In June 2020, my life changed and so did my family’s. I remember the day like it was yesterday. My mother told me the worst news imaginable — my dad had been diagnosed with Stage III Colon Cancer (结肠癌).
The news hit hard of course. However, in my head, my dad was a superman. As his daughter, I knew that cancer wasn’t going to beat him.
As weeks went on, life didn’t change much within our house. My mom still went to work; my brother and I still went to school; and my dad still worked while also meeting his doctor. However, I didn’t realized how much this new diagnosis was going to change my life.
As treatment progressed with my dad’s cancer, I couldn’t depend on him for things he usually did. And with my brother being away at college, I had to take on a lot more responsibility. But that was not the hardest part of this new journey. It was the fear. The fear that I could lose my Dad. The fear that I could get a call saying that he was in bad condition. The fear that I could never talk to him again. Yet with all these fears, there was never a doubt in my mind that my dad would beat this cancer. He was a superman.
The day of my dad’s surgery finally came. It was Father’s Day and I had my soccer game that day. I won my battle on the field and my dad won his in the hospital. May 2023, my dad was completely cancer free.
Though this journey proved to be a few of the hardest years of my life, it also proved to me how wonderful my dad really is.
1. What happened to the author’s family in June 2020?2. How did the author behave after hearing the news from her mother?
3. What’s the meaning of the underlined word “surgery” in Paragraph 5?
4. When did the author’s father completely recover from cancer?
5. What’s your father like? Please explain.
2 . Modern technology has a strong influence on every part of our life, including the education in the universities.
Ashok Goel, a professor of Georgia Institute of Technology, says he uses the Internet in almost all of the classes he teaches. Every term over 300 graduate students take his class on artificial intelligence (人工智能). The students never meet in person. All of the classes take place online — through a website, which lets students ask questions and complete their work from anywhere in the world.
Having hundreds of students in a class means Ashok Goel has to answer thousands of questions. He has eight teaching assistants to help him. But even that is not enough to give all the students the help they need.
So, in January, Goel had an idea. He decided to try an experiment. At the start of the spring 2016 term, he added a new member to his teaching team: Jill Watson. She was able to answer questions faster than most other teaching assistants. And she was available 24 hours a day.
It was only at the end of the term that Goel’s students learned Watson’s true identity: she was not a real person like the other teaching assistants. Jill Watson was an AI computer program.
And it seems Goel’s stories will become more common in the universities.
A website called Campus Technology publishes stories about how colleges and universities use new technology. In August, the site published a survey of over 500 professors and their use of technology. Fifty-five percent of the professors asked students to use study materials online before coming to class. And, more than 70 percent combined (使相结合) online materials and face-to-face teaching in their classrooms.
1. What can we learn from Paragraph 2?| A．Goel seldom uses the Internet in his class. | B．The students take Goel’s class online. |
| C．Goel occasionally meets his colleagues. | D．Goel’s students dislike going to college. |
| A．He is not a clever professor. | B．He wants to have a good sleep. |
| C．He does not want to give answers. | D．He has no time to answer all the questions. |
| A．She was a real person. | B．She helped Goel with his work. |
| C．She was one of Goel’s students. | D．She could ask all the questions. |
| A．Who a person is. | B．The name of a person. |
| C．Where a person is from. | D．A person’s contribution. |
| A．Ashok Goel has eight assistants to help him. |
| B．New technology is changing our way of living. |
| C．Modern technology greatly influences college education. |
| D．Teachers will be completely replaced by the computers. |
