1 . Many industries are facing a shortage of labour. Warehousing has grown rapidly. And robots are now indispensable, picking items off shelves and helping people pack an exponentially rising numbers of boxes. They are even beginning to walk slowly along some pavements, delivering goods or food right to people’s doors. Having more robots to boost productivity would be a good thing.
And yet many people fear that robots will destroy jobs. A paper in 2013 by economists at Oxford University was widely misinterpreted as meaning that 47% of American jobs were at risk of being automated.
In fact, concerns about mass unemployment because of robots are overblown. The evidence suggests robots will be ultimately beneficial for labour markets. A Yale University study found that an increase of one robot unit per 1, 000 workers boosted a company’s employment in Japan. Another study, by researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and colleagues elsewhere, looked at Finnish firms and concluded that their use of advanced technologies led to increases in hiring.
For all that, the march of the robots will bring big changes to workplaces. The skills and firms that are rewarded will shift, too. But that need not be the disaster many fear. One supposed example of “bad automation” is self-service checkouts in supermarkets because they displace human workers. Checkout staff who retrain to help customers pick items from aisles may well find that dealing with people in need is more rewarding than spending all day scanning barcodes.
Certainly, some people will be on the losing end of change even as the robots make society as a whole better off. One lesson from the freewheeling globalization of the 1990s and 2000s is that the growth in trade that was overwhelmingly beneficial contributed to a political backlash (强烈抵制) because the losers felt left behind. That’s one more reason why firms and governments would do well to recognize the value of retraining and lifelong learning. As jobs change, workers should be helped to acquire new skills, including how to work with and manage the robots that will increasingly be their colleagues.
The potential gains from the robot revolution have just started. It won’t be the plot in some films where the robots fight against their human masters and cause mass unemployment.
1. What does the underlined word “indispensable” mean in Paragraph 1?| A．Essential. | B．Spare. | C．Detective. | D．Complicated. |
| A．To prove that robots will not be a disaster. |
| B．To remind us of the big changes at workplaces. |
| C．To illustrate checkout staff will scan barcodes slowly. |
| D．To tell firms the value of retraining and lifelong learning. |
| A．It will push losers to leave behind. |
| B．Robots may lead to mass unemployment. |
| C．People will help robots to gain new skills. |
| D．Robots and people may become co-workers. |
| A．Jobs will be at risk due to robots. |
| B．No evidence shows that robots will destroy jobs. |
| C．Lifelong learning will quickly boost mass employment. |
| D．People have benefited a lot from the robot revolution. |
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Tips for Dealing with Seasonal Affective Disorder
Seasonal affective disorder (SAD) is a type of depression that sets in or starts in the winter months. Unlike other types of depression, it may improve as spring comes on. It is often a periodic recurring disorder—you’ll feel depressed every winter and begin to feel better each spring. SAD depression is caused by lowered levels of serotonin, the mood-affecting brain chemical that is caused by seasonal changes in daylight. Shorter days may also disrupt the body’s biological clock, which upsets the balance of melatonin, the hormone which regulates mood and sleep patterns.
Seasonal affective disorder is far more common in northern climates, where days can be very short in winter. SAD affects more women than men and is more likely to occur in people under age 40 than those older than that.
Although any amount of outdoor light can help raise serotonin levels, getting light in the morning seems to offer the most benefit. If the weather permits, take a walk. In your home or office, try sitting close to a window that faces south. Replacing light bulbs in your home with full spectrum light bulbs can help because they give out light similar to sunlight.
Studies have shown that increasing your exercise routine can counteract SAD. Exercise raises levels of serotonin. Moderate exercise, which means neither too much nor too little exercise, such as walking, riding a stationary bike or swimming is a great way to get started. But any activities that raise your heart rate, including daily chores, can help, especially if you can do them outdoors or near a sunny window. Yoga, jogging and Tai chi can all help lift your mood.
Year-end panic refers to the self-blame and overall feeling of panic brought about by the approach of the year’s end, often due to a poor financial year and pressure from work and family. Psychological experts suggest that we should avoid peer competition. While regretting for the failed plans in the past year, you can still make resolution to do it better in the coming year.
1. According to the passage, what is SAD?2. Who are more likely to suffer from SAD?
3. Please decide which part of the following statement is false, then underline it and explain why.
Increasing exercise routine can fight against SAD, and people should do a large amount of exercise to get started.
4. Seasons bring not only depression but also happiness. Which season can cheer you up? And why? (In about 40 words)
4 . “After 30 years of reading cardiograms (心电图), I can never tell whether it’s from a man or woman, or the age of the person,” said Eric Topol, a cardiologist from Scripps Research in La Jolla, California. “A machine can detect if a person has anaemia (贫血) or other difficult diagnoses (诊断).”
Topol is excited not only about how machines are already better than experts at spotting problems, but how they can discover patterns that experts wouldn’t even notice. “In Japan, doctors are using machine vision to pick up polyps (息肉) in real time, and detecting whether or not they could be cancerous and whether they should have a biopsy,” he said. “Machines will not replace physicians—but physicians making use of AI will soon replace those not using it.”
Still, these are early days for the application of AI in healthcare. Pearse Keane, a consultant doctor at Moorrelds Eye Hospital, has been leading a collaboration between Moor fields and Google’s Deep Mind Health. In 2018, he famously published a proof-of-concept paper in Nature showing the erst successful AI diagnosis for eye disease. “The algorithm that we’ve developed isn’t in clinical use at the minute, so we’re trying to implement this now,” Keane said.
Keane mentioned the INSIGHT study, which is looking into eye disease and its link to other conditions such as diabetes (糖尿病). “We are using the eye as a window to the rest of the body. With deep learning, we can now look at a retinal (视网膜）photograph and say: ‘This is a woman, she’s 58 years old, she’s not a smoker or a diabetic, her BMI is around 25, and her blood pressure is around 150 over 85’. Now, to me, that’s staggering.” Keane said.
The INSIGHT study is analysing more than three million OCT scans from around 300,000 patients. “We now know, for every person having had a retinal scan here, who’s gone on to develop a heart attack or diabetes,” he said. “The reason why we’re excited is that we think that if we can get the appropriate data sets and learn them deeply, we can find much more in the back of the eye about the health of the rest of the body.”
“The application of AI for healthcare and medicine is about precision and accuracy, but that’s not all,” said Topol. The most important aspect is how AI can promote a stronger human connection between doctor and patient. “We see patients in single digit numbers of minutes. And that’s not enough, you need the gift of time, which AI can give back,” he said. “Next year this will be the standard,” he believes. “Rather than doctors being data clerks, they will be making eye contact with patients. There’s no algorithm for empathy. That’s a human characteristic that we have to develop and get back in the way it used to be.”
1. According to Topol, machines in healthcare ______.| A．can pick up polyps |
| B．will replace doctors |
| C．are already better than experts |
| D．can discover if a patient has diseases |
| A．evaluate the effects of AI in healthcare |
| B．introduce a patient’s personal information |
| C．explain how deep learning detects diseases |
| D．show the present outcome of AI’s application |
| A．AI has been the standard of some advanced hospitals. |
| B．AI can improve the relationship between doctors and patients. |
| C．With deep learning, the researchers can find the secrets of the eye. |
| D．Doctors will spend more time on face-to-face communication with patients. |
| A．The AI’s application on diagnosis. |
| B．Successful AI diagnosis for eye disease. |
| C．The great clinical progress in deep learning. |
| D．The impact of AI on promoting human connection. |
5 . Stare at a blank wall in any room, and you are unlikely to learn much more than the paint color. But a new technology can inconspicuously scan the same surface for shadows and reflections.
This tool could gather information from a partial view of a space. It can spy on activity from around a corner.
As people move around a room, their bodies block a portion of any available light to create delicate and indistinct “soft shadows” on walls.
Sharma and other researchers did the experiment by filming a wall in a room as its occupants moved around and averaging the frames over time.
| A．The technology is thought advanced. |
| B．These can’t be caught by the human eye. |
| C．They recorded various activities of the people in the room. |
| D．Brightly colored clothing can even cast a light reflected glow. |
| E．It also can monitor someone who avoids a camera’s line of sight. |
| F．The system is considered a unique and wonderful discovery by camera specialists. |
| G．Although this system can function in any room, it performs poorly in dim lighting. |
6 . Farmed fish should have the same legal protection as other farmed animals, according to an animal welfare group. The Conservative Animal Welfare Foundation, which has Carrie Johnson as a supporter, says fish deserve to be treated with the same care as cows, pigs, sheep and other livestock because they experience stress and pain.
The foundation is focusing on improving fish welfare during slaughter (屠宰) because that is where the biggest differences in protection lie.
Slaughterhouses for land animals are required to have a vet on site and must have closed-circuit television in all areas where animals are handled, stunned and killed, with footage stored for independent inspection. Such legal requirements do not apply to fish slaughter facilities, which are not subject to routine welfare inspections by public bodies.
The UK industry, which rears up to 80 million fish a year, has instead adopted voluntary codes of practice. A report by the foundation cites evidence of abuses of fish revealed last year by The Times. A stunning machine at the firm’s plant at Arnish on the Isle of Lewis failed to make them unconscious and workers used their fingers to tear the gills (鳃) and struggled to keep up with the volume of fish wriggling on the unit. Fish were thrown and kicked as they struggled on the ground in 2020 at Test Valley Trout Farming in Hampshire, which supplied the Ritz and Harrods. Fish considered unprofitable were dropped on the floor and left to die. The company said the treatment of the fish was unacceptable and it operated under “the best industry standards available”.
The foundation’s report refers to the findings of the government’s Farm Animal Welfare committee, which said in a 2014 opinion on fish welfare that “at least some species, including trout, have a sensory experience of pain” as well as “a degree of sense”.
Studies have shown that fish feel pain and change their behaviour to avoid it. In one study, goldfish were given an electric shock in an area of a tank where they received food. They avoided that area for three days before hunger overcame their fear.
The foundation report states that the UK government is failing aquatic animals dismally and calls for unannounced welfare inspections of fish slaughterhouses and says they should be required to install closed-circuit television, with footage reviewed by public bodies.
1. What can we provide for the farmed fish?| A．Comfortable place. | B．Less pain. |
| C．Enough food. | D．Gentle love. |
| A．concerned | B．puzzled |
| C．surprised | D．scared |
| A．To encourage people to treat fish kindly. |
| B．To reveal the evidence of abuses of fish. |
| C．To appeal for the improvement of fish welfare. |
| D．To explain how fish experience pain during slaughter. |
7 . Tips on How to Use Body Language in Interviews
When was the last time you went to an interview? How did it go? There are lots of things to remember and prepare. However, one important thing to think about is your body language as it can really help you get the job. With a good understanding of body language in interviews, you can communicate the right messages, and even understand what the interviewer is saying or thinking. Here are some really useful things you need to know about body language in interviews.
Greetings
When greeting the interviewer, smile, look him in the eye and introduce yourself in a strong and confident voice. Also, remember that in most English-speaking countries (the UK, the USA, Australia, Canada, etc.), a firm handshake is seen as a sign of trust; and a limp handshake could make you appear weak or disinterested. Experts recommend waiting for the interviewer to extend his hand first.
Palms (手掌)
When possible, keep your palms facing up to show that you’re open, trustworthy and interested. Research has shown that if we can’t see the other person’s open palms, we subconsciously become suspicious of them.
Mirroring
Mirroring involves copying what someone does with their body. For example, if the interviewer places a hand on their leg, you should do the same, but not too obviously. Experts have shown that mirroring someone can make him like you, or even think that you’re more honest and trustworthy. However, be careful—if the other person knows about this technique, he might notice you doing it.
Sitting position
When sitting, if you lean back, you could appear lazy or arrogant; and if you lean forward too much, you might appear aggressive. The ideal posture is to sit with your back straight and your shoulders back a bit, leaning in very slightly. Sit with your legs slightly apart to give the impression of self-confidence and try to angle your knees and feet so they’re pointing towards the interviewer.
1. A good understanding of body language can help you ______.| A．succeed in getting the job |
| B．express the correct messages |
| C．know more about the interviewer |
| D．perform better than other interviewees |
| A．extend your hand first |
| B．sit with your legs apart |
| C．keep your palms facing down |
| D．copy what the interviewer does |
| A．Adventure. | B．Entertainment. | C．Life. | D．Profile. |
8 . Elvis Presley was one of the greatest musicians in rock and roll history who changed the way people enjoyed music. Born on January 8, 1935, Presley was raised by loving working-class parents. He received his first guitar as a gift on his 11th birthday and had his first taste of musical success a few years later when he won a talent show at his high school. After graduating in 1953, hе did a number of jobs while pursuing his musical dream.
In 1955, Presley began to develop a following for his unusual musical style and good looks. That same year, he signed with RCA. After that, Presley was on a roll, scoring with his first No.1 single as well as his first No.1 album, and signing a movie contract—all in 1956. From very humble (卑微的) beginnings, he grew into one of the biggest names in rock and roll.
Presley was hugely popular, releasing album after album of perfectly written and performed songs and creating a huge body of work that was the envy of anyone during the rock era. He was also a big influence in the Civil Rights Movement at the moment when black music was becoming popular. His home, Graceland, also became a landmark. After his death, countless fans from around the world visit the famous residence every year.
Figures like Presley helped create the image of the “rock star” as a cultural icon in America. In the mid-20th century, singers and musicians became superstars due to the wider distribution of music and the post-war economic growth, which led to much more free time and income for American families. The rebellious (叛逆的) rock stars inspired them to create their own, more liberated identity outside the cultural norms (准则) in the 1950s. Colorful figures like Presley influenced an entire generation of Americans.
1. What do we know about Presley as a young boy?| A．He had a gift for music. | B．His family was rich. |
| C．He received a guitar in 1953. | D．His family didn’t support his dream. |
| A．Busy with work. | B．Successful in career. |
| C．Attractive to fans. | D．Included in a ranking list. |
| A．A loss of identity. | B．The growth of economy. |
| C．A challenge to standards. | D．A change in social status. |
| A．Rock and Roll and Its Origin. |
| B．Elvis Presley and His Influence. |
| C．The Influential Figures in Rock and Roll. |
| D．The Ups and Downs of Elvis Presley’s Life. |
A group doctors,
A housewarming party is a special party to be held when someone buys or moves into a new apartment or house. The person who has bought or moved into the house is the one who
