1. 随着英语在我们的日常生活中发挥着更重要的作用，越来越多的中国成年人和青少年决心掌握这门外语。(as, increase, determine)
2. 然而，英语学习者发现美国英语和英国英语在拼写和发音上的差别很令人疑惑。(confuse,宾补)
3. 实际上，这两个国家的本国人交流是没有困难的，即使有时候他们使用不同的表达。(native)
4. 因此，专家建议我们应该广泛阅读来扩大词汇量而不是把焦点放在差别上。(recommend, focus)
5. 更重要的是，我们应该自信地使用阅读中学到的高级词汇。(定语从句)
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1. When was the news broadcast?
| A．On July, 16. | B．On July, 17. | C．On July, 15. |
| A．Excited. | B．Concerned. | C．Exhausted. |
| A．Wearing masks. |
| B．A French government “health pass”. |
| C．A recent negative test for COVID- 19. |
I was excited. I had been invited to go to my friend's birthday party. Tori was not my best friend, but she was in my class and we did stuff together. And I liked to go to parties. I asked my mom and she said I could go, so I told Tori that I’d be there.
And then, two days later, my very, very best friend called. She and her family were going to Disneyland for the whole day. She invited me to go with them. Disneyland! I loved Disneyland so much. I really wanted to go... more than anything. I ran to ask my mom if it was okay. That’s when my mom reminded me that Tori’s party was on the same day. She said I couldn’t change my mind just because something better came along.
I was mad. So mad. Disneyland was my favorite place in the whole world and I loved to go there ... and I especially liked going with my best friend. My excitement about going to the birthday party was gone. Tori’s party would be okay but not as fun as a whole day at Disneyland and besides that, Tori wasn’t even my best friend. I begged my mom. She said no. I cried. I sulked (生闷气). My mom still said no.
My mom explained to me – once you accept an invitation to something, you can’t change your mind and go to something just because you want to do the other thing more. That isn’t nice. She asked me to think about how I would feel if someone did that to me. I didn’t want to admit it, but my mom was right. It would hurt my feelings if someone did that to me.
Although I didn’t want to, I told my best friend that l wouldn’t be able to go to Disneyland with her. So my friend and her family went to Disneyland and my mom dropped me off at Tori’s party.
注意：
1．所续写短文的词数应为150左右；
2．应使用5个以上短文中标有下划线的关键词语；
3．续写部分分为两段，每段的开头语已为你写好；
4．续写完成后，请用下划线标出你所使用的关键词语。
Paragraph 1：
In spite of the fact that I had not wanted to go, I had a great time at the party!
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Paragraph 2:
When my mom came to pick me up, I didn’t want to leave.
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8 . Computers are getting better at writing their own code but software engineers may not need to worry about losing their jobs just yet.
DeepMind, a U.K. artificial intelligence lab acquired by Google in 2014, announced Wednesday that it has created a piece of software called AlphaCode that can code just as well as an average human programmer. The London-headquartered firm tested AlphaCode’s abilities in a coding competition on Codeforces — a platform that allows human coders to compete against one another. “AlphaCode placed at about the level of the median competitor, marking the first time an AI code generation system has reached a competitive level of performance in programming competitions,” the DeepMind team behind the tool said in a blogpost.
But computer scientist Dzmitry Bahdanau wrote on Twitter that human-level coding is “still light years away.” “The system ranks behind 54.3% participants,” he said, adding that many of the participants are high school or college students who are just learning their problem-solving skills. Bahdanau said most people reading his tweet could “easily train to outperform AlphaCode.”
Researchers have been trying to teach computers to write code for decades but the concept has yet to go mainstream, partly because the AI tools that are meant to write new code have not been versatile enough.
An AI research scientist, who preferred to remain anonymous as they were not authorized to talk publicly on the subject, told CNBC that AlphaCode is an impressive technical achievement, but a careful analysis is required of the sort of coding tasks it does well on, versus the ones it doesn’t.The scientist said they believe AI coding tools like AlphaCode will likely change the nature of software engineering roles somewhat as they mature, but the complexity of human roles means machines won’t be able to do the jobs in their entirety for some time.“You should think of it as something that could be an assistant to a programmer in the way that a calculator might once have helped an accountant,” Gary Marcus, an AI professor at New York University, told CNBC. “It’s not one-stop shopping that would replace an actual human programmer. We are decades away from that.”
DeepMind is far from the only tech company developing AI tools that can write their own code.
Last June, Microsoft announced an AI system that can recommend code for software developers to use as they work. The system, called GitHub Copilot, draws on source code uploaded to code-sharing service GitHub, which Microsoft acquired in 2018, as well as other websites. Microsoft and GitHub developed it with help from OpenAI, an AI research start-up that Microsoft backed in 2019. The GitHub Copilot relies on a large volume of code in many programming languages and vast Azure cloud computing power.
Nat Friedman, CEO of GitHub, describes GitHub Copilot as a virtual version of what software creators call a pair programmer — that’s when two developers work side-by-side collaboratively on the same project. The tool looks at existing code and comments in the current file, and it offers up one or more lines to add. As programmers accept or reject suggestions, the model learns and becomes more sophisticated over time. The software makes coding faster, Friedman told CNBC. Hundreds of developers at GitHub have been using the Copilot feature all day while coding, and the majority of them are accepting suggestions and not turning the feature off, Friedman said.In a separate research paper published on Friday, DeepMind said it had tested its software against OpenAI’s technology and it had performed similarly. Samim Winiger, an AI researcher in Berlin, told CNBC that every good computer programmer knows that it is essentially impossible to create “perfect code.”“All programs are flawed and will eventually fail in unforeseeable ways, due to hacks, bugs or complexity,” he said.“Hence, computer programming in most critical contexts is fundamentally about building ‘fail safe’ systems that are ‘accountable’.”
In 1979, IBM said “computers can never be held accountable” and “therefore a computer must never make a management decision.”Winiger said the question of the accountability of code has been largely ignored despite the hype around AI coders outperforming humans.
“Do we really want hyper-complex, intransparent, non-introspectable, autonomous systems that are essentially incomprehensible to most and uncountable to all to run our critical infrastructure?” he asked, pointing to the finance system, food supply chain, nuclear power plants and weapons systems.
1. What do we learn about AlphaCode?| A．a U.K. artificial intelligence lab acquired by GitHub created it. |
| B．AlphaCode will likely change the nature of software engineering roles somewhat now. |
| C．It’s a one-stop shopping that would replace an actual human programmer. |
| D．It’s a piece of software that can code just as well as a plain human programmer. |
| A．The question of the accountability of code should be largely ignored. |
| B．A computer must never make a management decision because they can never be held accountable. |
| C．We would let systems that are essentially incomprehensible to most to run our critical infrastructure. |
| D．All programs are flawed and will eventually fail in unforeseeable ways. |
| A．accept or reject suggestions | B．look at existing code in the current file |
| C．offer up one or more lines to add | D．make coding faster |
| A．Engineers may need to worry about losing their jobs. |
| B．Machines are getting better at writing their own code but human-level is ‘light years away’. |
| C．AlphaCode is an impressive technical achievement. |
| D．Microsoft announced an AI system that can recommend code for software developers. |
Last week, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology instructed Tencent to submit its new app products as well as updated versions of its existing app products,
The ministry’s technological examination of Tencent apps should be a wakeup call to the whole industry. No matter how big the companies are, they will take the responsibility
Strict regulations have taken effect since the ministry
