. First, children are black-and-white thinkers—they think there are right answers and wrong answers. Then they develop into relativists, realizing that knowledge can be contextual. This stage is the one where people can come to believe there is no truth. With media literacy education, the aim is to get students to the next level—that place where they can start to see and appreciate the fact that the world is messy, and that’s okay. They have these fundamental approaches to gathering knowledge that they can accept, but they still value uncertainty.
Schools still have a long way to go before they get there, though. Many more studies will be needed for researchers to reach a comprehensive understanding of what works and what doesn’t over the long term. “Education scholars need to take an ambitious step forward,” says Howard Schneider, director of the Center for News Literacy at Stony Brook University.
1. As for media literacy education, what is the author’s major concern?| A．How to achieve its goal. | B．How to measure its progress. |
| C．How to avoid its side effects. | D．How to promote its importance. |
| A．Importance. | B．Variety. | C．Motivation. | D．Benefit. |
| A．compare different types of thinking |
| B．evaluate students’ mind development |
| C．explain a theory of educational psychology |
| D．stress the need to raise students’ thinking levels |
| A．Media Literacy Education: Much Still Remains |
| B．Media Literacy Education: Schools Are to Blame |
| C．Media Literacy Education: A Way to Identify False Information |
| D．Media Literacy Education: A Tool for Testing Critical Thinking |
2 . The environmental practices of big businesses are shaped by a fundamental fact that offends our sense of justice. A business may maximize the amount of money it makes by damaging the environment and hurting people. When government regulation is effective, and the public is environmentally aware, environmentally clean big businesses may out-compete dirty ones, but the reverse is likely to be true if government regulation is ineffective and the public doesn’t care.
It is easy to blame a business for helping itself by hurting other people. But blaming alone is unlikely to produce change. It ignores the fact that businesses are not charities but profit-making companies, and they are under obligation to maximize profits for shareholders by legal means.
Our blaming of businesses also ignores the ultimate responsibility of the public for creating the conditions that let a business profit through destructive environmental policies. In the long run, it is the public, either directly or through its politicians, that has the power to make such destructive policies unprofitable and illegal, and to make sustainable environmental policies profitable.
The public can do that by accusing businesses of harming them. The public may also make their opinion felt by choosing to buy sustainably harvested products; by preferring their governments to award valuable contracts to businesses with a good environmental track record; and by pressing their governments to pass and enforce laws and regulations requiring good environmental practices.
In turn, big businesses can exert powerful pressure on any suppliers that might ignore public or government pressure. For instance, after the US public became concerned about the spread of a disease, transmitted to humans through infected meat, the US government introduced rules demanding that the meat industry abandon practices associated with the risk of the disease spreading. But the meat packers refused to follow these, claiming that they would be too expensive to obey. However, when a fast-food company made the same demands after customer purchases of its hamburgers dropped, the meat industry followed immediately. The public’s task is therefore to identify which links in the supply chain are sensitive to public pressure.
Some readers may be disappointed or outraged that I place the ultimate responsibility for business practices harming the public on the public itself. I also believe that the public must accept the necessity for higher prices for products to cover the added costs of sound environmental practices. My views may seem to ignore the belief that businesses should act in accordance with moral principles even if this leads to a reduction in their profits. But I think we have to recognize that, throughout human history, government regulation has arisen precisely because it was found that not only did moral principles need to be made explicit, they also needed to be enforced.
My conclusion is not a moralistic one about who is right or wrong, admirable or selfish. I believe that changes in public attitudes are essential for changes in businesses’ environmental practices.
1. The main idea of Paragraph 3 is that environmental damage__________.| A．is the result of ignorance of the public |
| B．requires political action if it is to be stopped |
| C．can be prevented by the action of ordinary people |
| D．can only be stopped by educating business leaders |
| A．reduce their own individual impact on the environment |
| B．learn more about the impact of business on the environment |
| C．raise awareness of the effects of specific environmental disasters |
| D．influence the environmental policies of businesses and governments |
| A．Meat packers stopped supplying hamburgers to fast-food chains. |
| B．Meat packers persuaded the government to reduce their expenses. |
| C．A fast-food company forced their meat suppliers to follow the law. |
| D．A fast-food company encouraged the government to introduce regulations. |
| A．Will the world survive the threat caused by big businesses? |
| B．How can big businesses be encouraged to be less driven by profit? |
| C．What environmental dangers are caused by the greed of businesses? |
| D．Are big businesses to blame for the damage they cause to the environment? |
3 . The artificial-intelligence chatbot ChatGPT has shaken educators since its November release. New York City public schools have banned it from their networks and school devices. There is, perhaps surprisingly, one subject area that doesn’t seem threatened, It turns out ChatGPT is quite bad at maths.
“I’m not hearing maths instructors express concern about ChatGPT,” said Paul von Hippel, a professor at the University of Texas who studies data science and statistics. “I’m not sure it’s useful for maths at all, which feels strange because maths was the first-use case for the artificial-intelligence devices.”
ChatGPT’s struggle with maths is inherent in this type of AI, known as a large language model. It scans a large amount of text from across the web and develops a model that might be extremely effective for writing grammatically correct responses to essay requirement, but not for solving a maths problem.
In an email, I asked Debarghya Das, a search-engine engineer, why ChatGPT gets some simple questions right but others completely wrong. “Maybe the right analogy (类比) is if you ask a room of people, who have no idea what maths is but have read many hieroglyphics (象形文字), ‘What comes after 2+2,’ they might say, ‘Usually, we see a 4,’ That’s what ChatGPT is doing.” But, he adds, “Maths isn’t just a series of hieroglyphics. It’s the process of calculating.”
It isn’t great for pretending you know it through a maths class because you only recognize the mistakes if you know the maths. Another reason that maths instructors are less anxious about this innovation is that they have been here before. The field was upended for the first time decades ago with the general availability of computers and calculators.
“Maths has had the biggest revolution based on machinery of any mainstream subject,” said Conrad Wolfram, the strategic director of Wolfram Research. “In the real world, since computers came along, have maths, science and engineering gotten conceptually simpler? No, completely the opposite. We’re asking harder and harder questions, going up a level.”
Eventually, AI will probably get to the point where its maths answers are not only confident but correct. A pure large language model might not be up for the job, but the technology will improve. In general, however, AI, like computers, will likely ultimately be most useful for those who already know a field well. They know the questions to ask, how to identify the shortcomings and what to do with the answer. A tool, in other words, is for those who know the most maths, not the least.
1. What does the underlined word “inherent” in Paragraph 3 most probably mean?| A．Stable. | B．Practical. | C．Limited. | D．Natural. |
| A．Calculating requires some knowledge of hieroglyphics. |
| B．ChatGPT is good at solving mathematical questions by analogy. |
| C．Reading hieroglyphics prevents ChatGPT solving maths questions. |
| D．ChatGPT’s response is based on language models instead of calculations. |
| A．ChatGPT is useful to identify maths mistakes. |
| B．Technical revolution made maths easier to understand. |
| C．New technology will end up pushing the boundaries of maths. |
| D．ChatGPT has been banned from networks and school devices. |
| A．It will play the largest role for professionals in a field. |
| B．It will become confident to solve all the maths problems. |
| C．It will turn the maths field over again just like computers. |
| D．It will take the jobs from humans as the technology improves. |
4 . When evaluating people on various psychological tests, psychologists often distinguish between markers of absolute performance and relative performance. Absolute performance reflects the raw measurement of something, like the time it takes to run a mile. Relative performance is how a person rates in relation to their peers, as in what place a runner gets in a race.
The standards we use to evaluate ourselves are almost always relative, as we compare ourselves to our peers and the standards that are most familiar to us. For instance, in my private practice, I have one patient I will call “Omar” who is dependent on social services and makes less than $30,000 per year at his job. While this level of poverty would lead most people to wake up depressed each day, Omar is one of the most optimistic and appreciative individuals I know. Why? Because most of his closest peers — his siblings and friends from childhood — have lives far worse than his.
In contrast to Omar, I have another patient, an adolescent I’ll call “Lena”, whose family has property over $5 million. Lena, however, lives in an upper-class neighborhood where her family is at the lower end of the income level. Though Lena's family allows her to enjoy possessions and experiences that less than I percent of her peers across the world can share, she consistently feels “less than”. Why? Because Lena doesn't compare herself to the rest of the world; This is too abstract an exercise for her, as it would be for most of us.
Accordingly, whether a psychologist is psychodynamic or cognitive-behavioral, therapy (疗法) with individuals struggling with situational or psychological depression aims to solve the problems associated with basing one's self-worth on comparisons with others. Psychologists try to help people focus on personal growth around the achievement of concrete goals in line with their values. independent of the achievement of others. For all of us, defining these goals, especially during Periods of emotional calm, can go a long way in helping us to avoid the trap of relativity that often leads to situational and psychological depression.
1. What is the function of Paragraph 1?| A．To show the significance of evaluating people. |
| B．To motivate readers to study psychological tests. |
| C．To help people perform well in psychological tests. |
| D．To provide some background information on evaluating people. |
| A．To measure different achievement. |
| B．To introduce the standards to evaluate people. |
| C．To explain relative performance with examples. |
| D．To contrast relative performance and absolute performance. |
| A．Setting goals in life is essential for everyone. |
| B．It's important to avoid unhealthy comparisons. |
| C．A sense of achievement can affect one's happiness, |
| D．Improving self-worth can help get rid of depression. |
| A．Happiness: Is it all relative? |
| B．Self-worth: Is it measurable? |
| C．Self-worth: Is it based on efforts? |
| D．Happiness: Is it associated with achievement? |
5 . In 1953, when visiting his daughter’s maths class, the Harvard psychologist B.F. Skinner found every pupil learning the same topic in the same way at the same speed. Later, he built his first “teaching machine”, which let children tackle questions at their own pace. Since then, education technology (edtech) has repeated the cycle of hype and flop (炒作和失败), even as computers have reshaped almost every other part of life.
Softwares to “personalize” learning can help hundreds of millions of children stuck in miserable classes—but only if edtech supporters can resist the temptation to revive harmful ideas about how children learn. Alternatives have so far failed to teach so many children as efficiently as the conventional model of schooling, where classrooms, hierarchical year-groups, standardized curriculums and fixed timetables are still the typical pattern for most of the world’s nearly 1.5 billion schoolchildren. Under this pattern, too many do not reach their potential. That condition remained almost unchanged over the past 15 years, though billions have been spent on IT in schools during that period.
What really matters then? The answer is how edtech is used. One way it can help is through tailor-made instruction. Reformers think edtech can put individual attention within reach of all pupils. The other way edtech can aid learning is by making schools more productive. In California schools, instead of textbooks, pupils have “playlists”, which they use to access online lessons and take tests. The software assesses children’s progress, lightening teachers’ marking load and allowing them to focus on other tasks. A study suggested that children in early adopters of this model score better in tests than their peers at other schools.
Such innovation is welcome. But making the best of edtech means getting several things right. First, “personalized learning” must follow the evidence on how children learn. It must not be an excuse to revive pseudoscientific ideas such as “learning styles”: the theory that each child has a particular way of taking in information. This theory gave rise to government-sponsored schemes like Brain Gym, which claimed that some pupils should stretch or bend while doing sums. A less consequential falsehood is that technology means children do not need to learn facts or learn from a teacher—instead they can just use Google. Some educationalists go further, arguing that facts get in the way of skills such as creativity. Actually, the opposite is true. According to studies, most effective ways of boosting learning nearly all relied on the craft of a teacher.
Second, edtech must narrow, rather than widen, inequalities in education. Here there are grounds for optimism. Some of the pioneering schools are private ones in Silicon Valley. But many more are run by charter-school groups teaching mostly poor pupils, where laggards (成绩落后者) make the most progress relative to their peers in normal classes. A similar pattern can be observed outside America.
Third, the potential for edtech will be realized only if teachers embrace it. They are right to ask for evidence that products work. But skepticism should not turn into irrational opposition. Given what edtech promises today, closed-mindedness has no place in the classroom.
1. According to the passage, education technology can ________.| A．decrease teachers’ working load |
| B．facilitate personalized learning |
| C．help standardize curriculums |
| D．be loved by schoolchildren |
| A．The students who are better at memorization tend to be less creative. |
| B．Schools with bans on phones have better results than high-tech ones. |
| C．Shakespeare was trained in grammar but he penned many great plays. |
| D．Lu Xun’s creativity was unlocked after he gave up studying medicine. |
| A．at the service of teaching |
| B．limited in use among pupils |
| C．aimed at narrowing the wealth gap |
| D．in line with students’ learning styles |
| A．To stress the importance of edtech. |
| B．To introduce the application of edtech. |
| C．To discuss how to get the best out of edtech. |
| D．To appeal for more open-mindedness to edtech. |
6 . Nowadays, the world is slowly becoming a high-tech society and we are now surrounded by technology. Facebook and Twitter are innovative tools; text messaging is still a somewhat existing phenomenon and even e-mail is only a flashing spot on the screen when compared with our long history of snail mail. Now we adopt these tools to the point of essentialness, and only rarely consider how we are more fundamentally affected by them.
Social media, texting and e-mail all make it much easier to communicate, gather and pass information, but they also present some dangers. By removing any real human engagement, they enable us to develop our abnormal self-love without the risk of disapproval or criticism. To use a theatrical metaphor (隐喻), these new forms of communication provide a stage on which we can each create our own characters, hidden behind a fourth wall of tweets, status updates and texts. This unreal state of unconcern can become addictive as we separate ourselves a safe distance from the cruelty of our fleshly lives, where we are imperfect, powerless and insignificant. In essence, we have been provided not only the means to be more free, but also to become new, to create and project a more perfect self to the world. As we become more reliant on these tools, they become more a part of our daily routine, and so we become more restricted in this fantasy.
So it is that we live in a cold era, where names and faces represent two different levels of closeness, where working relationships occur only through the magic of email and where love can start or end by text message. An environment such as this reduces interpersonal relationships to mere digital exchanges.
Would a celebrity have been so daring to do something dishonorable if he had had to do it in person? Doubtful. It seems he might have been lost in a fantasy world that ultimately convinced himself into believing the digital self could obey different rules and regulations, as if he could continually push the limits of what’s acceptable without facing the consequences of “real life.”
1. What can we know about new communication tools?| A．Destroying our life totally. | B．Posing more dangers than good. |
| C．Helping us to hide our faults. | D．Replacing traditional letters. |
| A．Sheltering us from virtual life. | B．Removing face-to-face interaction. |
| C．Leading to false mental perception. | D．Making us rely more on hi-tech media. |
| A．Technologies have changed our relationships. |
| B．The digital world is a recipe for pushing limits. |
| C．Love can be better conveyed by text message. |
| D．The digital self need not take responsibility. |
| A．Addiction to the Virtual World | B．Cost of Falling into Digital Life |
| C．Interpersonal Skills on the Net | D．The Future of Social Media |
7 . If you live on this planet, there’s a decent chance you’ve seen the classic Star TrekEpisode, in which captain Kirk and several members find themselves in what appears to be another universe.
These days, it seems the idea of the multiverse—many worlds—is having its Hollywood moment. Its appeal as a storytelling device is obvious—characters explore a multi-world with varying degrees of similarity to our own, as well as different versions of themselves. Hence, it has been fully established in mainstream pop culture.
While Hollywood can’t seem to get enough of the multiverse, it remains deeply controversial (有争议的) among scientists. Advocates on the two sides show no mercy toward each other in their books, on their blogs. But physicists didn’t pull the idea out of thin air—rather, several distinct lines of reasoning seem to point to the multiverse’s existence. However, critics warn that making the multiverse legal could make it harder for the public to distinguish speculative (推测性的) theories from established fact, making it more difficult to keep pseudo-science (伪科学) at bay. Giving credit to such speculation risks “turning fundamental physics into pseudo-science”.
The multiverse controversy is rooted in the idea of test ability. If we can’t interact with these other universes, or detect them in any way, some experts insist that reduces them to mere philosophical speculation. But Carroll, an advocate for “many worlds”, argues that mathematics is the language describing our physical theories. Since Schrdinger’s equation (方程), on which Quanturr (量子) mechanic rests, predicts the existence of many worlds, so be it.
Could a more expansive view of the universe itself be the next breakthrough? As Siegfried puts it: “Every time in the past that we’ve thought, ‘We’ve got it; this is what the whole universe is’—the people who’ve said, ‘Maybe there’s more than one of those’ have always turned out to be right.”
1. Why is Hollywood so occupied with the multiverse?| A．It makes for engaging plots. |
| B．It is a much-talked-about topic. |
| C．It is helpful to popularize science. |
| D．It dominates the mainstream pop culture. |
| A．Out of date. | B．Out of place. | C．Out of nowhere. | D．Out of question. |
| A．it can be detected somehow |
| B．it can be reasoned logically |
| C．it can be interpreted philosophically |
| D．it can be predicted by mathematics equation |
| A．Doubtful. | B．Dismissive. | C．Unclear. | D．Approving. |
8 . Some people prefer to have a bite to eat before hitting the gym, known as a fed workout. Others would like to wait until after exercising to refuel their bodies, called a fasted workout.
If you want energy and strength for an ideal workout, you need fuel. A fed workout will provide your body with power. Eating before exercise may help you sustain longer sessions and lift heavier weights.
Many fitness enthusiasts are not on board with this idea. They report feeling sick and inactive while trying to exercise after eating. With a fasted workout, you may not get the usual indigestion. Experts for fasted workouts further claim that eating afterwards makes your body use its fat reserves for energy, meaning you will burn more fat.
Deciding when to eat for an ideal workout is a personal choice. Both fasted workouts and fed activities have their benefits and shortcomings.
| A．However, a fasted workout might not work for you. |
| B．How your body will respond is based on your workout intensity. |
| C．These benefits can result in burning more fat and shaping a slimmer body. |
| D．To eat or not to eat, that is the question on many fitness enthusiasts’ minds. |
| E．Think thoroughly and discuss with your fitness instructor before taking a choice. |
| F．Knowing what to eat for an ideal workout is just as important as knowing when to eat. |
| G．A person doing a 30-minute session a day may not have a problem with fasted workouts. |
9 . On a dark night, 11-year-old Joe was playing hide-and-seek with his friends in the backyard when he thought he saw Magellan—a huge housecat. However, when the cat suddenly jumped on his head, Joe found it turned out a young cougar. He backed away from the animal, then turned and ran inside the house.
Cougar encounters like this one are becoming increasingly common in the U.S. Most people assume that’s because cougar populations are growing, or because the big cats are coming into closer contact with the expanding web of human suburbs. But Professor Robert Wielgus at Washington State University argues that poorly designed hunting policies might be causing an increase in cougar-human conflicts.
Wielgus’s research teams have been fitting the big cats with radio collars and monitoring their movements. They find that the cougar population is actually declining rapidly and almost no male cougars are over four years of age. And a study shows that the heavily hunted area has five times as many cougar complaints as the lightly hunted area—even though the density of cougars is about the same in both areas.
Wielgus suspects that hunting policies, which allow older males to be killed to keep cougar populations in check, were the culprit and teenage cougars in the heavily hunted area may be responsible for most of the trouble. To test his theory, he adds two more groups of cougars to the tracking program—one in a heavily hunted area and another in a comparable but lightly hunted area. He concludes that heavy hunting indeed almost wipes out older males and the population structure in the heavily hunted area shifts toward younger animals.
With these findings, Wielgus believes without adults to keep them under control, the disorderly teens are more likely to come into conflict with humans, farm animals and pets.
Wielgus’s ideas don’t sit well with everyone. “Hunting definitely does cause lots of teenage males to flow in, but I don’t yet see solid proof that they are more likely to cause trouble than older cats,” says the University of Montana’s Robinson. “In many cases, the new arrivals have been squeezed out of remote wilderness habitat and forced into areas where they are more likely to encounter humans. I think humans are primarily responsible for all the interaction you see. We’re moving into these areas where cougars and deer are,” according to Alldredge, a researcher at the Colorado Division of Wildlife.
We may not understand what makes 18-year-old males more likely than 48-year-old men to do dangerous things, Wielgus says, but we know that the world would be a different place, if teenagers were in charge.
1. The passage begins with a story to ________.| A．lead into the topic | B．describe an incident |
| C．show the author’s attitude | D．warn of the dangers of cougars |
| A．effect | B．evidence | C．cause | D．target |
| A．Alldredge agrees hunting results in the arrival of lots of teens. |
| B．Robinson doubts whether age is a key factor in human-cougar conflicts. |
| C．Alldredge believes killing older males may cause a bigger threat. |
| D．Robinson holds humans are to blame for the fall of older males. |
| A．Driving teenage cougars back into their natural habitat. |
| B．Getting people to move out of the areas where cougars are. |
| C．Forbidding children to play in the backyard by themselves. |
| D．Changing hunting policies to ensure a healthy cougar population. |
10 . Superhuman artificial intelligence is already among us. Well, sort of. When it comes to playing games like chess and Go, or solving difficult scientific challenges like predicting protein structures, computers are well ahead of us. But we have one superpower they aren’t close to mastering: mind reading.
Humans have a mysterious ability to reason the goals, desires and beliefs of others, a crucial skill that means we can anticipate other people’s actions and the consequences of our own. Reading minds comes so easily to us, though, that we often don’t think to spell out what we want. If AIs are to become truly useful in everyday life—to cooperate effectively with us or to understand that a child might run into the road after a bouncing ball—we have to give them this gift that evolution has given us to read other people’s minds.
Psychologists refer to the ability to infer another’s mental state as theory of mind. In humans, this capacity starts to develop at a very young age. How to reproduce the capability in machines is far from clear, though. One of the main challenges is context. For instance, if someone asks whether you are going for a run and you reply “it’s raining”, they can quickly conclude that the answer is no. But this requires huge amounts of background knowledge about running, weather and human preferences.
Moreover, whether humans or AI, the theory of mind is supposed to emerge naturally from one’s own learning process. Building prior knowledge into AI makes it reliant on our imperfect understanding of theory of mind. In addition, AI may be capable of developing approaches we could never imagine. There can be many forms of theory of mind that we don’t know about simply because we live in a human body that has certain types of senses and a certain ability to think.
Yet we might still want AI to have a more human-like form of theory of mind. Humans can clearly explain their goals and desires to each other using common language and ideas. While letting AI form the theory of mind in their learning process is likely to lead to developing more powerful AI, plainly building in shared ways to represent knowledge may be crucial for humans to trust and communicate with AI.
It is important to remember, though, that the pursuit of machines with theory of mind is about more than just building more useful robots. It is also a stepping stone on the path towards a deeper goal for AI and robotics research: building truly self-aware machines. Whether we will ever get there remains to be seen. But along the way thinking about other people and other agents, we are on the path to learning to think about ourselves.
1. According to the passage, which of the following contexts can AI understand well?| A．When you are asked to eat spicy food for dinner and you reply “a sore throat”. |
| B．When a teacher asks for a boy’s homework and he answers “my dog ate it”. |
| C．When a mom tells her kid some food is good for health and the kid eats it. |
| D．When kids see their mom after hurting themselves and they cry louder. |
| A．humans’ theory of mind is far from perfect |
| B．humans limit AI’s theory of mind to an extent |
| C．we should reject human-like forms of abilities for AI |
| D．shared forms of theory of mind result in more powerful AI |
| A．Reliability. | B．Practicability. |
| C．Reasoning capability. | D．Communication ability. |
| A．AI with Its Own Theory of Mind Is Expected |
| B．AI with Theory of Mind Will Reshape Our Future |
| C．AI’s Theory of Mind Is a Blessing or Suffering to Humans |
| D．Theory of Mind Bridges the Gap Between Humans and AI |
