1 . Hanwengong Shrine
Now we come to Hanwengong Shrine, which is beside Hangjiang river and west of Bijia mountain.
In the year of A.D. 819, for some political reason, Han Yu was exiled (流放) to Chaozhou, a backland at that time. But he was not depressed by this, and he helped local people to develop education, agriculture, irrigation and release slaves.
The shrine was built against the mountain and divided into two parts, the front part and the back part. Now we play a small game: count the stone steps, and later I’ll tell you a secret. How many steps are there? Yes, 51 steps! Why?
A.When Han Yu came to Chaozhou, he was 51 years old. |
B.Han Yu was a Confucian figure, and there are many stories about him in Chaozhou. |
C.Although Han Yu’s ideas had no obvious practical effect at the time, they had a great impact on society decades later. |
D.Built in the Song dynasty, the shrine is the oldest and best preserved monument to Han Yu, one of the greatest literary men in the Tang dynasty. |
E.To memorize what he had contributed to the development of Chaozhou, people constructed this shrine and named him Hanwengong respectfully. |
F.There are so many tourists that, to relieve the pressure on the monuments, the scenic spot requires that a maximum of 500 people visit at a time. |
A.At Mary Johnson’s. | B.At a painter’s studio. |
C.In an exhibition hall. | D.Outside an art gallery. |
How to Stay on Task
“In many activities, it is difficult to maintain a high level of focus over time. Our research asks why this is the case,” said Matthew K. Robison, assistant professor of psychology at the University of Texas at Arlington. Although humans generally perform fine in situations that require sustained attention, they are often distracted, which can lead to inattention. Common distractions can be anything from thinking about a new romantic interest to reacting to a car honking. Most inattention has minor consequences like forgetting to forward an email or pick up an item at the grocery store. However, other inattention can lead to serious consequences, such as a train operator not reacting to an incident, a surgeon forgetting a step in an operation or an individual forgetting to turn off an oven.
“Sustaining attention can be easier said than done, as attention fluctuates(波动) across short and long intervals,” Robison said. One of the most common approaches to studying inattention has been to examine response time to a variety of tasks. For this study, Robison and colleagues employed more than 100 participants to complete reaction time tasks for about 25 minutes. In a standard control condition, participants were simply told to respond as quickly as possible on each trial. “In this condition, reaction times systematically increased across time, consistent with the idea that task focus was decreasing,” Robison said. “However, when we gave them specific goals to pursue and made those goals harder over time, they did not show that effect.”
The drop in concentration goes some way to explaining why we remember or forget the moment and why some people remember better than others. Robison and colleagues at the University of Oregon have also published a new study on maintaining attention. The results provide evidence that a simple and easily implementable change in behavior — setting specific goals for oneself — can significantly improve our ability to maintain task focus over time. “Setting a specific goal will increase sustained attention and reduce inattention,” said Robison based on his studies.
_______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________8 . The emergence of black holes undoubtedly marks the beginning of a revolution. Black holes have many peculiar properties, such as the alteration of space and time, the radiation of gravitational waves and so on. Scientists are still trying to study the properties and evolution of black holes in order to better understand the origin and evolution of the universe.
Recently, a team of astronomers may have found a solo-wandering black hole using a strange trick of gravity called microlensing (微透镜效应), but the results still have to be confirmed.
Sometimes it’s tough being an astronomer. Nature likes to hide the most interesting things from easy observation. Take, for example, black holes. Except for the strange quantum (量子) phenomenon of Hawking radiation, black holes are completely black. They don’t emit a single bit of radiation – they only absorb, hence their name.
To date, the only way astronomers have been able to spot black holes is through their influence on their environments. For example, if an orbiting star gets a little too close, the black hole can absorb the gas from that star, causing it to heat up as it falls. We can watch as stars dance around the giant black hole at the center of the Milky Way.
Even the famed pictures of the black holes in the center of the Milky Way and the M87 galaxy(星系) aren’t photographs of the black holes themselves. Instead, they are radio images of everything around them.
But surely not all black holes have other light-emitting objects around them to help us find them. To find these wanderers, astronomers have tried their luck with microlensing. We know that heavy objects can bend the path of light around them. This is a prediction of Einstein’s general theory of relativity, and the slight bending of starlight around our own sun was one of the first successful tests of the theory.
Microlensing is pretty much what the name suggests. When astronomers get extremely lucky, a wandering black hole and pass between us and a random distant star. The light from that star bends around the black hole because of its gravity, and from our point of view, the star will appear to temporarily flare in brightness.
And when I say “extremely lucky” I mean it. Despite trying this technique for over a decade, it is only now that astronomers have found a candidate black hole through microlensing. Two teams used the same data, a microlensing event recorded from both the OGLE (Optical Gravitational Lensing Experiment) telescope in Chile and the MOA (Microlensing Observations in Astrophysics) telescope in New Zealand. One team found that the mass was somewhere around seven times the mass of the sun – definitely black hole territory. But the other team estimated a much smaller mass, around 2-4 times the mass of the Sun. If the true mass of the object is at the lower end of that spectrum (光谱), then the wanderer is probably not a black hole.
1. Why does the author say it is hard to be an astronomer?A.Einstein’s theory is hard to understand. |
B.Many things in nature are not easy to observe. |
C.Understanding the evolution of the universe is not easy. |
D.Whether the black hole has been found remains to be seen. |
A.Stars’ wandering in black holes. |
B.Black holes’ absorbing the star’s gas. |
C.The relationship between stars’ heating and black holes. |
D.Finding black holes by observing environmental changes. |
A.People can often find black holes with glowing objects. |
B.Research groups can work together to find black holes. |
C.Glowing objects around black holes help us find them sometimes. |
D.Understanding the properties of black holes helps find them. |
A.To persevere in the end is to win. |
B.Facts speak louder than words. |
C.Failure is the mother of success. |
D.Things are not always what they seem. |
A. empowers B. termed C. interaction D. implications E. advances F. question G. obtained H. additionally I. pressure J. currently K. defining |
A New Era of Creative Partnerships
In a new paper in a Nature Human Behavior special issue on AI, researcher Janet Rafner from Aarhus Institute of Advanced Studies and Center for Hybrid Intelligence at Aarhus University and Prof. Jacob Sherson, director of the Center for Hybrid Intelligence, together with international partners, discuss research and societal
The team of researchers argue that we should direct our attention to understanding and developing co-creativity, the interaction between humans and machines towards what is
Rafner comments: To date, most studies on human-AI co-creativity come from the field of human-computer
While these
“Right now, we need to move the conversation away from questions like Can AI be creative? One reason for this is that
We,
What If You’re Not Good at English?
Researchers whose first language is not English can spend around twice as long reading an English scientific journal article as native speakers. For a PhD student, that can mean
These statistics,
The team found that among scientists who had published only one paper in English, scientists from countries
At conferences, even those who overcome obstacles face difficulties in presenting their work in English. Germana Barata, a researcher who