1 . 听下面一段对话，根据所听内容填空。
The experiment began on July ______, and after ______ days in space they successfully produced new seeds.

2 . 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.

2. What did the research team do for their research?

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.

3. How did the research team know if individuals might be sick?

A．By making comparisons.	B．By interviewing their doctors.
C．By observing them in their lab.	D．By analyzing causes and effects.

4. Which of the following statement does Mr. Mitsuyama agree with?

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.

3 . 应用文写作运用：演讲稿——太空探索
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）
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4 . 根据汉语提示完成短文。

Clair mentioned that she     1     (缺乏自信).What’s worse, her husband who wanted to improve his social status thought their home wasn’t good enough. Tony comforted her and promised to help Clair     2     (让她更漂亮，让她的房子更高雅). He made it. A few days later, Clair invited her friends to her house. Tony     3     (面带微笑地迎接他们)，standing up straight     4     (双臂交叉). All of them     5     (喜欢) Clair’s house and envied her having Tony, who in fact was a robot     6     (是一家公司赞助的).

5 . 根据提示用本部分所学词汇的正确形式完成下列短文。

Bing Dwen Dwen, the mascot (吉祥物) of the Beijing Winter Olympics, is a cute panda whose     1     (外形) is full-body “shell” made out of ice. It has     2     (使留下深刻印象) people with its wonderfully     3     (生动的) appearance and become popular in China.

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       4     (难懂的) for foreigners, or the resulting pronunciation would be       5     (与……大不相同) the Chinese pronunciation. Moreover, “dun” is a word in English meaning “to ask someone to pay what they owe you again and again”. It also means “a dull greyish-brown color”. Both meanings don’t show goodwill. So, the Chinese Olympic Committee decided to change the name in an entirely new way.

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     6     (值得做的). It     7     (确保) foreign athletes and fans call Dwen Dwen “d-when d-when”, which is as close to the original “doon-doon” as an average English speaker can get.

6 . 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.    1    They can help provide for improved delivery and quality of services.

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.    2    

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.     3       After the data collected is analyzed, the result will be communicated to the decision-makers, who will take action to improve the city life of its residents.

    4     Singapore, for example, has introduced a wide range of smart technologies inboth its public and private areas in 2024.To help with the aging population, it introduced a digital health system allowing video consultations as well as devices that can monitor their health.

    5     However, as with any significant citywide technology initiative, implementation (实施) of smart cities takes vision, investment, and careful planning to ensure adoption and success.Taking the first steps toward picturing what your smart city might look like is, well, the smart thing to do.

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.

7 . 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.     1     Here are three things that A.I. is especially good at.

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.     2    

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.

    3    

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.     4     It didn’t make the real one painless, but I felt more confident knowing I’d already practised with a chatbot.

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

    5     I’ve used A.I. programs to “read” long articles for me, and summarize dense academic papers. Usually they get the key points right, even if some of the details are missing. If you’re bored of reading this article, you could ask ChatGPT to summarize it for you. I promise I won’t be offended.

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.

8 . 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.

2. How do the price-optimisation systems work?

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.

3. What does Matt Pavich think of the price-optimisation system?

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.

4. What’s the best title for this text?

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

9 . 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。

The ZQ-2 Y3 rocket, developed by Chinese privately-owned aerospace company LandSpace,     1     (launch) into space on September 9th, 2023 from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center, taking three satellites into orbit.

It is the second successful flight for the company with the ZQ-2 series rocket, the     2     (late) example of Chinese privately-owned aerospace companies sending satellites into orbit. The launch successfully delivered three commercial satellites into the     3     (plan) orbit about 460 kilometers above the Earth, further highlighting the     4     (mature) and stability of the ZQ-2 carrier rocket, and also     5     (mark) a step forward for the company and China’s commercial aerospace industry.

The ZQ-2 Y3 has     6     total length of 49.5 meters, which is capable of placing a 1.5-ton payload into a typical sun-synchronous orbit at about 500 kilometers above the Earth. Future models could ultimately increase the payload to four tons,     7     can facilitate the deployment (部署) of low earth orbit satellites and cargo spacecraft.

Now China is home     8     world-class enterprises in the fields of raw materials, electronic information, and equipment required for rocket manufacturing (制造).     9     (obvious), the rapid development of China’s commercial aerospace companies and the domestically developed rockets with cost advantages     10     (benefit) China’s Internet constellation (互联网星座) construction plan greatly in the future.

10 . 听下面一段较长对话，回答以下小题。
1. What is the man’s job about?

A．Observing the planets.

B．Teaching others knowledge.

C．Going into space to do research.

2. What is the man looking at today?

A．Mars.

B．Venus.

C．The Moon.

3. Where will the woman have lunch?

A．At the man’s office.

B．At a café.

C．At her home.

4. What will the woman do next?

A．Go home.

B．Have lunch.

C．Use the telescope.