1 . At a recycling center, two team members spend all day pulling items from a conveyor belt covered in garbage. One pulls out juice cartons and plastic bottles that can be reprocessed, while the other searches for pollutants in the stream of paper products. They are AI-powered robots that each look like a supercharged mechanical arm. Yes, even recycling has gotten involved in the AI revolution.

In theory, materials recovery facilities (MRFs) gather the wastes, sort them out, and then sell the materials to companies that can reuse them. In practice, the MRFs aren’t all that good. The issue is that it’s long been too hard for recycling plants to sort materials with the level of specificity needed to reuse them. The traditional recycling methods succeed in separating waste into broad categories of paper, glass, and metal. But finer layers of detail often go unnoticed, especially with plastic. It’s hard for recyclers to determine whether, say, a container is a milk container or a pesticide (杀虫剂) container.

AI stands to make a change, giving recycling plants a far more detailed view into packaging. The AI-powered recycling robots are “vision systems”: In the same way ChatGPT is trained, they ingest lots of photographs of thrown- away items in various states of damage. The robots are then able to identify even tiny differences in a product’s color, shape, texture, or logo. Recycling operators said that traditional systems tend to be 85 to 95 percent accurate, while robotics companies claim up to 99 percent accuracy.

That is not to say that the turn to AI has already fixed recycling. The high- tech systems won’t come cheap — an individual robot can cost as much as $300,000. Even if costs eventually decrease, recycling robots can’t change the fact that recycling, even at its best, is just not a particularly efficient way of dealing with single-use products. From a plastics- pollution standpoint, what’s better than a recyclable single-use cup is not using one at all.

1. What is described in the first paragraph?

A．A common sight of a recycling center.	B．The application of AI tools in recycling.
C．The power of AI to change an industry.	D．A display of difficulties in waste sorting.

2. What is the challenge faced by recycling plants?

A．The accuracy of waste sorting.

B．The low profit from selling reusable materials.

C．The efficiency of waste management.

D．The unnoticeable danger in collecting waste materials.

3. What does the underlined word “ingest” in Paragraph 3 mean?

A．Edit.

B．Copy.

C．Absorb.

D．Download.

4. What can be inferred from the last paragraph?

A．Single- use products should be restricted.	B．Costs of high- tech systems will increase.
C．Recyclable products should be advocated.	D．AI will be the final frontier of recycling.

3 . You have three layers of skin which act as a barrier against disease, p_________ (n. 毒害, 毒药) and the sun’s harmful rays.

4 . You can get burned by a v_________ (n. 多样) of things: hot liquids, steam, fire, etc.

5 . It will a_______(v. 有感染力, 呼吁) to those who love Impressionist and Post-Impressionist paintings.

6 . He tried to stop us p___________ (v. 发表, 发布) it but later we were proved right.

7 . A footballer was accused of taking money for d____________ (adv. 故意地) not scoring goals.

8 . Frick had a p____________ (n. 偏爱, 喜爱) for pre-twentieth century Western paintings.

9 . A c___________ (adj. 传统的, 常规的) artist of this period was not interested in showing nature and people as they really were.

10 . You will find your colleague very eager to assist you, so you may be able to c______________ (v. 集中, 专注) on photography later if you are interested.