1 . HANDSTITCHED WORLDS: THE CARTOGRAPHY OF QUILTS
Quilts (床罩) are a narrative art; with themes that are political, spiritual, communal, or commemorative, they are infused with history and memory, mapping out intimate stories and legacies through a handcrafted language of design. Handstitched Worlds: The Cartography of Quilts is an invitation to read quilts as maps, tracing the paths of individual histories that illuminate larger historic events and cultural trends.
Spanning the nineteenth to twenty-first centuries, this insightful and engaging exhibition brings together 18 quilts from the collection of the American Folk Art Museum, New York, representing a range of materials, motifs, and techniques from traditional early-American quilts to more contemporary sculptural assemblages. The quilts in Handstitched Worlds show us how this too-often overlooked medium balances creativity with tradition, individuality with collective zeitgeist. Like a road map, these unique works offer a path to a deeper understanding of the American cultural fabric.
Number of Works:18 quilts
Organized by: American Folk Art Museum, New York
Approximate size:175-200 linear feet
Security: Moderate security
Participation Fee: Please inquire
Shipping: IA&A makes all arrangements; exhibitors pay outgoing shipping costs within the contiguous U.S.
Booking Period:12 weeks
Tour: June 2021—August2024
Contact: TravelingExhibitions@ArtsandArtists.org
Leigh Yawkey Woodson Art Museum, Wausau, WI
June 12, 2021—August 29, 2021
Washington State Historical Society, Tacoma, WA
September 17, 2021—January 23, 2022
Utah Museum of Fine Arts, Salt Lake City, UT
February 19, 2022—May 14, 2022
Fort Wayne Muesum of Art, Fort Wayne, IN
June 18, 2022—September 11, 2022
AVAILABLE
October 2022—January 2023
Dane G. Hansen Memorial Museum, Logan, KS
February 17,2023—May 14, 2023
AVAILABLE
June 2023—December 2023
Lauren Rogers Museum of Art, Laurel, MS
January 30, 2024—April 21, 2024
AVAILABLE
May 2024—August 2024
All tour dates can be customized to meet your scheduling needs. Please contact Traveling Exhibitions @ Artsand Artists.org for more information.
1. What is the purpose of the exhibition of Handstitched Worlds: The Cartography of Quilts?| A．To promote creativity and individuality thorough the engaging exhibition. |
| B．To provide an opportunity for visitors to learn to make quilts stitch by stitch. |
| C．To give visitors an insight into the history and culture of America in specific periods. |
| D．To enrich the understanding of the American culture by a tour visit to museums across America. |
| A．The exhibition is free both for the exhibitors and for the visitors. |
| B．Exhibitors that are interested can choose whatever dates they want. |
| C．The artistic and historic value of handstitched quilts used to be neglected. |
| D．Exhibitors that are interested can book the exhibition 12 weeks in advance. |
| A．exhibitors | B．visitors | C．artists | D．historians |
2 . Wholesale prices for gas and electricity are increasing suddenly across Europe,raising the possibility of increases in already-high utility (公共事业）bills and further pain for people who have taken a financial hit fromCOVID-19.
Governments are struggling to find ways to limit costs to consumers as scant natural gas reserves present yet another potential problem, exposing the continent to even more price increases and possible shortages if it’s a cold winter.
In the U.K., many people will see their gas and electricity bills rise next month after the nation’s energy regulator approved a 12% price increase for those without contracts that lock in rates. Officials in Italy have warned that prices will increase by 40% for the quarter that will be billed in October.
There are multiple causes for the price increases, energy analysts say, including tight supplies of natural gas used to generate electricity, higher costs for permits to release carbon dioxide as part of Europe’s fight against climate change, and less supply from wind in some cases.
Analysts at S&P Global Platts say electricity prices have risen due to strong demand from places like data centers and electric cars, but above all because of the rise in the price of natural gas used in generating plants. Utility companies’ exposure to natural gas prices has increased as high-emission coal plants have been retired, while utilities face higher costs for carbon allowances required by the European Union’s emissions trading system, which is aimed at reducing emissions of greenhouse gases.
The tight gas market could bite even more sharply if there’s an unusually cold winter. That’s because European distributors did not refill reserves reduced during last winter as they typically had done in summer months. In March 2008, when the freeze named “the beast from the east” hit Europe, industrial users in the U.K got a notice that there was a risk of interruption, although it didn’t come to that.
Could Europe run out of gas? “The short answer is Yes, this is a real risk,” said James Huckstepp, an analyst at S&P Global Platts. “Storage stocks are at record lows and there isn’t currently any spare supply capacity that is exportable anywhere in the world.The longer answer is that it’s hard to predict how it will play out given that Europe has never run out of gas in two decades under the current distribution system.”
1. What does the underlined word “scant” in Paragraph 2 probably mean?| A．Total. | B．Additional. | C．Limited. | D．Regular. |
| A．The closure of some coal plants. |
| B．The great demand for electric cars. |
| C．The competition between utility companies. |
| D．The change in the emissions trading system. |
| A．More natural gas will be needed for industrial use. |
| B．European distributors don’t make good preparations. |
| C．It is not easy to fill reserves during the cold weather. |
| D．Utility companies work can be easily interrupted. |
| A．Europe is expected to seek help from other countries. |
| B．It is hard to control the gas price in Europe at present. |
| C．Europe might face a serious shortage of gas in the future. |
| D．There’s something wrong with Europe’s distribution system. |
| A．thrived | B．swelled | C．prospered | D．flourished |
Up to 82 percent of children with healthy mothers are not easy to be obese（肥胖的）, according to research. A mother,
And research suggests it could be more to do with nurture(养育)
The study examined the medical history and lifestyles of more than 24,000 children aged nine
The mother's health was judged on her height-to-weight ratio(比例), her diet, amount of physical
5 . Hollywood’s theory that machines with evil(邪恶) minds will drive armies of killer robots is just silly. The real problem relates to the possibility that artificial intelligence(AI) may become extremely good at achieving something other than what we really want. In 1960 a well-known mathematician Norbert Wiener, who founded the field of cybernetics（控制论）, put it this way: “If we use, to achieve our purposes, a mechanical agency with whose operation we cannot effectively interfere(干预), we had better be quite sure that the purpose put into the machine is the purpose which we really desire.”
A machine with a specific purpose has another quality, one that we usually associate with living things: a wish to preserve its own existence. For the machine, this quality is not in-born, nor is it something introduced by humans; it is a logical consequence of the simple fact that the machine cannot achieve its original purpose if it is dead. So if we send out a robot with the single instruction of fetching coffee, it will have a strong desire to secure success by disabling its own off switch or even killing anyone who might interfere with its task. If we are not careful, then, we could face a kind of global chess match against very determined, super intelligent machines whose objectives conflict with our own, with the real world as the chessboard.
The possibility of entering into and losing such a match should concentrate the minds of computer scientists. Some researchers argue that we can seal the machines inside a kind of firewall, using them to answer difficult questions but never allowing them to affect the real world. Unfortunately, that plan seems unlikely to work: we have yet to invent a firewall that is secure against ordinary humans, let alone super intelligent machines.
Solving the safety problem well enough to move forward in AI seems to be possible but not easy. There are probably decades in which to plan for the arrival of super intelligent machines. But the problem should not be dismissed out of hand, as it has been by some AI researchers. Some argue that humans and machines can coexist as long as they work in teams—yet that is not possible unless machines share the goals of humans. Others say we can just “switch them off” as if super intelligent machines are too stupid to think of that possibility. Still others think that super intelligent AI will never happen. On September 11, 1933, famous physicist Ernest Rutherford stated, with confidence, “Anyone who expects a source of power in the transformation of these atoms is talking moonshine.” However, on September 12, 1933, physicist Leo Szilard invented the neutron-induced(中子诱导) nuclear chain reaction.
1. Paragraph 1 mainly tells us that artificial intelligence may .| A．run out of human control |
| B．satisfy human’s real desires |
| C．command armies of killer robots |
| D．work faster than a mathematician |
| A．prevent themselves from being destroyed |
| B．achieve their original goals independently |
| C．do anything successfully with given orders |
| D．beat humans in international chess matches |
| A．help super intelligent machines work better |
| B．be secure against evil human beings |
| C．keep machines from being harmed |
| D．avoid robots’ affecting the world |
| A．It will disappear with the development of AI. |
| B．It will get worse with human interference. |
| C．It will be solved but with difficulty. |
| D．It will stay for a decade. |
