1 . The Federal Communications Commission of the US recently issued the first-ever fine for space junk, against the Dish Network. The satellite television company failed to properly deal with one of its satellites, leaving it at a lower orbit than it promised when securing its license.
Some space junk was discarded during missions — maybe an astronaut dropped his lucky penny, or released an instrument’s camera cover after it was no longer needed. Other junk, however, is the result of collisions: Even that lucky penny, traveling at 15 times the speed of a bullet, can cause huge damage — ending a satellite’s mission or, worse, breaking that satellite into pieces.
That’s obviously bad news for satellites. The solution isn’t to demand the launch of fewer satellites; these bring real benefits to people on the Earth.
And while traffic management is certainly necessary, pieces of garbage are never going to be able to follow even the most sensible rules of the orbital road. That means two things need to happen: People need to stop littering, and they need to take out some trash.
The professionals, unsurprisingly, have more carefully considered names for these processes — mitigation (减轻) and remediation (补救). Any time a company wants to put a satellite in the sky, it should have a clear plan for the instrument’s end of life. For objects in very high geostationary orbit (地球同步轨道), this usually involves sending the item to the out-of-the-way “graveyard” orbit. For objects lower down, it tends instead to involve moving them lower still, so that they will bum up upon reentering the atmosphere.
Active removal of garbage that has failed to get out of the way is technically tricky, but at least for large objects, remediation is possible.
Encouragingly, some countries are beginning to try. No nation, however, can save space on its own. A global convention (协定) to set a 21st-century code of conduct for space is in order.
1. What does the underlined word “discarded” in paragraph 2 mean?| A．Collected up. | B．Thrown away. |
| C．Produced. | D．Ignored. |
| A．The satellites benefit our life a lot. |
| B．We need new satellites to replace old ones. |
| C．Countries are using satellites to occupy space. |
| D．We must make a deeper exploration into the universe. |
① Sending satellites to the “graveyard” orbit.
② Moving objects lower still.
③ Active removal of debris.
| A．①② | B．②③ | C．①③ | D．①②③ |
| A．To provide solutions to space junk. |
| B．To explain the damage of space junk. |
| C．To call upon countries to fine companies making space junk. |
| D．To appeal to nations for the protection off space environment. |
2 . How has artificial intelligence (AI) changed and shaped our world over the last five years? How will AI continue to impact our lives in the coming years? Those are the questions addressed in my report.
When it comes to the current state of AI, I must say some of the biggest changes in the last five years have been how well AI performs in large data systems on specific types of tasks. We’ve seen Alpha Zero become the best Go player entirely through self-play, and everyday use of AI such as grammar checks and auto complete, automatic personal photo organization, and speech recognition become commonplace for large numbers of people.
In terms of potential, I’m most excited that AI can develop better and be used to assist people in various ways. It can help with decision-making such as identifying the likely treatment options for patients and provide basic assistance such as text-to-speech transformation for the visually damaged. In many situations, people and AI are complementary; that’s why I assume there is a possibility of teaming people with AI.
In the past, people had a fairly rosy outlook on AI, but now the public have a much more mixed view. This comes from the fact we are much less willing to tolerate faults, especially discriminatory ones. There have also been questions of information and disinformation control as people get their news and entertainment by searches and rankings personalized to their needs. So, there’s a much greater recognition that we should not be waiting for AI tools to become mainstream before making sure they are morally correct.
The need to understand the basics of AI and data science starts much earlier than college education, as children are being exposed to AI as soon as they click on online videos. But for computer science students in college, I think a key thing that future engineers need to realize is when to demand input and how to talk across subject boundaries to get at often difficult-to-quantify ideas of safety, equity, and so forth.
1. Why does the author talk about AI’s performance on some tasks in paragraph 2?| A．To criticize AI’s lack of diversity. | B．To show AI’s specialized advancements. |
| C．To explain AI’s superiority to humans. | D．To highlight AI’s considerable intelligence. |
| A．Significant. | B．Independent. | C．Interrelated. | D．Contradictory. |
| A．Its disadvantages. | B．Its moral duty. |
| C．The high expectations. | D．The personalized news. |
| A．Strengths and Faults of AI | B．The Present and Future of AI |
| C．AI: How to Further Develop? | D．Humans vs AI: Who’s Better? |
1. Where does the woman usually watch the 2022 Winter Olympics?
| A．On her cellphone. | B．On TV. | C．On the computer. |
| A．It can be the best in history. |
| B．It’s widely watched in the US. |
| C．It promotes streaming services. |
| A．Figure skating. | B．Freestyle skiing. | C．Ice hockey. |
4 . Recently, as a journalist, I have published many stories about social media, privacy and artificial intelligence (AI), among other things. So when ChatGPT told me that my output may have influenced its responses to other people’s prompts (提示), I rushed to wipe my data from its memory. As I quickly discovered, however, there is no delete button. AI-powered chatbots never forget what they have learned, because they are trained on data sets including vast numbers of websites and online articles. As long as they exist on the Internet, they get to be remembered.
That means the likes of ChatGPT are possible to let out sensitive personal information, if it has appeared online, and that the companies behind these AIs will struggle to make good on “right-to-be-forgotten” regulations, which force organizations to remove personal data on request. It also means we are powerless to stop hackers (黑客) controlling AI outputs by planting misinformation or ill instructions in training data. All of these explain why many computer scientists are busy to teach AIs to forget. While they are finding that it is extremely difficult, “machine unlearning” solutions are beginning to appear. And the work could prove vital beyond addressing concerns over privacy and misinformation.
The new generation of AI-powered chatbots like ChatGPT, which produce text in response to our prompts, are underpinned by large language models. These are trained on mountains of data, most of which is scraped from the Internet. From this, they learn to spot statistical patterns, which means they can predict the likeliest next word in a sentence, producing fluent answers to our every question.
The trouble is that the way AI chatbots work means that when they learn something, it can’t be unlearned. This creates a significant problem when it comes to privacy, as Dr. Zhang made clear in recent research. He highlighted how difficult it will be for AI companies to obey the “right to be forgotten”, which the European Union declared a human right back in 2014.
1. Why can chatbots store what it has learned forever?| A．Lack of a delete button. | B．Manual code entry. |
| C．Strong review ability. | D．The way they are trained. |
| A．Because AI has many security risks. | B．Because AI stores limited information. |
| C．Because AI needs to be updated regularly. | D．Because AI imitates humans completely. |
| A．Chatbots can answer 90% of the questions. |
| B．Chatbots’ data comes from the designer’s software. |
| C．Chatbots produce the answers based on the prompts. |
| D．Chatbots can predict your problems in advance. |
| A．Controlled. | B．Adjusted. | C．Boosted. | D．Supported. |
1. What can ChatGPT do?
| A．Write long articles. |
| B．Give proper responses. |
| C．Reply to emails interestingly. |
| A．Your satisfaction is guaranteed by the policy. |
| B．Your refund will be back within 10 days. |
| C．You can get your refund after you’ve used 17, 000 words. |
| A．To criticize ChatGPT. |
| B．To advertise KoalaChat. |
| C．To introduce KoalaChat. |
6 . Researchers in China have developed a robotic chemist powered by AI that might be able to obtain oxygen from water on Mars. The robot uses materials found on the red planet to produce catalysts (催化剂) that break down water, releasing oxygen.
“If you think about the challenge of going to Mars, you have to work with local material,” says Andy Cooper, a chemist at the University of Liverpool. “So I can see the logic behind it.”
The study was led by Jun Jiang at the University of Science and Technology of China Jiang and his team used a mobile machine the size of a refrigerator with a robotic arm to analyse five meteorites (陨石) that had come from Mars. The team’s goal was to investigate whether the machine could produce useful catalysts from the material.
The AI-powered system used some chemicals to dissolve (溶解) and separate the material, then analysed the resulting substances that consists of two or more elements. These then formed the basis of a search of more than 3.7 million formulae (公式) for a chemical that could break down water—known to exist as ice at Mars’ poles and under the planet’s surface-a process the team said would have taken a human researcher 2, 000 years. The result was a catalyst that could release oxygen from water, with the potential for use on a future Mars mission.
If a catalyst that can produce oxygen from water can be made on Mars, this would remove the need for missions to carry such a catalyst from Earth. Jiang says that for every square metre of Martian material, his group’s system could make nearly 60 grams of oxygen per hour, potentially removing the need for astronauts on future missions to the planet to carry oxygen from Earth to use when they get there. “The robot can work continuously for years, ” says Jiang.
Jiang points out that his group’s robotic chemist could also be used to produce other useful catalysts on Mars, for processes like fertilizing (施肥) plants. “Different chemicals can be made by this robot,” he says. And Mars isn’t the only place where it could be used. “Maybe lunar soil is another direction,” Jiang says.
1. What can we learn about the study?| A．A chemist with a robotic arm is involved. |
| B．Researchers aim to purify the water on Mars. |
| C．Oxygen is of vital importance in space travels. |
| D．Materials from Mars are analysed to produce catalysts. |
| A．Approving. | B．Unclear. | C．Dismissive. | D．Doubtful. |
| A．Precise calculation. | B．Integration of materials. |
| C．High-speed operation. | D．Flexibility of movement. |
| A．The robot can stand endless working time. |
| B．Martian catalysts can produce more oxygen. |
| C．The system can make 60 grams of oxygen per day. |
| D．The robotic chemist can be applied in a broader way. |
7 . In one horrible film plot, Al eventually outsmarts humans and takes over computers and factories. In another, large language models (LLMs) of the sort that power generative AI like ChatGPT give bad guys the know-how to create destructive cyberweapons.
It is time to think hard about these film plots, not because they have become more probable but because policymakers around the world are considering measures to guard against them. The idea that AI could drive humans to extinction is speculative—no one yet knows how such a threat might materialise and no common methods exist for determining what counts as risky. Plenty of research needs to be done before standards and rules can be set.
Governments cannot ignore a technology that could change the world deeply. Regulators have been too slow in the past, but there is danger, too, in acting hurriedly. If they go too fast, policymakers could create global rules that are aimed at the wrong problems and are ineffective against the real ones.
Because of the computing resources and technical skills required, only a handful of companies have so far developed powerful “frontier” models. New hurried regulations could easily block out competitors to the “handful of companies”, especially because these companies are working closely with governments on writing the rule book. A focus on extreme risks is likely to make regulators careful of open -source models, which are freely available and can easily be revised.
The best that governments can do now is to set up the basic systems to study the technology and its potential risks, and ensure that those working on the problem have enough resources. As AI develops further, regulators will have a far better idea of what risks they are guarding against, and consequently what the rule book should look like. A fully mature body could eventually take shape. But creating it will take time and reflection.
1. What does the first paragraph function as?| A．An argument. | B．An explanation. | C．A comment. | D．A lead-in. |
| A．Theoretical. | B．Common. | C．Unique. | D．False. |
| A．Competition in this area is prevented. | B．The development of AI is restricted. |
| C．AI will be applied to a limited degree. | D．The public will be misled about danger. |
| A．AI: a Real Threat? | B．Don’t Rush into Policing AI |
| C．AI: Humans’ Friend or Enemy? | D．Time for Government to Regulate AI |
8 . 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。
In a classic tale, Hansel and Gretel dropped breadcrumbs (面包屑) while walking through a
Typically, all the information a rover
This is just one of the most impressive applications
9 . “The Worthington Christian defeated the Westerville North by 2—1 in an Ohio boys’ soccer game on Saturday.” That’s according to a story that appeared last month in The Columbus Dispatch. That lead was written not by a sportswriter, but by an artificial intelligence (AI) tool.
Many news organizations are now examining how AI might be used in their work. But if they begin their “experimenting” with high school sports because they are less momentous than war, peace, climate change and politics, they may miss something crucial. Nothing may be more important to the students who play high school sports, and to their families, neighborhoods, and sometimes, the whole town. That next game is what the students train for, work toward, and dream about. Someday, almost all student athletes will go on to have jobs in front of screens, in office parks, at schools, in hospitals or on construction sites. They may suffer blows and setbacks. But the high school games they played and watched, as well as their hopes and cheers, will stay vivid in their memories.
I have a small idea. If newspapers will no longer send staff reporters to cover high school games, why not hire high school student journalists? News organizations can pay students an hourly wage to cover high school games. The young reporters might learn how to be fair to all sides, write vividly, and attract readers. That’s what some celebrities in sports did, and do.
And think of the great writers who were inspired by sports: Hemingway on fishing, Bernard Malamud and Marianne Moore on baseball, Chen Zhongshi on football, and CLR James on cricket, who said, “There can be raw pain and bleeding where so many thousands see the inevitable (不可避免的) ups and downs of only a game.” A good high school writer, unlike a robot, could tell readers not just the score, but the stories of the game.
1. Why is the lead mentioned in the first paragraph?| A．To introduce an original idea. | B．To show AI’s wide application. |
| C．To bring in the opinion about AI. | D．To stress AI’s importance to news. |
| A．Hopeful. | B．Eye-catching. | C．Competitive. | D．Far-reaching. |
| A．Rich in contents. | B．Fair in comments. |
| C．Centered on results. | D．Targeted on readers. |
| A．News Organizations Are Abusing AI | B．High Schoolers Can Do What AI Can’t |
| C．Great Writers Are Crazy About Sports | D．AI Ruins High School Students’ Memory |
10 . For anyone planning to fly to or from France in 2024, we’ve got a bit of inconvenient news-thousands of flights from four French airports are getting cancelled. It’s all because much of-the air traffic control system hasn’t been updated since the 1970s.
The air traffic control systems in Paris’ main airports are well overdue for an upgrade. Though the systems have received plenty of minor updates over the years, 2024 is the time for a huge improvement- it’s thought that around 80 percent of the system will need to be modernized.
Currently, workers still use an air traffic control process which was developed in the 1970s, including using paper strips to represent incoming planes. Thankfully, €1 billion is being invested into improving France’s air traffic control.
But that means there’ll be a large number of cancellations. According to BFM, it’s estimated that around 16,500 flights to or from Paris’ Charles de Gaulle, Orly, Le Bourget and Beauvais airports won’t go ahead. The number of passengers that passed through Paris Airports in 2022 was almost 44 million. Paris’ Charles de Gaulle saw 26.1 million passengers, and Paris Orly saw 15.7 million passengers. For the coming improvement, airlines that operate at these airports have been told to reduce their flight programme by 20 percent between March 9 and April 14. It’s during this period that the new system will be tested at Athis-Mons, France’s largest air traffic control centre.
Will your flight to France be impacted? Well, it’s up to each airline which flights won’t run, but it’s thought that long-distance routes will take priority. Air France has already cancelled some of theirs, notified passengers, and offered them same-day alternatives.
While this could mean that travelling through Paris is a faff (忙乱) in 2024, it’s estimated that 2.5 million flights pass through French airspace annually. With that much air traffic to control, it’d be good to have it all processed by something a bit more reliable than some pieces of paper.
1. What inconvenience will be caused in France according to the passage?| A．Airlines will decrease their flights. | B．A number of flights will be delayed. |
| C．Flights to France will be unavailable. | D．The airports will be under reconstruction. |
| A．To illustrate the flight cancellations. | B．To give examples of airport capacities. |
| C．To compare the numbers of passengers. | D．To analyze the reasons for air traffic control. |
| A．They will be offered a discount. |
| B．They might reschedule their flights. |
| C．They will have to cancel their travel plans. |
| D．They can only book tickets for long-distance routes. |
| A．France’s largest air traffic control centre will be tested. |
| B．€l billion is being invested into modernizing four French airports. |
| C．France is cancelling flights for improving air traffic control system. |
| D．The number of passengers that pass through Paris’ airports will decrease. |
