2 . Amblyopia is the most common cause of vision loss in children. In all cases of amblyopia, there’s a stronger eye and a weaker eye, and it’s winner-take-all in the cortex (大脑皮层). The cortex learns to ignore the signal from the weaker eye. By ignoring the weaker eye, the brain doesn’t fuse (融合) images from both eyes. As a result, people with amblyopia can have trouble seeing in 3D.

In an attempt to solve this problem, doctors start treating patients with amblyopia at a young age, while their brain pathways are still developing. The children, usually under 7 years old, are often told to wear an eye patch over their strong eye to force the brain to rely on the weaker. But whenever the eye patch is removed, the competition can start over. For lasting improvement, new treatments need to teach the brain to stop suppressing (抑制) key visual cues coming from the weaker eye, says neuroscientist Dennis Levi of the University of California.

Now, several research teams are taking a new way that aims to get the brain to make better use of the information coming from both eyes, Several companies are working on treatments based on this new angle. One is called Luminopia.

Luminopia’s therapy involves having children watch videos through a virtual reality headset. As the children watch, the headset blocks out certain parts of the display for each eye, so the patients actually have to combine input from the two images to get the full video.

The company conducted a trial showing that children with amblyopia begin to see better on eye chart assessments after three months of one-hour sessions done six days a week, But they have yet to measure improvements in long-term effectiveness. It is believed that if people with amblyopia don’t learn to fuse signals from both eyes from a young age, they never will. So some scientists think attempting to treat adults, whose brains have suppressed signals from their weak eye for decades, is a lost cause.

1. Why does a person with amblyopia have trouble seeing in 3D?

A．His brain is unable to receive images.

B．His cortex overlooks signals from the weaker eye.

C．His stronger eye can’t send signals to the brain.

D．His weaker eye fails to receive signals.

2. Which of the following best describes the effect of an eye patch?

A．Ineffective.	B．Temporary.
C．Wonderful.	D．Comprehensive.

3. What is the working principle of Luminopia’s therapy?

A．Activating the weak eye to get the full video.

B．Forcing the brain to rely on the weaker eye.

C．Improving the situations with eye chart assessments.

D．Blocking out the images received from the stronger eye.

4. What can we learn about Luminopia’s therapy from the last paragraph?

A．It has an instant effect.	B．Adults are is main targets.
C．More trials need to be conducted.	D．It has long-term effectiveness.

3 . A group of small, wiggling (扭动) robots that communicate by flashing lights can make collective decisions. This is similar to the process bees use to reach a consensus on where to build their nest.

“We believe that in the near future there are going to be simple robots that will do jobs that we don’t want to do, and it will be very important that they make decisions in an autonomous manner,” says Carmen Miguel at the University of Barcelona in Spain. She and her team tested how imitating bees might help with that.

When bees go house-hunting, they communicate their preferred locations through a “wiggle dance”. The more a bee recommends one location, the longer and harder it wiggles. Eventually other bees join them, and they reach a consensus when a majority are wiggling together. Researchers previously translated this behavior into a mathematical model, and Miguel and her colleagues used it to program decision-making rules into small robots called kilobots.

Each kilobot with three thin legs had an infrared-light emitter (红外线发射器) and receiver, and a colored LED light. Within a group, kilobots could move around, turn clockwise or anticlockwise and use infrared signals to exchange information.

Ezequiel Ferrero at the University of Barcelona says that across all the experiments, kilobots reached a consensus within about half an hour, even when they didn’t have many immediate neighbors to communicate with. He says that getting the right combination of how long they spend transmitting their message and how much they walk around allowed them to make a collective decision in the end.

1. How do bees agree with each other about where to construct a new home?

A．By doing a group dance.	B．By imitating simple robots.
C．By giving out flashing lights.	D．By advising a favoured place.

2. What did the team do to enable kilobots to become smart?

A．They exposed kilobots to real bees.	B．They equipped kilobots with thin legs.
C．They put a programme into kilobots.	D．They built a special mathematical model.

3. What’s the key element for kilobots to make group judgement?

A．Doing more practical experiments.	B．Having enough companions around.
C．Combining different figures accurately.	D．Sending brief messages automatically.

4. Which is the most suitable title for the text?

A．Bees are natural wiggle dancers.

B．Robots learn to dance by imitating bees.

C．Wiggle dances mean a lot in communication.

D．Robots reach a consensus by imitating bees wiggling.

4 . Tokyo restaurant Sushiya no Nohachi reportedly serves great sushi, but it is most famous for its gimmick — making the world’s smallest sushi with a single grain of rice.

Located in Asakusa, a slightly quieter part of Tokyo, Sushiya no Nohach is the place to go if you want to enjoy the tiniest and most adorable sushi in the world. Each piece is made with only a grain of rice and a tiny slice of topping wrapped in the thinnest piece of nori (海苔). Every served piece is actually perfect, which hints at the amount of work and patience that goes into making them. They are the work of Hironori Ikeno, the chef of Sushiya no Nohachi, who came up with the idea in 2002 when a client asked him how small he could make his sushi. He answered, “It is as small as a grain of rice”, and proceeded to demonstrate that he wasn’t kidding. Years later, the restaurant became internationally famous for making the world’s smallest sushi.

Despite its size, miniature sushi actually takes a bit longer to make than regular-sized Ones, because of the precision and concentration required to put the tiny ingredients together. That is part of the reason why the restaurant only prepares tiny sushi for customers a few times a week and no more than five times a day, although they do sometimes make exceptions for foreign visitors who travel to the restaurant just to experience the world’s smallest sushi.

“I had a client from Sweden who came just to see my tiny sushi and the moment she saw it, she literally cried with joy,” Hironori Mheno said.

Interestingly, one cannot simply order the tiny sushi at the restaurant. It is served for free upon request with a regular-sized sushi course. Considering the sushi served at this place is reportedly delicious, you should probably be more excited about that. Plus, it also justifies the gimmick that the restaurant is so famous for.

1. What does the underlined word “gimmick” in paragraph 1 probably refer to?

A．A plan to promote the sushi.	B．A trick to attract customers.
C．A dish to win over opponents.	D．A class to teach cooking skills.

2. What made Hironori Ixeno start to make the smallest sushi?

A．His pursuit for perfection.	B．A bet he made with others.
C．The requirement from his boss.	D．The curiosity of a customer.

3. Compared with the regular sushi, the world’s smallest sushi            .

A．takes more time to make	B．costs more money to buy
C．sells worse among customers	D．needs more expensive materials

4. What do Hironor Ikeno’s words about the Swedish customer show?

A．His lack of experience.	B．His sense of achievement
C．Diversity of the customers.	D．Special treatment to foreigners.

6 . 阅读下面短文，在空白处填入1个适当的单词或括号内单词的正确形式。

China has nearly 5, 000 years of     1     (record) history. However, the history of Chinese furniture is even longer than     2     of its writing, which can be traced back to more than 7, 000 years ago.

During the Ming and Qing dynasties, most of the furniture was hand-made using high-quality hardwood     3     raw materials, which are now rare and expensive. Ordinary people often use wood such as pine, elm, and beech, but the quality between the woods     4     (different) greatly.

Classical furniture is mostly made by hand. Modern machines cannot     5     (complete) replace handwork. The shapes carved by the machine are neat but the lines are rigid and lacking in vitality. The most delicate aspect of Chinese classical furniture is the structural part of the work. Combining pieces of wood together,     6     (use) nothing more than the wood itself, is a basic skill of all carpenters in ancient China. It was first discovered in the wooden structure of the Hemudu site     7     the ancestors lived. This structure fully represents the     8     (create) and artistry (艺术性) of humanity.

Ancient Chinese     9     (philosophy) have been expressed in traditional Chinese furniture.     10     (achieve) that, skilled carpenters properly matched the curves and straight lines of the furniture.

9 . Charles Darwin found inspiration for his theory of evolution in birds’ beaks, giant tortoise shells — and language. “The survival of certain favored words in the struggle for existence is natural selection,” he wrote in The Descent of Man in 1871．

Language gradually shifts over time. Much research examines how social and environmental factors influence language change, but ignores the forces of human cognitive selection that fix certain words into the lexicon (词汇表). For an extensive new study published recently, scientists investigated just that.

In an experiment like a game of telephone, thousands of participants read English-language stories and rewrote them to be read by other participants, who then rewrote them for others. Only certain words from the first stories survived in the final versions. Researchers analyzed the word types speakers consistently favored, theorizing that such preferences drive language change over time. The scientists also separately analyzed two large collections of English historical texts from the past two centuries, containing more than 40 billion words — again seeing only certain types survive.

The end result shows three properties that give words an “evolutionary advantage” by helping them stick in the brain: First, words typically acquired at an early age (such as “hand,” “uncle”or “today”) are stabler. Next, concrete words linger (逗留) better than abstract ones: “dog” persists longer than “animal,” which persists longer than “organism.” Lastly, emotionally exciting words — whether negative or positive — tend to endure.

Early language-evolution models assumed that language becomes increasingly complex over time. But Fritz Breithaupt, a cognitive scientist, says the new study supports a more recent theory that language ultimately gets more efficient and easier to understand. Still, as the study notes, “the English language is not baby talk.” Breithaupt explains: “Yes, we shift toward simple language, but then we also grab complex language that we need.” New words that address the complexities of modern life may somewhat balance out this shift.

Columbia University linguist McWhorter more or less agrees with the study’s results about evolutionary advantages within language. He questions, however, implications regarding the overall efficiency of English — a language which contains things like “needlessly complex” grammatical traces.

1. What does the new study concentrate on?

A．The impact of cognitive selection.

B．The perspective of Charles Darwin.

C．The effectiveness of preserved words.

D．The importance of natural environment.

2. What may make a word gain evolutionary advantage?

A．Its stability in word-building.	B．Its more abstract meaning.
C．Its strong emotional information.	D．Its simple grammatical structure.

3. What phenomenon does the underlined “this shift” in Paragraph 5 refer to?

A．Communication gets more complex.

B．Humans prefer to use simpler language.

C．Language is getting less understandable.

D．New words can interpret modern life easily.

4. What does McWhorter imply about English?

A．It has an evolutionary advantage.

B．It keeps the grammatical traces.

C．It should be simplified sometimes.

D．People should embrace its changes.