1 . Self-driving vehicles will rely on cameras，sensors and artificial intelligence (Al) to recognize and respond to road and traffic conditions.But sensing is the most effective for objects and movement in the neighborhood of the vehicle.Not everything important in a car’s environment will be caught by the vehicle’s camera.Another vehicle approaching at high speed on a collision(碰撞)track might not be visible until it’s too late.This is why vehicle-to-vehicle communication is undergoing rapid development.Our researches show that cars will need to be able to chat and operate on the road，although the technical challenges are considerable.

Applications for vehicle-to-vehicle communication range from vehicles driving together in a row，to safety messages about nearby emergency vehicles.Vehicles could alert each other to avoid collisions or share notices about passers-by and bicycles.

From as far as several hundred meters away.vehicles could exchange messages with one another or receive information from roadside units (RSUs) about nearby incidents or dangerous road conditions through 4 G network.A high level of Al seems required for such vehicles，not only to self-drive from A to B，but also to react intelligently to messages received.Vehicles will need to plan，reason，strategize and adapt in the light of information received in real time and to carry out cooperative behaviors.For example，a group of autonomous vehicles might avoid a route together because of potential risks，or a vehicle could decide to drop someone of earlier due to messages received，a foreseen crowding ahead.

Further applications of vehicle-to-vehicle communication are still being researched，including how to perform cooperative behavior.

The railway line     1    (connect) Beijing and Zhangjiakou, the co-host city of the Beijing 2022 Winter Olympics, is the world's first intelligent, high-speed railway. It     2    (go)into operation on Dec 30, 2019. The railway is 174 km long, with a maximum design speed of 350 kph. It reduces the travel time between Beijing and Zhangjiakou from over three hours to 47 minutes. The train is designed with an area to store snowboards, a device to secure wheelchairs and a mobile news center     3     passengers can watch live Olympic broadcasts.

4 . I was desperately nervous about becoming car-free. But eight months ago our car was hit by a passing vehicle and it was destroyed. No problem, I thought: we’ll buy another. But the insurance payout didn’t even begin to cover the costs of buying a new car—I worked out that, with the loan (贷款) we’d need plus petrol, insurance, parking permits and tax, we would make a payment as much as £600 a month.

And that’s when I had my fancy idea. Why not just give up having a car at all？I live in London. We have a railway station behind our house, a tube station 10 minutes’ walk away, and a bus stop at the end of the street. A new car club had just opened in our area, and one of its shiny little red Peugeots was parked nearby. If any family in Britain could live without a car, I reasoned, then surely we were that family.

But my new car-free idea, sadly, wasn’t shared by my family. My teenage daughters were horrified. What would their friends think about our family being “too poor to afford a car”？(I wasn’t that bothered what they thought, and I suggested the girls should take the same approach.)

My friends, too, were astonished at our plan. What would happen if someone got seriously ill overnight and needed to go to hospital？(an ambulance) How would the children get to and from their many events？(buses and trains) People smiled as though this was another of my mad ideas, before saying they were sure I’d soon realize that a car was a necessity.

Eight months on, I wonder whether we’ll ever own a car again. The idea that you “have to” own a car, especially if you live in a city, is all in the mind. I live—and many other citizens do too—in a place that has never been better served by public transport, and yet car ownership has never been higher. We worry about rising car costs, but we’d be better off asking something much more basic: do I really need a car？Certainly the answer is no, and I’m a lot richer because I dared to ask the question.

In most big cities, it is easier to hire a taxi at a moment’s notice when the weather is good. But when it’s raining, people have a much harder time     1    (find) one. One obvious reason is that many people who walk short distances during good weather prefer to take a taxi in the rain.     2    , taxis tend to be more fully occupied on rainy days. Besides, the supply of available taxis is also smaller because taxi drivers can     3     (easy) reach the target fares and go home early.

8 . Surveillance (监视) is a fact of life. Your boss is monitoring your performance at work. Supermarkets are collecting data on your grocery shopping.     1    

In a few months, European Union law-makers are due to approve proposals that will make driver assistance systems mandatory (强制的) in cars within three years. All new models of car will come with black boxes (event data recorders), intelligent speed assistance, lane-keeping assistance and more besides.

A large number of technologies will soon be monitoring a driver’s every move. Are we prepared for devices that watch how we drive and try to help us do it better?

    2     In a report published in April 2018, it found that the suite of changes could save at least 7,300 lives by 2030, and reduce the number of serious injuries from car crashes by 38,900. “We can have the same kind of impact as when safety belts were first introduced,” says Oliver Carsten, who studies transport safety at the University of Leeds, UK.

    3     The black box is the most controversial (有争议的) tech because of fears that the tech encourages surveillance. It would be easy to worry about being watched in your car. But the EU rules say the system is only checked in the event of an accident to help with insurance claims and police investigation. The point is to provide for a fair allocation (分配) of responsibility when a crash occurs. Some people choose to have a black box because it can reduce their individual insurance premium (保险费).     4     What’s more, the data collected in human-driven cars will help train automated driving systems to the point that they could be ready for large-scale deployment in the future.

    5     Drivers should think of it as an extra layer of protection, rather than the vehicle trying to take over driving from you.

Beijing was once a city of bikes, the capital of a country    1    (know) as the Bicycle Kingdom, where cars were reserved for official and political business.    2    , decades of remarkable economic growth led to a huge flowing of cars in the city. Owning one became not just a marker of reaching the middle class but also a    3    (require) for marriage. As the economy boomed, autos pushed bikes off the roads,    4    (create) heavy pollution and miserable traffic.

Fortunately, now Beijing may be returning to its roots with a modern twist. Thanks to about 20 technology companies, brightly coloured shared bikes    5    (flood) Beijing since last year. Many local residents welcome the shared bikes    6    the flexibility and freedom they offer. They pick up the bikes and then ride and drop    7    off anywhere they like, locking the back wheel, with no need to find a fixed place.

Analysis in China say there are three factors    8    contribute to the sudden increase of bikes: a lot of cash looking for a home, a good idea and government support. “As the city’s population grew, traffic jams got    9    (bad).” Cai, the Ofo spokeswoman, said, “Shared bikes could solve the ‘last mile’ problem in    10    environmentally friendly way.”