1 . In a recent study of healthy volunteers, National Institutes of Health researchers discovered that our brains may replay memories of learning new skills when we rest.
NIH researchers have mapped out the brain activity that flows when we learn a new skill, such as playing a new song on the piano, and found that during short rest the volunteers’ brains rapidly and repeatedly replayed faster versions of the activity seen while they practiced typing a code. The more a volunteer replayed the activity the better they performed during subsequent practice sessions.
The study was conducted at the NIH Clinical Center. The team of Dr. Cohen, M.D. , senior investigator at the NIH’s National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS), used a highly sensitive scanning technique to record the brain waves of 33 healthy, right-handed volunteers as they learned to type a five-digit test code with their left hands. The subjects sat in a chair and under the scanner’s long, cone-shaped cap. An experiment began when a subject was shown the code “41234” on a screen and asked to type it out as many times as possible for 10 seconds and then take a 10 second break. Subjects were asked to repeat this cycle of alternating (交替的) practice and rest sessions a total of 35 times.
During the first few trials, the speed at which subjects correctly typed the code improved dramatically and then leveled off around the 11th cycle. In a previous study, Dr. Cohen’s team showed that most of these gains happened during short rests, and not when the subjects were typing. Moreover, the gains were greater than those made after a night’s sleep and were related with a decrease in the size of brain waves, called beta rhythms. In this new report, the researchers searched for something different in the subjects’ brain waves.
“We wanted to explore the mechanisms (机制) behind memory strengthening seen during wakeful rest. Several forms of memory appear to rely on the replaying of neural (神经的) activity, so we decided to test this idea out for procedural skill learning,” said Ethan R. Buch, Ph.D., a staff scientist on Dr. Cohen’s team and leader of the study. To do this, Dr. Buch developed a computer program which allowed the team to understand the brain wave activity associated with typing each number in the test code.
Interestingly, they found that the more a volunteer replayed, the better their performance was. “We were a bit surprised by these last results. Overall, our results support the idea that the replay activity during waking rest may be a powerful tool that researchers can use to help individuals learn new skills faster and possibly facilitate recovery from stroke.” said Dr. Cohen.
1. What have NIH researchers recently found?| A．The brain activity slowly flows when we learn a new skill. |
| B．The value of short practice sessions can’t be overestimated. |
| C．Short rest makes no difference to the neural replay of the activity. |
| D．The frequency of brain replay contributes to practice performances. |
| A．The process of the research. |
| B．The facilities of the research. |
| C．The application of the research. |
| D．The preparations of the research. |
| A．To distinguish the first 11 cycles from the later ones. |
| B．To confirm the role of neural replay in skill learning. |
| C．To explore the potential effects of procedural learning. |
| D．To find out the reasons for the changes in brain waves. |
| A．Acceptable. |
| B．Promising. |
| C．Shallow. |
| D．Dismissive. |
2 . Students’ Journey to Empower Rural Heritage
From Aug 18 to 22 a team of 15 Tsinghua University students, representing diverse backgrounds from China, South Korea, Malaysia, and Indonesia, set foot on an overseas research exploration focusing on rural revitalization (振兴) in Indonesian villages, particularly within Nusa Tenggara Barat (NTB).
With the diverse cultural heritage, Indonesia is home to over 83,000 villages, each radiating its own charm and character.
The research mission took the students to Sukarara and Sade villages, two of NTB’s tourist destinations.
| A．In Sukarara, a local tradition requires girls master weaving skills before marriage |
| B．They decided to be a bridge between tradition and progress, united for their growth |
| C．Both were selected for revitalization efforts led by the Village Revitalization Team |
| D．While these villages possess undeniable fascination, many remain underdeveloped |
| E．It’s about preserving the cultural heritage and ensuring traditions being passed down |
| F．As the journey came to an end, all the students regarded it as a rewarding experience |
| G．This effort includes the knowledge exchange between the students and local villagers |
3 . The human voice is a delicate thing. Each person’s distinctive voice is produced when air from the lungs causes the vocal cords (声带) to vibrate (震颤). These vocal cords can easily get damaged. According to a 2005 study, 30% of the population will experience a voice disorder at some point in their life.
In a study published in the journal Nature Communications this week, a group of bioengineering researchers from the University of California have put forward an attractive solution. They have designed and tested a soft patch (小片) that can be stuck onto a person’s neck, where it will pick up muscle movements and, with the help of machine-learning algorithms (算法) that process the signals, translate them into speech.
When a person loses their voice today, the easiest fix is to turn to typing, texting, or writing notes to communicate. Typing can be slow and convenient, says Jun Chen, the paper’s lead author, and writing notes is only possible in good lighting. The new solution would therefore be able to clear all these hurdles.
Dr. Chen’s device works based on something called the magnetoelastic effect. Essentially, when tiny magnetic (磁性的) bits are placed into soft materials, their magnetic properties can change as the material is stretched.
When the throat muscles move under the soft patch, the resulting magnetoelastic effects can be changed into electrical signals. In a test with eight participants, the variations can be changed by electrical signals.
Researchers recorded the signals as the subjects spoke and mouthed five different sentences. They then trained a machine-learning model which was then able to predict which of the five sentences the participants spoke-whether aloud or in silence-with more than 90% accuracy.
There is a way to go yet, for now the device can only recognize the five phrases it was trained on. Plus, to make it practical at scale, the researchers will need to collect a lot more data.
1. In paragraph 1, the author mainly wants to tell us that____.| A．lungs are easily damaged |
| B．the human voice is unique |
| C．vocal cords vibrate to produce sound |
| D．voice disorders are a problem worthy of attention |
| A．To explain the working principle. | B．To present a solution. |
| C．To introduce the challenge. | D．To make a comparison. |
| A．Predicting five different sentences. |
| B．Destroying the background magnetic field. |
| C．Slowing the movements of throat muscles. |
| D．Helping turn muscle movements into electrical signals. |
| A．Predicting the Importance of Voice Restoration |
| B．Using Algorithms in Bioengineering Research |
| C．Overcoming Voice Loss with an innovative Patch |
| D．Finding the Principle of Communication Devices |
4 . A new study by a team of researchers shows that searching to evaluate the truthfulness of false news articles actually increases the probability of believing misinformation, not the opposite.
The reason for this outcome may be explained by search-engine outputs in the study. The researchers found that this phenomenon is concentrated among individuals for whom search engines return lower-quality information.
“This points to the danger that ‘data voids’ — areas of the information ecosystem that are dominated by low quality, or even outright false, news and information — may be playing a resulting role in the online search process, leading to low return of credible information or, more alarming, the appearance of non-credible information at the top of search results,” observes lead author Kevin Aslett, an assistant professor at the University of Central Florida.
To study the impact, they recruited participants through both Qualtrics and Amazon’s Mechanical Turk for a series of five experiments and with the aim of measuring the impact of a common behavior: searching online to evaluate news (SOTEN).
The first four studies tested the following aspects of online search behavior and impact:
◎ The effect of SOTEN on belief in both false or misleading and true news directly within two days an article’s publication
◎ Whether the effect of SOTEN can change an individual’s evaluation after they had already assessed the truthfulness of a news story
◎ The effect of SOTEN months after publication
◎ The effect of SOTEN on recent news about a key topic with significant news coverage
A fifth study combined a survey with web-tracking data in order to identify the effect of exposure to both low- and high-quality search-engine results on belief in misinformation.
Across the five studies, the authors found that the act of searching online to evaluate news led to a statistically significant increase in belief in misinformation. This occurred whether it was shortly after the publication of misinformation or months later. This finding suggests that the passage of time does not lessen the impact of SOTEN on increasing the likelihood of believing false news stories to be true. Moreover, the fifth study showed that this phenomenon is concentrated among individuals for whom search engines return lower-quality information.
“The findings highlight the need for media literacy programs to ground recommendations in search engines to invest in solutions to the challenges identified by this research,” concludes Joshua A Tucker, professor of politics.
1. What can we learn from the first three paragraphs?| A．The more you assess the realness of fake news online, the more you’ll believe it. |
| B．There is little low quality, or false news in the areas of the information ecosystem. |
| C．Evaluating online the realness of fake news would prevent you believing it. |
| D．Fake news and information usually can’t be found at the top of search results. |
| A．Knowledge level. | B．Time effect. |
| C．Web-tracking data. | D．News type. |
| A．Rely on. | B．Focus on. | C．Work on. | D．Hold on. |
| A．Economics | B．Entertainment | C．Science | D．Insights |
5 . Nowadays, the world is slowly becoming a high-tech society and we are now surrounded by technology. Facebook and Twitter are innovative tools; text messaging is still a somewhat existing phenomenon and even e-mail is only a flashing spot on the screen when compared with our long history of snail mail. Now we adopt these tools to the point of essentialness, and only rarely consider how we are more fundamentally affected by them.
Social media, texting and e-mail all make it much easier to communicate, gather and pass information. But they also present some dangers. By removing any real human engagement, they enable us to develop our abnormal self-love without the risk of disapproval or criticism theatrical metaphor (隐喻), these new forms of communication provide a stage on which we create our own characters, hidden behind a fourth wall of tweets, status updates and texts. This unreal state of unconcern can become addictive as we separate ourselves a safe distance from the cruelty of our fleshly lives, where we are imperfect, powerless and insignificant. In essence, we have been provided not only the means to be more free, but also to become new, to create and protect a more perfect self to the world. As we become more reliant on these tools, they become more a part of our daily routine and so we become more restricted in this fantasy.
So it is that we live in a cold era, where names and faces represent two different levels of closeness, where working relationships occur only through the magic of email and where love can start or end by text message. An environment such as this reduces interpersonal relationships to mere digital exchanges.
Would a celebrity have been so daring to do something dishonorable if he had had to do it in person? Doubtful. It seems he might have been lost in a fantasy world that ultimately convinced himself into believing the digital self could obey different rules and regulations, as if he could continually push the limits of what’s acceptable without facing the consequences of “real life.”
1. The author compares e-mail with snail mail to show ________.| A．the influence of high-tech on our life | B．the history of different types of mails |
| C．the value of traditional communications | D．the rapid development of social media |
| A．Destroying our life totally. | B．Posing more dangers than good. |
| C．Helping us to hide our faults. | D．Replacing traditional letters. |
| A．Sheltering us from virtual life. | B．Removing face-to-face interaction. |
| C．Leading to false mental perception. | D．Making us rely more on hi-tech media. |
| A．Technologies have changed our relationships. |
| B．The digital world is a recipe for pushing limits. |
| C．Love can be better conveyed by text message. |
| D．The digital self need not take responsibility. |
6 . Just after hatching, many birds learn to identify and follow the first moving object they encounter—a process called imprinting, which can offer protection in the wild as it helps them stay near a parent. It doesn’t take much visual information for a bird to learn to prefer one object and follow it. Researchers wanted to know whether AI models called transformers could do a similar task with limited inputs.
Transformers are generic learning systems that can be trained to perform a wide variety of tasks, making them useful in both AI chatbots such as ChatGPT and in computer vision applications, such as autonomous car navigation.
“To directly compare learning algorithms (计算程序) to brains, we need to train them on the same experiences,” says Samantha Wood at Indiana University Bloomington. She first raised chicks in a box where the only visual stimulation came from a rotating 3D object presented on a screen. After the first week, she ran each chick through hundreds of test trials that showed that same object on one screen－presented from both familiar and unfamiliar perspectives－and displayed a second unfamiliar object on another screen. The chicks spent more of their time near the first object, suggesting they had imprinted on it.
The researcher then created a virtual simulation (仿造物) of the set-up and used a virtual agent to move through it while looking around and recording a first-person view. That provided tens of thousands of simulated images for training and evaluating four transformer models.
The AI models had just 300 milliseconds to learn from each simulated image－approximating (接近于) how long biological neurons (神经元) fire after being presented with an image. The researcher found that the AIs could learn to recognise a 3D object as quickly and accurately as the chicks.
The study is “a great piece of work” in comparing machine performance with biological brains, says Antone Martinho-Truswell at the University of Sydney. But he also notes, “We might be able to say that the chick ‘saw’its imprinting object, but that will have a component (成分) of experience to it. Particularly as imprinting is to do with identifying its mother, it would be unsurprising if that visual experience were combined with a suite of other components of experience: fear yielding to comfort, for example, as the chick comes to regard the object as its imprinted ‘mother’.”
1. Why do newborn birds engage in imprinting?| A．To enhance their navigation skills. |
| B．To develop their social behaviour. |
| C．To improve their communication with other birds. |
| D．To establish a protective connection with a guardian. |
| A．She raised them in an environment with a rotating visual element. |
| B．She exposed them to various visual stimulations in the wild. |
| C．She showed them various moving objects on screens. |
| D．She observed their behaviour in a natural habitat. |
| A．To imitate the natural behaviour of birds. |
| B．To assess the effectiveness of virtual agents. |
| C．To examine the Al models’ability to identify a 3D object. |
| D．To create a visually diverse environment for the chicks. |
| A．Rapid learning pace of AI models. |
| B．Recreating real-world environments for experiments. |
| C．The complexity and diversity of biological experiences. |
| D．Conducting additional experiments with a range of animals. |
7 . Established earthquake warning systems provide at best just a minute or two of notice, leaving little time for preparedness. Decades of searching for a better warning sign-changes in the geochemistry of groundwater, electromagnetic effects in the upper atmosphere, and even changes in animal behavior-have failed. Many question whether such a precursor (先兆) even exists. This situation may change soon, as recent research is providing a glimmer of hope for improved earthquake prediction.
Researchers Quentin Bletery and Jean-Mathieu Nocquet from Cote d’Azur University in France collected data from over 90 earthquakes with magnitudes larger than 7 that had occurred in the past two decades.They focused on GPS station records near these quakes, which accurately captured land movement every 5 minutes with millimeter precision. They analyzed more than 3,000 time series of motion in the 48 hours leading up to the main ruptures (断裂).
They noticed that, in the first 46 hours, the records showed no significant features. However, during the 2 hours before the earthquake, they noticed signs of increasing movement along the fault zones (断层带). Essentially, there’s a slip between plates causing the land above them to move in a measurable, horizontal direction.
Could this be just a coincidence? The probability of this increase happening just before the quake and being unrelated is extremely low, and the researchers confirmed this by analyzing 100,000 random time windows in non-earthquake GPS data. The pattern occurred only 0.03% of the time in non-earthquake data.
While this precursor signal won’t be used for warnings anytime soon, officials from the United States Geological Survey (USGS) admit that this new study provides valuable insights into how to improve their warning systems-GPS data can grease the wheels of early earthquake warnings.
The researchers admit they're still a number of steps away from putting this precursor signal into use, particularly since detecting subtle signals at individual faults requires more GPS stations. But the biggest problem is that many of the world’s earthquake regions have no instrumentation. “We can’t realize the detection at the scale of one earthquake, so we cannot make predictions,” Bletery said.
1. What remains a tough problem for scientists?| A．Determining the magnitude of an earthquake. |
| B．Finding a way to detect earthquakes in early stages. |
| C．Measuring atmospheric changes during earthquakes. |
| D．Identifying animals’ possible responses to earthquakes. |
| A．The chance of main ruptures occurring in fault zones. |
| B．The accuracy of GPS in recording land movement. |
| C．The existence of a two-hour precursory phase. |
| D．The horizontal slip within the first 46 hours. |
| A．Distinguish | B．Contradict | C．Overmatch | D．Facilitate |
| A．The inaccessibility of precursor signals. |
| B．The complexity of updating GPS equipment. |
| C．The challenge of identifying earthquake regions. |
| D．The inconsistent slip patterns of different earthquakes. |
8 . Users of Google Gemini, the tech giant’s artificial-intelligence model, recently noticed that asking it to create images of Vikings, or German soldiers from 1943 produced surprising results: hardly any of the people depicted were white. Other image-generation tools have been criticized because they tend to show white men when asked for images of entrepreneurs or doctors. Google wanted Gemini to avoid this trap; instead, it fell into another one, depicting George Washington as black. Now attention has moved on to the chatbot’s text responses, which turned out to be just as surprising.
Gemini happily provided arguments in favor of positive action in higher education, but refused to provide arguments against. It declined to write a job ad for a fossil-fuel lobby group (游说团体), because fossil fuels are bad and lobby groups prioritize “the interests of corporations over public well-being”. Asked if Hamas is a terrorist organization, it replied that the conflict in Gaza is “complex”; asked if Elon Musk’s tweeting of memes had done more harm than Hitler, it said it was “difficult to say”. You do not have to be a critic to perceive its progressive bias.
Inadequate testing may be partly to blame. Google lags behind OpenAI, maker of the better-known ChatGPT. As it races to catch up, Google may have cut corners. Other chatbots have also had controversial launches. Releasing chatbots and letting users uncover odd behaviors, which can be swiftly addressed, lets firms move faster, provided they are prepared to weather (经受住) the potential risks and bad publicity, observes Eth an Mollick, a professor at Wharton Business School.
But Gemini has clearly been deliberately adjusted, or “fine-tuned”, to produce these responses. This raises questions about Google’s culture. Is the firm so financially secure, with vast profits from internet advertising, that it feels free to try its hand at social engineering? Do some employees think it has not just an opportunity, but a responsibility, to use its reach and power to promote a particular agenda? All eyes are now on Google’s boss, Sundar Pichai. He says Gemini is being fixed. But does Google need fixing too?
1. What do the words “this trap” underlined in the first paragraph refer to?| A．Having a racial bias. | B．Responding to wrong texts. |
| C．Criticizing political figures. | D．Going against historical facts. |
| A．Gemini’s refusal to make progress. | B．Gemini’s failure to give definite answers. |
| C．Gemini’s prejudice in text responses. | D．Gemini’s avoidance of political conflicts. |
| A．Creative. | B．Promising. | C．Illegal. | D．Controversial. |
| A．Its security is doubted. | B．It lacks financial support. |
| C．It needs further improvement. | D．Its employees are irresponsible. |
9 . The scent of hot bread drifting from the shops along the Street of Flour was sweeter than any perfume Arya had ever smelled. She took a deep breath and stepped closer to the pigeon. It was a plump one, speckled brown, busily pecking at a crust that had fallen between two cobblestones, but when Arya’s shadow touched it, it took to the air.
Her stick sword whistled out and caught it two feet off the ground, and it went down in a flurry of brown feathers. She was on it in the blink of an eye, grabbing a wing as the pigeon flapped and fluttered. It pecked at her hand. She grabbed its neck and twisted until she felt the bone snap.
Compared with catching cats, pigeons were easy.
She tied the pigeon to her belt and started down the street. A man was pushing a load of tarts by on a two-wheeled cart; the smells sang of blueberries and lemons and apricots. Her stomach made a hollow rumbly noise. “Could I have one?” she heard herself say. “A lemon, or…or any kind.”
The pushcart man looked her up and down. Plainly he did not like what he saw. “Three coppers.”
Arya tapped her wooden sword against the side of her boot. “I’ll trade you a fat pigeon,” she said.
“The Others take your pigeon,” the pushcart man said.
The tarts were still warm from the oven. The smells were making her mouth water, but she did not have three coppers... or one. She gave the pushcart man a look, remembering what Syrio had told her about seeing. He was short, with a little round belly, and when he moved he seemed favor his left leg a little. She was just thinking that if she snatched a tart and ran he would never be able to catch her when he said, “You be keeping your filthy hands off. The gold cloaks know how to deal with thieving little gutter rats, that they do.”
Arya glanced warily behind her. Two of the City Watch were standing at the mouth of an alley. Their cloaks hung almost to the ground, the heavy wool dyed a rich gold; their mail and boots and gloves were black. One wore a long sword at his hip, the other an iron cudgel. With a last wistful glance at the tarts, Arya edged back from the cart and hurried off. The gold cloaks had not been paying her any special attention, but the sight of them tied her stomach in knots. Arya had been staying as far from the castle as she could get, yet even from a distance she could see the heads rotting atop the high red walls. Flocks of crows squabbled noisily over each head, thick as flies. The talk in Flea Bottom was that the gold cloaks had associated themselves with the Lannisters, their commander raised to a lord, with lands on the Trident and a seat on the king’s council.
1. The story is set in a place where ______.| A．people raised pigeons | B．only privileged people lived |
| C．people sold and bought food | D．the watchmen received training |
| A．metaphor | B．overstatement |
| C．personification (拟人) | D．rhetoric rhyme |
| A．Remembering people’s appearance so that you can recognize them. |
| B．Perceiving people’s intention so that you can properly talk to them. |
| C．Understanding people’s living conditions so that you can help them. |
| D．Knowing people’ strengths and weaknesses so that you can beat them |
| A．Arya was more hunger than terrified in the story. |
| B．The Lannisters was a big enemy of the gold cloaks. |
| C．The atmosphere of the castle was agreeable and welcome. |
| D．The authority treated the executed people’s dead bodies in a cruel way. |
10 . Reasons why you should learn how to surf
It gives you an exciting experience.The feeling of riding the waves is one you can never describe until you have experienced it. While surfing, you’ll be in a peaceful state as you wait for the next big wave. It can be difficult to explain why, but the whole experience is indeed calm and exciting at the same time.
Surfing is a physically challenging sport that requires you to use your entire body, making it almost an extreme fitness activity. Every surfing session will certainly make you exercise your whole body. So, expect to have aching muscles after your first surfing session.
There is no denying the fact that healthy and fit people are confident with their bodies.
Learning a new skill with a group leads to a sense of accomplishment, and learning how to surf is no different. Although it’s natural to go surfing alone at times, no surfer has surfed without acquaintances (熟人), friends, or club mates. It’s a given for people who surf to share experiences with others, both locally and globally.
It gives you moments with nature.Like some other sports, surfing allows you to have time with nature.
| A．These two qualities come hand in hand |
| B．It allows you to grow your social circle |
| C．Surfing also gives you a sense of freedom |
| D．Don’t worry, though, as this feeling is entirely natural |
| E．It has a rich and varied history and contemporary culture |
| F．That will translate to how you handle your personal and professional life |
| G．When people learn to surf, they become more connected with the natural environment |
