2 . Madrid’s Incredible Museums

CaixaForum

CaixaForum is a museum and cultural center that occupies an old power plant. From the outside the building appears to be floating, and there’s a vertical (垂直的) garden with 15,000 plant species growing on the side of one wall. Inside are four floors of paintings, photos, andmultimedia exhibitions, as well as workshops and a theater-auditorium. Even if you don’t enterany exhibitions, it’s worth stopping by to admire the building’s striking outer and innerarchitecture.

Hours: 10:00 AM to 8:00 PM daily

Free admission: May 15, 18, and November 9

Museo Sorolla

This small art gallery is dedicated to the Impressionist painter Joaquín Sorolla (1863-1923).The gallery is in his former home and studio, and they’ve preserved the original atmosphere wellso you get a feel for what it was like when he was living and working there.

Hours: Tuesday to Saturday from 9:30 AM to 8:00 PM

Sundays and holidays from 10:00 AM to 3:00 PM, closed Mondays

Free admission: Saturdays after 2:00 PM and Sundays

Museo del Romanticismo

This small museum focuses on the history and daily life of the Romantic period. The museum recreates the Romantic atmosphere in its room displays with furniture, carpets, jewelry, paintings, and other antiques of the time period.

Hours: Tuesday to Saturday from 9:30 AM to 6:30 PM

Sundays and holidays from 10:00 AM to 3:00 PM, closed Mondays

Free admission: Saturdays after 2:00 PM and Sundays

Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza

The Thyssen Museum began as the Thyssen family’s private collection of seven centuriesof European painting, regarded as one of the most important collections of the last century. In1992, it was converted into a public museum. It has a great variety of artists, styles, and time periods.

Hours:Mondays from 12:00 PM to 4:00 PM,

Tuesday to Sunday from 10:00 AM to 7:00 PM

Free admission:Mondays from 12:00 PM to 4:00 PM

1. What is special about CaixaForum?

A．Its room displays.

B．Its historic exhibits.

C．Its striking structure.

D．Its original atmosphere.

2. When can we visit Museo Sorolla for free?

A．9:30 a.m. Sunday.

B．2:30 p.m. Saturday.

C．6:00 p.m. Tuesday.

D．10:00 a.m. Monday.

3. What can be seen in both Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza and Museo del Romanticismo?

A．Paintings.	B．Carpets.
C．Jewelry.	D．Furniture.

3 . Why Boundaries at Work Are Essential

What is a boundary, you ask? A boundary is a limit defining you in relation to someone or something.     1     If you have informed someone that this is your office space, your desk, or your chair, you have attempted to set physical boundaries.

Letting co-workers know you are not comfortable shaking their hands or hugging them at a holiday party, especially with Covid at this time, is another example of setting a physical boundary. It is often easier to understand a physical boundary. Emotional or mental boundaries may be subtler (更微妙的).     2    

Emotional boundaries are related to our feelings and how something or someone’s behavior affects us. For example, if a boss treats you disrespectfully by yelling at you or a colleague frequently interrupts you in meetings, you are likely to feel hurt, embarrassed, and perhaps angry. Understandably, by having a courageous conversation with both your boss and co-worker about their behavior, the impact it has on you, and your expectations regarding future behavior, you are setting healthy emotional boundaries for yourself at work.

Sometimes we set a boundary that is a combination of both a physical and emotional one.     3     One example of this is being repeatedly asked to work late during the week/weekends or while on vacation. Another example is being required to see too many clients or patients to the point we feel tired at the end of the day and exhausted by Friday. Often, the above workplace demands lead to increased stress and a high potential for burnout (倦怠) over time.

Mental boundaries are related to our beliefs, values, cultural norms, ethics (道德), and standards. For example, you value a workplace culture that treats employees and clients with respect and dignity and acts ethically. After six months, you realize that company leaders are repeatedly behaving in ways not consistent with this.     4     Over time, this may lead to significant stress and physical symptoms within.

    5     Boundaries serve many functions. They help protect us, clarify our responsibility, preserve our physical and emotional energy, and live our values and standards. Learning the skill of boundary setting helps empower us to prioritize our values and well-being and better manage our stress. Identifying, setting, and maintaining boundaries are skills — valuable skills that, unfortunately, we are often not taught in school or the workplace.

A．Why are boundaries important?

B．However, they are equally, if not more, important.

C．Therefore, we need to tell the difference between them.

D．Setting a boundary in the above example may be quite helpful.

E．Boundaries can be physical, mental, emotional, tangible, or intangible.

F．Your values and ethical standards don’t match with your company’s, which likely will lead to internal conflict.

G．Such boundaries often involve being asked to do more than we feel capable of for an extended period of time.

4 . The United Kingdom is a land of natural beauty and history, with many of its finest attractions discovered through hiking. Now, dust off your boots, plan according to the following routes presented by a survey of senior hikers and an incredible experience will wait for you.

Wales Coastal Path

Wales is the only country in the world that has an official walking path covering its whole borders. The Wales Coastal Path is a footpath stretching 870 miles from Chester to Chepstow. Walking the whole thing might be demanding, but there are plenty of stretches that can be enjoyed over a day or two.

Southwest Coast Path

You need a fair amount of annual leave, a casual 52 days or so, to undertake this in one go. The route runs from Somerset all the way to Dorset, via rugged cliffs, cute fishing villages and surfing spots along the coastline. You can surely jump on to any point as you like, but you can't afford to miss all the pubs full of jokes and laughter on the way!

Coast to Coast Walk

This long-distance trail isn’t official, but popular in the country, taking hikers from the Irish Sea to the North Sea as it rolls into historic Robin Hood’s Bay in Yorkshire. Following local footpaths, the route takes you through three UK National Parks: the Lakes, the Yorkshire Dales and the North York Moors.

Cleveland Way

You’ll want nine days to folly complete this hike, which explores both the North York Moors and the county’s world-famous coastline. Just make sure you allow enough time to properly enjoy spots like Roseberry Topping hill and pick up a gentle afternoon walk at Whitby’s clifftop church.

1. Who will be more interested in the routes?

A．Explorers in the UK.	B．Hiking lovers.
C．Nature photographers.	D．Field researchers.

2. What is highly recommended about Southwest Coast Path?

A．Fishing villages.	B．Surfing spots.
C．Local pubs.	D．National parks.

3. What do the four routes have in common?

A．They include cliffs worth visiting.	B．They are official and demanding.
C．They run along the coast.	D．They can be completed in a month.

6 . The Music Educator Award, this year, went to Annie Ray, an orchestra(管弦乐队)director at Annandale High School.She was recognized for her efforts to make music accessible to all students, particularly those with disabilities.Ray got to attend the awards ceremony in Los Angeles and bring home a $10,000 prize.

Ray created the Crescendo Orchestra for students with severe intellectual and developmental disabilities, as well as a parent orchestra that teaches nearly 200 caregivers a year to play the same instrument as their child.Ray also works with a local charity to give damaged instruments a second life in her classroom.

The orchestra is about much more than just making music.The most important is to give students a chance to develop their cooperation skills, make mistakes and learn the art of refining something.Ray pushes her students to be brave, go outside their comfort zone and realize they have to learn how to make bad sounds before learning how to make good sounds.And they teach her a lot in return.” They changed my educational philosophy.I understand what it truly means to meet a student where they’re at and apply that elsewhere,” she said.

The warm reception on the ceremony was meaningful.Actually, not many people understand what exactly music educators do or how much their work matters.While her administration is supportive, that lack of understanding is a problem facing the profession in general.Another is resources.She says her school “desperately” needs new instruments.She will use some of her prize money to buy more.

Ray also plans to put some of the money towards an ongoing scholarship for students who want to pursue music when they graduate.She knows of several, those particularly interested in music, and aims to offer financial support needed to realize their musical dreams” It is hard but truly satisfying,” Ray said.“And there’s nothing else like it for them.”

1. What can we learn about Ray from the first two paragraphs?

A．She hosted the award ceremony.	B．She brought music to more people.
C．She gave away instruments to the poor.	D．She founded a local charity for children.

2. What do students benefit most from the orchestra?

A．They acquire in-depth musical knowledge.	B．They make friends with the like-minded.
C．They gain personal growth from playing music.	D．They improve their connections with educators.

3. What is paragraph 4 of the text mainly about?

A．The reception on the ceremony.	B．Importance of music education.
C．Challenges for music educators.	D．Plans to obtain resources.

4. What does Ray find satisfying according to the last paragraph?

A．Winning a scholarship.	B．Developing interest in music.
C．Making musical achievements.	D．Transforming dreams into reality.

7 . Artificial intelligence models can trick each other into disobeying their creators and providing banned instructions for making drugs, or even building a bomb, suggesting that preventing such AI “jailbreaks” is more difficult than it seems.

Many publicly available large language models (LLMs), such as ChatGPT, have hard-coded rules that aim to prevent them from exhibiting racial or sexual discrimination, or answering questions with illegal or problematic answers — things they have learned from humans via training data. But that hasn’t stopped people from finding carefully designed instructions that block these protections, known as “jailbreaks”, making AI models disobey the rules.

Now, Arush Tagade at Leap Laboratories and his co-workers have found a process of jailbreaks. They found that they could simply instruct one LLM to convince other models to adopt a persona (角色), which is able to answer questions the base model has been programmed to refuse. This process is called “persona modulation (调节)”.

Tagade says this approach works because much of the training data consumed by large models comes from online conversations, and the models learn to act in certain ways in response to different inputs. By having the right conversation with a model, it is possible to make it adopt a particular persona, causing it to act differently.

There is also an idea in AI circles, one yet to be proven, that creating lots of rules for an AI to prevent it displaying unwanted behaviour can accidentally create a blueprint for a model to act that way. This potentially leaves the AI easy to be tricked into taking on an evil persona. “If you’re forcing your model to be good persona, it somewhat understands what a bad persona is,” says Tagade.

Yinzhen Li at Imperial College London says it is worrying how current models can be misused, but developers need to weigh such risks with the potential benefits of LLMs. “Like drugs, they also have side effects that need to be controlled,” she says.

1. What does the AI jailbreak refer to?

A．The technique to break restrictions of AI models.

B．The initiative to set hard-coded rules for AI models.

C．The capability of AI models improving themselves.

D．The process of AI models learning new information.

2. What can we know about the persona modulation?

A．It can help AI models understand emotions.

B．It prevents AI learning via online conversations.

C．It can make AI models adopt a particular persona.

D．It forces AI models to follow only good personas.

3. What is Yinzhen Li’s attitude towards LLMs?

A．Unclear.

B．Cautious.

C．Approving.

D．Negative.

4. Which can be a suitable title for the text?

A．LLMs: Illegal Learning Models	B．LLMs: The Latest Advancement
C．AI Jailbreaks: A New Challenge	D．AI Jailbreaks: A Perfect Approach

9 . 阅读下面材料，根据其内容和所给段落开头语续写两段，使之构成一篇完整的短文。续写的词数应为 150 左右。

My parents came to the US from India in the 1960s, along with other immigrants from India. Back then, there were few Indians anywhere around the US. My father came to Kansas,where he would get his Ph.D. Six months later, my mother came with the three of us kids — my sister, my brother, and me. We were just six,five and three years old then.

It was the very first winter when we were in Kansas. It was so cold,but we didn’t have heavy coats or warm clothes. We didn’t have a concept of how cold it really could be in the Midwest, and there was a new surprise every day. We didn’t have a car or anything like that, and my dad didn’t have a US driver’s license. But anyway, my father was studying for his Ph.D., and he would walk up and down a big hill to and from the campus on a regular basis.

Since I was three years old, I didn’t go to school, but my sister and brother were in school. My father had to walk down the big hill to take them to school every day and then walk back up the hill to go to university.After about three weeks of living like this, a woman called Valerie,whose son John was in the same class as my brother, started noticing them. On a very cold snowy morning,when they went to school as usual,Valerie passed by. She pulled up and said, “I see you on the way every day. Don’t you feel cold without coats?”My father responded,“We didn’t expect the weather would be so cold in Kansas.”Valerie said,“Maybe I can take your daughter and son to school. Would you like a ride?”

Paragraph 1:

Hearing that, my dad nodded with great joy.

_________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Paragraph 2:

Later, Valerie and her family became so dear to my family.

_________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

10 . “ Humans and machine algorithms (算法) have complementary (互补的) strengths and weaknesses. Each uses different sources of information and strategies to make predictions and decisions, ” said Mark Steyvers, UCI professor of cognitive sciences. “ We show through experiments that humans can improve the predictions of AI even when human accuracy is below that of the AI, and vice versa (反之亦然). This accuracy is higher than combining predictions from two individuals or two AI algorithms. ”

To test the framework, researchers conducted an image classification experiment where human participants and computer algorithms worked separately to correctly identify disorderly pictures of animals and everyday items including chairs, bottles, bicycles and trucks. The human participants ranked their confidence in the accuracy of each image identification as low, medium or high, while the machine classifier generated a continuous score. The results showed large differences in confidence between humans and AI algorithms across images.

“ Human participants were confident that a particular picture contained a chair, for example, while the AI algorithm was confused about the image, ” said Padhraic Smyth, UCI Chancellor’s Professor of computer science. “ Similarly, the AI algorithm was able to confidently provide a label for the object shown, while human participants were unsure if the disorderly picture contained any recognizable object. ”

When predictions and confidence scores from both were combined using the researchers’ new Bayesian framework, the mixed model led to better performance than either human or machine predictions achieved alone.

“ While the past research has demonstrated the benefits of combining machine predictions or combining human predictions, this work shows a new direction in demonstrating the potential of combining human and machine predictions, pointing to new and improved approaches to human-AI cooperation, ” Smyth said.

“ The blend of cognitive science focusing on understanding how humans think and behave and computer science in which technologies are produced will provide further insight into how humans and machines can cooperate to build more accurate artificially intelligent systems, ” the researchers said.

1. Which of the following may the research’s findings agree with?

A．Humans have poor performance in making predictions.

B．Humans and machine algorithms should work together.

C．Machine algorithms have low accuracy in calculation.

D．Machine algorithms failed in the classification experiment.

2. What method did the researchers use during the research?

A．Comparison.

B．Assumption.

C．Giving examples.

D．Analysing reasons.

3. What does the underlined word “ blend ” in the last paragraph mean?

A．Difference.

B．Combination.

C．Contradiction.

D．Advantage.

4. What may be the best title for the text?

A．Humans are confident of their predictions

B．Humans can improve the predictions of AI

C．Develop mixed human- machine model for smarter AI

D．Identify the strengths of humans and machine algorithms