1 . On March 7, 1907, the English statistician Francis Galton published a paper which illustrated what has come to be known as the “wisdom of crowds” effect. The experiment of estimation he conducted showed that in some cases, the average of a large number of independent estimates could be quite accurate.
This effect capitalizes on the fact that when people make errors, those errors aren’t always the same. Some people will tend to overestimate, and some to underestimate. When enough of these errors are averaged together, they cancel each other out, resulting in a more accurate estimate. If people are similar and tend to make the same errors, then their errors won’t cancel each other out. In more technical terms, the wisdom of crowds requires that people’s estimates be independent. If for whatever reasons, people’s errors become correlated or dependent, the accuracy of the estimate will go down.
But a new study led by Joaquin Navajas offered an interesting twist (转折) on this classic phenomenon. The key finding of the study was that when crowds were further divided into smaller groups that were allowed to have a discussion, the averages from these groups were more accurate than those from an equal number of independent individuals. For instance, the average obtained from the estimates of four discussion groups of five was significantly more accurate than the average obtained from 20 independent individuals.
In a follow-up study with 100 university students, the researchers tried to get a better sense of what the group members actually did in their discussion. Did they tend to go with those most confident about their estimates? Did they follow those least willing to change their minds? This happened some of the time, but it wasn’t the dominant response. Most frequently, the groups reported that they “shared arguments and reasoned together”. Somehow, these arguments and reasoning resulted in a global reduction in error. Although the studies led by Navajas have limitations and many questions remain, the potential implications for group discussion and decision-making are enormous.
1. What is paragraph 2 of the text mainly about?| A．The methods of estimation. | B．The underlying logic of the effect. |
| C．The causes of people’s errors. | D．The design of Galton’s experiment. |
| A．the crowds were relatively small | B．there were occasional underestimates |
| C．individuals did not communicate | D．estimates were not fully independent |
| A．The size of the groups. | B．The dominant members. |
| C．The discussion process. | D．The individual estimates. |
| A．Unclear. | B．Dismissive. | C．Doubtful. | D．Approving. |
2 . My students frequently ask me how I planned out my career to become president of Fidelity Investments. I always tell them, “There was no grand plan; I backed into my career one step at a time.” In this tough economy and ever-changing world, it is more important than ever to smartly evaluate each step in your career. To prepare for whatever surprises lie ahead, try to make choices today that will maximize your options in the future.
Gaining transferable (可转移的) knowledge begins with the choices you make at school. You want your education to provide you with the necessary skills and expertise to succeed in a wide variety of jobs.
Once you have finished your formal education, search for jobs that will allow you to further expand your transferable knowledge—to help you find your next job. Let’s say you take a job putting together airplane leases. Within a few years, you could become the world’s expert on the subject.
Remember gaining transferable knowledge is only one piece of the puzzle.
Of course, you can build your network to some degree without changing jobs.
| A．You can make yourself more attractive. |
| B．Gain transferable expertise and form close bonds with your colleagues. |
| C．Your next step should help you expand your web of personal relationships. |
| D．This later helped me evaluate and start business units throughout the world. |
| E．You can attend conferences or participate in committees at trade associations. |
| F．This means that you need to make smart choices about the courses you will follow. |
| G．However, this narrow expertise probably won’t help you in any other line of work. |
3 . How to Feel Connected
It's easy to feel disconnected from what is going on around you in today's fast-paced world.
Consider why you feel disconnected. Knowing what is making you feel disconnected can help you choose the best ways to address it.
Interact with people in person. Technology is a great way to stay in touch, but sometimes you need to spend time with other people in person.
Your loved ones could feel shy, so you may never know how to improve your relationship unless you ask the right questions. Asking them to open the doors can give you some insight on what you can do. Learning this information can help to strengthen your bond.
Show your commitment to them. Simply showing up and being there for your loved ones says a lot about how much you value your relationships. Putting in the time shows them that you are committed and want to stay connected.
Show appreciation. A simple “thank you” goes a very long way. Unfortunately, it is something that people who are close often take for granted. Telling someone you appreciate their time, love, and efforts can strengthen your bond and help you to become more connected.
| A．Ask others what they need from you. |
| B．Sometimes you can feel isolated and distant from the ones you love. |
| C．Be brave to express your love. |
| D．Reach out to people to schedule a time to get together. |
| E．Attending family events, or simply visiting someone once a week can help to strengthen your relationship and keep it strong. |
| F．Targeting your efforts toward those issues allows you to close that distance more effectively. |
| G．You can have a gift delivered to friends on special occasions. |
4 . Pollution
Pollution happens when the environment is dirtied, by waste, chemicals, and other harmful substances(物质).Pollution is a problem all over the world. But it is especially bad in large cities with a lot of industries and cars.
Wildfires, volcanoes, and industrial chemicals cause some air pollution. But most air pollution comes from burning fossil fuels (矿物燃料）These include coal, oil and natural gas. The burning of fossil fuels may release harmful gases. Air pollution may cause such diseases cancer and asthma. It also leads to polluted rain that can harm living things
Causes of water pollution are easy to see. People dump(倾倒) garbage and dirty water into river, lakes and oceans. Factories or cities sometimes release poisonous chemicals, and other wastes into water. These chemicals may make the groundwater unfit to drink.
Littering, or throwing garbage on the ground, is a form of land pollution. Litter can destroy the habitats of plants and animals. The buildup of dangerous chemicals in the ground is another form of land pollution. The chemicals may come from farms or factories.
Many governments, environmental groups, and ordinary people are working to control pollution. Governments have passed laws to keep people from releasing dangerous chemicals into the environment
| A．Farmers use chemical to help crops grow. |
| B．This type of pollution may be seen in big cities. |
| C．They also can harm fish and other forms of life. |
| D．These chemicals can spread to plants and animals. |
| E．In addition, air pollution may be a cause of global warming. |
| F．There are three main forms of pollution: air, water, and land. |
| G．Some companies and people are trying to use fewer fossil fuels. |
5 . A robot created by Washington State University (WSU) scientists could help elderly people with dementia (痴呆) and other limitations live independently in their own homes.
The Robot Activity Support System, or RAS, uses sensors installed in a WSU smart home to determine where its residents are, what they are doing and when they need assistance with daily activities. It navigates (定位) through rooms and around obstacles to find people on its own, provides video instructions on how to do simple tasks and can even lead its owner to objects like their medication or a snack in the kitchen.
“RAS combines the convenience of a mobile robot with the activity detection technology of a WSU smart home to provide assistance in the moment, as the need for help is detected,” said Bryan Minor, a postdoctoral researcher in the WSU School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.
Currently, an estimated 50 percent of adults over the age of 85 need assistance with every day activities such as preparing meals and taking medication and the annual cost for this assistance in the US is nearly $2 trillion. With the number of adults over 85 expected to triple by 2050, researchers hope that technologies like RAS and the WSU smart home will relieve some of the financial strain on the healthcare system by making it easier for older adults to live alone.
RAS is the first robot researchers have tried to incorporate into their smart home environment. They recently published a study in the journal Cognitive Systems Research that demonstrates how RAS could make life easier for older adults struggling to live independently.
“While we are still in an early stage of development, our initial results with RAS have been promising,” Minor said. “The next step in the research will be to test RAS’ performance with a group of older adults to get a better idea of what prompts, video reminders and other preferences they have regarding the robot.”
1. How does RAS serve elderly people?| A．Through sensors. | B．Through objects. |
| C．Through a mobile robot. | D．Through their daily activities. |
| A．It is the first robot used in daily life. | B．Its function remains to be tested. |
| C．It can locate people and do any task. | D．It can cook for owners on its own. |
| A．Doubtful. | B．Negative. |
| C．Optimistic. | D．Uncertain. |
| A．Elderly people leave the nursing home. |
| B．Smart Home Tests first elder-Care robot. |
| C．RAS, the first robot to make home smart. |
| D．Older adults have benefited from RAS. |
6 . If you live in Washington, D. C., or Redwood, Calif., you may have glimpsed a small, boxy robot rolling along a local sidewalk, minding it’s own business, but attracting the attention of many a curious onlooker. The autonomous machines were part of a pilot program last year by Starship Technologies focused on delivering meals from local restaurants in dozens of cities around the world.
“Today, more than ever, people lead a busy and diverse life,” Lex Bayer, Starship’s CEO, said in a statement online. “The hassle of needing to rearrange your life for a delivery will become a thing of the past. You don’t have to switch your working from home day, reschedule meetings, visit a locker, drive to a post office or contact a deliveryman all because of a missed delivery.”
The package delivery service is not available to everyone just yet. The company said it’s rolling out the service in Milton Keynes, England. The wheeled robots have a top speed of 4 mph and can detect obstacles from as far as 30 feet away. “The robot can operate through just about anything,” Nick Handrick, head of operations for Starship’s D. C. office, told The Washington Post's Maura Judkis last year. “If you had something in the way—a stick—it’s able to climb the edges of a road.”
By giving customers control of when deliveries occur, Starship Technologies is offering its service as a way to battle package theft. In its announcement, the company cited statistics from a Wakefield Research Poll for Comcast last year that found that 3 in 10 Americans who live in houses or townhouses have had packages stolen.
To sign up for the service, which costs a little more than $10 per month, customers need to download the company's app. Customers then create a “Starship Delivery Address,” a unique address inside a Starship facility, instead of a residence, where they can have packages sent from places such as Amazon, com. Once a package is delivered to the Starship address, customers receive a text that allows them to schedule a home delivery via robot.
1. Which can best replace the underlined word “hassle” in paragraph 2?| A．failure | B．expectation | C．safety | D．trouble |
| A．There is a limit to its service area. |
| B．It takes longer to deliver packages. |
| C．It covers a short distance each time. |
| D．It can’t sense the barriers 20 feet away. |
| A．The company shortens the delivery hour. |
| B．The package is delivered to the house directly. |
| C．Its delivery time is in the control of customers. |
| D．The customers are informed of its delivery time in advance. |
| A．It is a real home address of the customers. |
| B．It can arrange delivery robots for the customers. |
| C．It is a cheaper solution to the delivery of packages. |
| D．It sends the packages mainly to some shopping platforms. |
7 . Do you enjoy eating ketchup on your fries? If so, you must like the essential ingredient in the sauces, tomatoes. The tomato originally comes from South America and has been eaten by people there for thousands of years. Today, tomatoes are popular all over the world. However, when they were first introduced, there was quite a bit of controversy and apprehension surrounding them.
Tomatoes were first planted by the Aztecs (阿兹特克人) in Central America. In fact, ancient Aztec writings mention recipes for dishes of tomatoes. Spanish soldiers conquered the Aztecs and brought tomato seeds back with them to Europe. In Europe, these yellowish tomatoes were first called “apples of gold “. For a long time, people in Northern Europe and North America did not eat these “apples of gold”. The tomato plant looked similar to the nightshade plant, a deadly poison, so they were afraid to eat them. German people even thought that if someone ate tomatoes, he or she would change into a werewolf(狼人). But finally, by the mid-1800s people all over the world had accepted the tomato.
However, the tomato was due for more controversy. Do you think the tomato is a fruit or vegetable? Actually the tomato is a fruit. But in America, the tomato is a vegetable by law. Why is the tomato legally a vegetable in America? In the 1800s, there was no import tax in fruit from other countries. At that time, many tomatoes were coming from other countries into America, and American tomatoes farmers became worried about making a living. The government made the tomato a vegetable by law so that non-American tomatoes would be taxed.
Actually, it is easy to tell that the tomatoes is really a fruit. Cut into a tomato and look inside. You can see many seeds in the center, which is one sign of a fruit. In fact, tomatoes are similar to strawberries. Both have seeds inside, and both grow from the flowers of a plant. And both have delicious flesh surrounding the seeds. Tomatoes and strawberries are actually in the same family.
1. What is the main idea of this reading?| A．How our ideas about tomatoes have changed |
| B．How to grow tomatoes |
| C．The history of tomatoes planting. |
| D．The history of famous tomato dishes. |
| A．They thought tomatoes could change them into monsters. |
| B．They though tomatoes were similar to a deadly plant. |
| C．They thought tomatoes cost too much to grow. |
| D．They thought tomatoes were poisonous. |
| A．Both a fruit and a vegetable. | B．A kind of vegetable. |
| C．A kind of fruit. | D．Neither a fruit nor a vegetable. |
| A．Tomatoes do not grow very bug. |
| B．The inside parts are similar. |
| C．They grow on tree. |
| D．Summer is the best time to pick them. |
8 . Antarctica(南极洲)’s melting ice, which has caused global sea levels to rise by at least 13.8 millimeters over the past 40 years, was thought to primarily come from the unstable West Antarctic Ice Sheet(WAIS). Now, scientists have found that the East Antarctic Ice Sheet (EAIS)—considered largely unaffected by climate change—may also be melting at an unexpectedly rapid speed.
The WAIS, whose base is below sea level, has long been considered the most likely to break down. Besides gravity, a deep current of warm water slips beneath the sheet, melting it from below until it becomes a floating shelf at risk of breaking away. In contrast, extreme cold and a base mostly above sea level are thought to keep the EAIS relatively safe from warm waters.
But as greenhouse gases warm much of the planet, driving stronger polar winds, some scientists think warm water carried by a circular current will start to invade East Antarctica’s once unassailable ice. A cooperation of more than 60 scientists last year, published in Nature, estimated that the EAIS actually added about 5 billion tons of ice each year from 1992 to 2017.
Eric Rignot of the University of California, Irvine, and colleagues combined 40 years of satellite imagery and climate modeling and found that overall Antarctica now sends six times more ice into the sea each year than it did in 1979, with the majority coming from West Antarctica. But East Antarctica was responsible for more than 30% of Antarctica’s contribution to the 13.8-millimeter sea level rise over the past 40 years. “The more we look at this system the more we realize this is fragile,” Rignot says. “Once these glaciers become unstable there is no red button to press to stop it.”
Rignot hopes the study brings greater attention to a part of Antarctica that has traditionally been understudied. Helen Fricker, a glaciologist (冰川学家) in California, agrees. “We need to monitor the entire Antarctica and we just can’t do that without international cooperation.”
1. What is the new finding of scientists?| A．The east Antarctica is losing ice at an increasing rate. |
| B．The west Antarctica is melting six times faster than in 1979. |
| C．5 billion tons of ice is added to Antarctica each year. |
| D．The sea level has risen by 13.8 mm over the past 40 years. |
| A．A base mostly over sea level. | B．The force of gravity. |
| C．The invasion of a warm current. | D．Extremely low temperature. |
| A．Fragile. | B．Unattackable. |
| C．Mild. | D．Unstable. |
| A．Satellite imagery. | B．Global monitoring. |
| C．Worldwide climate modeling. | D．Worldwide combined efforts. |
9 . We’ve all been there: in a lift, in line at the bank or on an airplane, surrounded by people who are, like us, deeply focused on their smartphones or, worse, struggling with the uncomfortable silence.
What’s the problem? It’s possible that we all have compromised conversational intelligence. It’s more likely that none of us start a conversation because it’s awkward and challenging, or we think it’s annoying and unnecessary. But the next time you find yourself among strangers, consider that small talk is worth the trouble. Experts say it’s an invaluable social practice that results in big benefits.
Dismissing small talk as unimportant is easy, but we can’t forget that deep relationships wouldn’t
even exist if it weren’t for casual conversation. Small talk is the grease(润滑剂) for social communication, says Bernardo Carducci, director of the Shyness Research Institute at Indiana University Southeast. ＂Almost every great love story and each big business deal begins with small talk,＂ he explains. ＂The key to successful small talk is learning how to connect with others, not just communicate with them.＂
In a 2014 study, Elizabeth Dunn, associate professor of psychology at UBC, invited people on their way into a coffee shop. One group was asked to seek out an interaction(互动) with its waiter; the other, to speak only when necessary. The results showed that those who chatted with their server reported significantly higher positive feelings and a better coffee shop experience. ＂It’s not that talking to the waiter is better than talking to your husband,＂ says Dunn. ＂But interactions with peripheral(边缘的) members of our social network matter for our well-being also.＂
Dunn believes that people who reach out to strangers feel a significantly greater sense of belonging, a bond with others. Carducci believes developing such a sense of belonging starts with small talk. ＂Small talk is the basis of good manners,＂ he says.
1. What phenomenon is described in the first paragraph?| A．Addiction to smartphones. |
| B．Inappropriate behaviours in public places. |
| C．Absence of communication between strangers. |
| D．Impatience with slow service. |
| A．Showing good manners. | B．Relating to other people. |
| C．Focusing on a topic. | D．Making business deals. |
| A．It improves family relationships. | B．It raises people’s confidence. |
| C．It matters as much as a formal talk. | D．It makes people feel good. |
| A．Conversation Counts | B．Ways of Making Small Talk |
| C．Benefits of Small Talk | D．Uncomfortable Silence |
10 . More than loo genes are related with increased risk of developing schizophrenia (精神分裂症), bipolar disorder (躁郁症) and alcoholism (酗酒), confirms a large study published in the recent issue of the British scientific journal Nature.
The world’s largest study into the genetic basis of mental illnesses was led by researchers from British universities, including University College London (UCL), Cardiff University and King's College London (KCL).
Researchers believe that they are now much closer than before to understanding the complex biological causes, which make some people being at high risk of developing mental illnesses. They also believe that these findings could lead to new treatments.
The researchers analyzed the DNA of about 37,000 patients with schizophrenia, bipolar disorder or alcoholism, and compared the smallest genetic changes to those found in about 113,000 healthy people. They then identified about 128 independent genetic variants (变体) at 108 locations on the human chromosomes (染色体) that contribute significantly to developing schizophrenia — 83 of these sites have never before been linked to the illness, according to scientists.
For example, people with the variant of the GRM3 gene, thought to be important in brain signaling, are around 2 to 3 times more likely to develop schizophrenia or alcohol dependence. The variant, which is found in approximately one in every 200 people, is also associated with a three times risk of developing bipolar disorder.
“We could be looking at the next big drug target for treating mental illness,” Professor David Curtis from UCL, co-author of the paper, said. “The work opens up new ways to prevent and treat mental illnesses by revealing the mechanisms involved in their development.”
1. What can we learn from Paragraph 3?| A．Researchers are disappointed at curing biological causes. |
| B．Researchers are worried about the complex biological causes. |
| C．Researchers have found the method of curing biological causes. |
| D．Researchers are confident for figuring out the complex biological causes. |
| A．there are 37,000 patients with mental illnesses in the world |
| B．most of the sites have never before been linked to mental illnesses |
| C．there is little difference between the patients and the healthy people |
| D．the cause of mental illnesses has nothing to do with the genetic changes |
| A．the variant of the GRM3 gene is important |
| B．the number of people with the variant of the GRM3 gene is large |
| C．the number of people with the variant of the GRM3 gene is small |
| D．people with the variant of the GRM3 gene aren’t likely to suffer schizophrenia |
| A．The importance of gene variants. |
| B．The research of gene variants. |
| C．The cause of mental illnesses. |
| D．Gene variants linked to mental illnesses. |
