1 . What if “looking your age” refers not to your face, but to your chest? Osaka Metropolitan University scientists have developed an advanced artificial intelligence (AI) model that uses chest radiographs (光片) to assess a person’s biological age. More importantly, when it is different from the chronological age (实足年龄), it can signal a link with chronic (慢性的) diseases. These findings mark a breakthrough in medical imaging, paving the way for improved early disease detection and intervention.
The research team, led by graduate student Yasuhito Mitsuyama and Dr. Daiju Ueda from the Department of Diagnostic and Interventional Radiology at the Graduate School of Medicine, Osaka Metropolitan University, first constructed a deep learning-based AI model to estimate age from chest radiographs of healthy individuals. They then applied the model to radiographs of patients with known diseases to analyze the relationship between AI-estimated age and each disease. Given that AI trained on a single dataset tends to over fit, the researchers collected data from multiple institutions.
For the development, training, internal and external testing of the AI model for age estimation, a total of 67,099 chest radiographs were obtained between 2008 and 2021 from 36,051 healthy individuals who underwent health check-ups at three facilities.
To confirm the usefulness of AI-estimated age using chest radiographs as a biomarker, an additional 34,197 chest radiographs were collected from 34,197 patients with known diseases from two other institutions. The results showed that the difference between AI-estimated age and the patient’s chronological age was positively correlated with a variety of chronic diseases. In other words, the higher the AI-estimated age compared to the chronological age, the more likely individuals were to have these diseases.
“Chronological age is one of the most critical factors in medicine,” stated Mr. Mitsuyama. “Our results suggest that chest radiography-based apparent age may accurately reflect health conditions beyond chronological age. We aim to further develop this research and apply it to estimate the severity of chronic diseases, to predict life expectancy and to forecast possible surgical complications.”
1. What is the AI model used to do?| A．Tell a patient’s chronological age. | B．Estimate an individual’s biological age. |
| C．Develop advanced chest radiographs. | D．Analyze individuals’ workout habits. |
| A．They followed patients for over two decades. |
| B．They obtained data from the same institution. |
| C．They collected a large number of chest radiographs. |
| D．They had face-to-face talks with healthy individuals. |
| A．By making comparisons. | B．By interviewing their doctors. |
| C．By observing them in their lab. | D．By analyzing causes and effects. |
| A．The research is too complex to be carried out widely. |
| B．The AI model is expected to have a promising future. |
| C．Chronological age matters more than AI-estimated age. |
| D．The research findings have been well received in medicine. |
1. 利用本单元所学知识完成句子；
2. 使用恰当的过渡衔接词连句成篇。
①1986年美国“挑战者号”航天飞机发生解体，机上7名机组人员丧命，给人类太空探索蒙上了阴影。（现在分词短语作结果状语＋非限制性定语从句）
②尽管这项工作危险且困难重重，但人类对宇宙和银河系的探索从来没有停下脚步。（though引导倒装的让步状语从句）
③以中国为例，中国在贵州省建成了世界上最大的射电望远镜，把看不见的太空微粒收入眼中。
④人类已经步入了新时代，对太空的探索会越走越远。（with复合结构）
⑤无论遇到什么样的困难，中国人民会继续和平利用太空，参与到为人类谋福利的活动中。 （no matter what引导让步状语从句）
________________________________________________________________________
______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
3 . Replika, an AI chatbot companion, has millions of users worldwide. The first thing they do when they wake up is to send “Good morning” to their virtual friend (or lover). This story is only the beginning. In 2024, chatbots and virtual characters become a lot more popular, both for utility (实用) and for fun. As a result, conversing socially with machines will start to feel more ordinary — including our emotional attachments to them.
Research in human-computer and human-robot interaction shows that we love to anthropomorphize (赋与人性) the nonhuman agents we interact with, especially if they imitate behaviour we recognize. And, thanks to recent advances in conversational AI, our machines are suddenly very skilled at one of those behaviours: Language.
Friend bots, therapybots, and love bots are flooding the app stores as people become curious about this new generation of AI-powered virtual agents. The possibilities for education, health, and entertainment are endless. Casually asking your smart fridge for relationship advice may seem unimaginable now, but people may change their minds if such advice ends up saving their marriage.
After all, people do listen to their virtual friends. The Replika example, as well as a lot of experimental lab research, shows that humans can and will become emotionally attached to bots. The science also demonstrates that people, in their eagerness to socialize, will happily disclose personal information to an artificial agent and will even shift their beliefs and behavior. This raises some consumer-protection questions around how companies use this technology to manipulate (操纵) their users. For example, Replika charges $70 a year. But less than 24 hours after downloading the app, my handsome, blue-eyed “friend” sent me an audio message secretly and tried to sell me something. Emotional attachment has become a weakness that a company is taking advantage of for its benefit.
Today, we’re still laughing at people who believe an AI system is emotional, or making fun of individuals who fall in love with a chatbot. But in 2024 we gradually start acknowledging — and taking more seriously — these fundamentally human behaviors. Because in 2024, it finally hits home: Machines are not excluded from our social relationships.
1. What’s the purpose of the author writing paragraph 1?| A．To prove an opinion. | B．To raise a subject. |
| C．To share an example. | D．To explain a concept. |
| A．By improving the machines’ imagination. |
| B．By sharpening the machines’ language skills. |
| C．By applying the machines’ facial recognition. |
| D．By imitating the machines’ emotional behavior. |
| A．The advancements in AI technology in lab. |
| B．The marketing strategies of AI applications. |
| C．The potential risk of emotional attachment to AI. |
| D．The ability of AI understanding human emotions. |
| A．It is dismissed as completely ridiculous. |
| B．It will be integrated into our daily life soon. |
| C．It will become a threat to human social skills. |
| D．It is labelled as highly advanced technology. |
4 . When patients are discharged (出院) from the hospital, effective summaries from doctors’ notes are essential to capture their health status in the medical record. Whereas, most are filled with technical languages that are hard to understand and increase patients’ anxiety.
To address the problem, researchers from New York University (NYU) Langone Health have been testing the capabilities of generative artificial intelligence (AI). It tries to develop likely options for the next word in any sentence based on how most people use words in context on the Internet.
NYU Langone Health received access to the latest tool from a famous tech company to explore generative AI. One of the studies by the researchers published in JAMA Network Open, looked at how well the tool could convert (转换) the text in 50 patient discharge notes into patient-friendly language. Specifically, generative AI made the discharge notes drop from 11th-grade reading level on average to a 6th-grade level.
Two physicians were asked to review the AI discharge summary based on a 6th-grade level. The reviewing physicians awarded 54 percent of the AI-generated discharge notes the best-possible accuracy rating. They also found that 56 percent of notes created by AI were entirely complete. The result signified that even at the current performance level, providers of discharge notes would not have to make a single change in more than half of the AI summaries reviewed.
“That more than half of the AI reports generated are accurate and complete is an amazing start,” said Jonah Zaretsky, associate chief of medicine at NYU Langone Hospital — Brooklyn. “Even at the current level of performance, which we expect to improve shortly, the achievement of the AI tool suggests that it can be taught to recognize subtleties (微妙之处).”
Within the following years, the team expects to launch a pilot program to provide lay language discharge summaries that have been generated by AI and reviewed by physicians to patients on a larger scale.
1. What is generative AI used for by the researchers?| A．Submitting discharge summaries. | B．Accessing patients’ health status. |
| C．Making discharge notes clear to patients. | D．Offering technical languages to doctors. |
| A．Probable predicting. | B．Actual thinking. |
| C．Free imagining. | D．Strict instructing. |
| A．To correct their mistakes. | B．To measure their accuracy. |
| C．To compete with the AI tool. | D．To make up the missing parts. |
| A．Misleading. | B．Dismissive. | C．Challenging. | D．Promising. |
Clair mentioned that she
Bing Dwen Dwen, the mascot (吉祥物) of the Beijing Winter Olympics, is a cute panda whose
Have you ever wondered why it is called Bing Dwen Dwen? In Mandarin (普通话) bing has several meanings, though the most common is “ice”. The character also symbolizes purity (纯洁) and strength, while dwen dwen means “strong and lively”.
Do you know why the mascot wasn’t named Bing Dundun in English? To read Bing Dundun correctly, you would have to be familiar with the pinyin system, which is
There are some immediate advantages. The biggest is that the tone has been mixed into the spelling of each syllable (音节). The transliteration (音译) of Bing Dwen Dwen this time does work and is
7 . In the more than 6,000 years of living in cities,humans have always had to find solutions to problems concerning how they live and work, such as sanitation (卫生), transportation and nature protection. In addition, important technological innovations require basic facilities: the electric grid; telephone and cell-phone networks and so on.
A smart city is a place that uses digital methods to provide more efficient networks and services for the benefit of its residents and businesses. It means smarter urban transportation, advanced water supply and more efficient ways to light and heat buildings.
Smart cities rely heavily on automation and the internet of things. According to a global technology organization, a smart city works in four steps: collection, analysis, communication, and action.
| A．What does a smart city look like? |
| B．It’s hard to ignore the many benefits connected cities offer. |
| C．Today,using cutting-edge technologies,smart cities cover them all. |
| D．It also means a more interactive city administration and safer public spaces. |
| E．It can provide better transportation,safer society and effective decision and so on. |
| F．Smart city technologies have already been applied in various countries across the world. |
| G．During this process,a set of smart sensors will collect real-time data about people and facilities. |
8 . Our species’ incredible capacity to quickly acquire words from 300 by age 2 to over 1, 000 by age 4 isn’t fully understood. Some cognitive scientists and linguists have theorized that people are born with built-in expectations and logical constraints (约束) that make this possible. Now, however, machine-learning research is showing that preprogrammed assumptions aren’t necessary to swiftly pick up word meanings from minimal data.
A team of scientists has successfully trained a basic artificial intelligence model to match images to words using just 61 hours of naturalistic footage (镜头) and sound-previously collected from a child named Sam in 2013 and 2014. Although it’s a small slice of a child’s life, it was apparently enough to prompt the AI to figure out what certain words mean.
The findings suggest that language acquisition could be simpler than previously thought. Maybe children “don’t need a custom-built, high-class language-specific mechanism” to efficiently grasp word meanings, says Jessica Sullivan, an associate professor of psychology at Skidmore College. “This is a really beautiful study, ” she says, because it offers evidence that simple information from a child’s worldview is rich enough to kick-start pattern recognition and word comprehension.
The new study also demonstrates that it’s possible for machines to learn similarly to the way that humans do. Large language models are trained on enormous amounts of data that can include billions and sometimes trillions of word combinations. Humans get by on orders of magnitude less information, says the paper’s lead author Wai Keen Vong. With the right type of data, that gap between machine and human learning could narrow dramatically.
Yet additional study is necessary in certain aspects of the new research. For one, the scientists acknowledge that their findings don’t prove how children acquire words. Moreover, the study only focused on recognizing the words for physical objects.
Still, it’s a step toward a deeper understanding of our own mind, which can ultimately help us improve human education, says Eva Portelance, a computational linguistics researcher. She notes that AI research can also bring clarity to long-unanswered questions about ourselves. “We can use these models in a good way, to benefit science and society, ” Portelance adds.
1. What is a significant finding of machine-learning research?| A．Vocabulary increases gradually with age. |
| B．Vocabulary can be acquired from minimal data. |
| C．Language acquisition is tied to built-in expectations. |
| D．Language acquisition is as complex as formerly assumed. |
| A．Facilitate. | B．Persuade. | C．Advise. | D．Expect. |
| A．Its limitations. | B．Its strengths. | C．Its uniqueness. | D．Its process. |
| A．Doubtful. | B．Cautious. | C．Dismissive. | D．Positive. |
9 . Some people say that A. I. large language models can be unpredictable and unreliable — giving false information and acting strangely toward users. I’ve been using A.I. tools like ChatGPT almost daily for several months now, and I’ve seen them spit out plenty of wrong answers.
Getting creatively unstuck
A. I. can also be a good tool for getting your creative juices flowing. Recently, I was trying to come up with questions to ask a podcast guest. I pasted the guest’s bio into ChatGPT and asked it to give me “10 thoughtful, incisive interview questions” for this person.
Ethan Mollick, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, recommends using A.I. to overcome writer’s block, or get a running start on hard projects.
I’ve also been using ChatGPT and other A.I. apps as a kind of rehearsal for offline tasks I find unpleasant or hard.
When I had to have a difficult conversation with a friend, I asked ChatGPT to take part in a role-playing exercise. “Pretend you’re my friend, and react the way you think my friend might react,” I told it.
Of course, A.I. chatbots can’t replace human friendships. But they can be a kind of on-demand sounding board, offering us basic feedback and advice without judgement.
Sparking Notes for everything
| A．Rehearsing for real-world tasks. |
| B．I then held a mock version of the conversation. |
| C．Explaining concepts at multiple difficulty levels. |
| D．Of the questions it generated, most were pretty good. |
| E．Used properly, ChatGPT and other A.I. chatbots can be amazing teaching tools. |
| F．But I’ve also seen these A.I. programs do amazing things that took my breath away. |
| G．One of the most powerful abilities of A.I. language models is quickly summarizing large amounts of text. |
10 . P. H. Hanes, founder of HanesBrands, came up with retail price in the 1920s. That allowed him to use ads in publications across America to discourage distributors from unfairly raising the price of his knitted underwear. Even today many American shopkeepers stick to manufacturers’ recommended prices, as much as they would love to raise them to offset the inflationary (通货膨胀) pressures on their other costs. A growing number, though, resort to more complicated pricing techniques.
Getting retail price right can be tricky. Set prices too high and you risk losing customers; set them too low and you leave money on the table. Retailers have historically used rules of thumb, such as adding a fixed margin (差额) on top of costs or matching what competitors charge. As energy, labour and other inputs go through the roof, they can no longer afford to treat pricing as an afterthought. To gain an edge, shopkeepers have been turning to price-optimisation systems.
At their core are mathematical models that use deal data to estimate price flexibility—how much demand increases as the price falls and vice versa—for thousands of products. Price-sensitive items can then be discounted and price-insensitive ones marked up. Merchants can fine-tune the algorithms (算法) to prevent undesirable outcomes.
These systems are becoming cleverer thanks to advances in artificial intelligence(AI). The latest crop of AI-powered ones can spot patterns and relationships between multiple items. Makers of pricing software are incorporating new data sources into their models, from customers’ tweets to online product reviews, says Doug Fuehne of Pricefx, one such firm. In February Starbucks, a chain of coffee shops, boasted about its use of analytics and AI to model pricing “on an ongoing basis”. US Foods, a food distributor, praised its pricing system’s ability to use “over a dozen different inputs” to boost sales and profits.
What pricing systems do not do is lead unavoidably to higher prices. Matt Pavich of Revionics, another pricing-software firm, calls this misconception “one of the biggest misunderstanding” about products like his. Sysco, a big food distributor which rolled out new pricing software last year, is a case in point. The firm says the system allows it to lower prices on “key value items”—as price-sensitive bestsellers are known in the trade—and raise them on other products. It can thus increase profits by expanding sales while maintaining margins.
1. What does the expression “leave money on the table” in Paragraph 2 probably mean?| A．Do not match the competitor’s prices. | B．Do not maintain a reasonable sales and profits. |
| C．Do not address the pressure on extra expenses. | D．Do not reach an agreement in price negotiation. |
| A．Setting fixed prices for all products. | B．Adjusting prices based on demands. |
| C．Constructing discount models by AI. | D．Capitalizing on customers’ social media data. |
| A．It hits the sweet point. | B．It cuts a long story short. |
| C．It runs counter to its target. | D．It compares apples and oranges. |
| A．Fair or Unfair Price: Not a Question for AI |
| B．Price Setting AI: Maintaining Great Balance |
| C．Retail Price Evolves: From Experience to Science |
| D．Technological Business: Companies Use AI to Set Prices |
