1 . A Day in My Wheel Chair

Alex Johnson was born with a rare disorder and got his first wheelchair when he was 7 years old. When he was 11, he arranged to get a bunch of borrowed wheelchairs and then invited his teachers and fellow students to spend a day in them.

Dozens of volunteers quickly learned how complicated it was for Alex to get around the school. Balancing a lunch tray while also rolling down the cafeteria line? Super tricky. Those who participated also learned about the aches and pains Alex struggles with daily. There’s also the arduous, if not impossible, task of rolling a manual wheelchair up and down slopes.

Doors are the worst, they said, because they’re heavy and difficult to pull open from a rolling chair. And although the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) specifies that doorways need to be wide enough to allow a wheelchair and the person’s hands to pass through safely, but many doors in older buildings are just too narrow.

But making the world more accessible for wheelchair users is a public policy issue controlled by government officials, so Alex recently challenged the Tennessee House of Representatives to spend a day in wheelchairs. And 10 men and women took him up on it! For a full day, they worked at their desks and attended all their regular meetings in wheelchairs. The lawmakers had the same eye-opening experiences that Alex’s school pals had.

State Representative Clark Boyd said, “I expected it to be difficult, but I had no idea how frustrating it could be to just simply get around.”

Thanks to comparable wheelchair challenges around the world, more lawmakers are getting the opportunity to learn more about what it’s like for the millions of people living with a mobility disability. “My hope is that through my challenge we can make the world more accessible,” Alex said. “Together, we can change the world, one challenge at a time.”

1. In what way were the students’ experiences of spending a day in wheelchairs and the lawmakers’ experiences similar?

A．Gaining a better understanding of what life is like for disabled people.

B．Learning that making the world more accessible is government officials’ work.

C．Learning how tiring it is to roll a wheelchair to move around the school building.

D．Understanding what it’s like for Alex to balance a lunch tray while in a wheelchair.

2. In paragraph 3, the word “arduous” is closest in the meaning to “_________”.

A．compulsory

B．fruitless

C．ridiculous

D．challenging

3. Why did the writer quote Clark Boyd’s remark?

A．To criticize the ADA for the narrow doors in buildings.

B．To show that Clark felt sympathy for wheelchair users.

C．To demonstrate that he had decided to change the public policy issues.

D．To convince the reader that lawmakers can make the world more accessible.

2 . Engaging in Family Meals

Engaging in family meals may be a matter of improving communication and support at home. A new study in the Journal of Nutrition Education and Behavior, published by Elsevier, connects less family discouragement and better family communication with a higher likelihood to eat evening family meals and family breakfasts together, and not in front of a television. The researchers surveyed 259 patients who participated in weight management and weight loss programs at the Ohio State University or Wake Forest University.     1    

“It’s important to note all family members in the home have influence,” lead study author Keeley J. Pratt, PhD, the Ohio State University, Columbus, OH, USA, said of the findings that any family member can influence the adoption and maintenance of healthy patterns and behaviors in the home.     2     The study also found parents who perceived their child to be overweight were more than four times as likely to talk to them about the kid’s weight, also called “weight talk.”

“While open communication with children about health is beneficial, it’s important to ensure communication directly about children’s weight is not harmful in their development of a healthy body image and behaviors. That includes older children and adolescents who are at greater risk of developing eating disorders and disordered eating behaviors,” Professor Pratt said.     3     Families with younger children, regardless of gender, were more likely to eat family dinners and breakfasts together, and parents of older children were more likely to talk about their own weight with the child. As kids grow up, the relationship between kids and their parents becomes better.

    4     “Understanding these associations will provide essential evidence needed to design future family-based interventions for these patients to help in their behavior change and weight loss, prevent the beginning of obesity in children, and enhance positive family meal practices and healthy communication about weight,” Professor Pratt said.

A．The study shows parents of older children were more likely to talk about their own weight with the child.

B．They found parents with better family communication were more likely to participate in family meals.

C．There was no significant difference between male and female children in this study.

D．This was the first study specifically to examine the home eating habits of adult patients.

E．Previous study has shown parental obesity (肥胖) is the strongest risk for children’s obesity.

F．Someone has no power to influence the family, but they are influencing each other.

3 . Like many schools worldwide, the pandemic forced Safe Passage to address an issue it’s been debating for years: how to best integrate (使……完整，使……整体) online or remote learning into its education plans.     1     But the area’s lack of internet access, as well as security concerns like theft, make distributing technology for students to learn at home a daunting (令人怯步的) task.

Holland says students will be at a disadvantage in today’s workplace if they don’t have access to digital tools.     2    

“Blended learning is a combination between technology and face-to-face classroom learning,” says Holland. “It’s not a bolt-on solution. If you see technology as this cool thing you just bolt on to an existing curriculum, you are in big trouble.”

Jean-Francois agrees.

“A lot of grants will include purchasing laptops or tablets. But education is a lot more complex,” she says. “    3     We can’t just assume that if we give them a tablet and instructions, they are going to know how to use it, and we shouldn’t expect they are going to know how to effectively teach children with it.”

    4     But Johnson, the Rotarian who helps clubs design education grants, cautions against moving too quickly to “reinvent education.”

“We need to figure it out, but figure it out one step at a time,” says Johnson. “You have to know what people are able to accept and use — cognitively, socially, and emotionally. Determine that, then move forward.”

A．Most remote learning involves technology like tablets.

B．The Rotary clubs raise money to buy tablets and pack the items for delivery.

C．With the unpredictability of the pandemic, many schools will be making the same kind of decisions in the coming year.

D．At the same time, students benefit most when technology is integrated into the entire curriculum, not just provided through a mass distribution of laptops.

E．We need to use this time and lean into developing teachers in new ways we haven’t thought of before.

F．Students have formed small groups to share smartphones with others who don’t have one.

4 . “Is data the new oil?” asked advocates of big data back in 2012 in Forbes magazine. By 2016, with the rise of big data’s fast-growing cousin deep learning, we had become more certain: “Data is the new oil,” stated Fortune magazine.

Amazon’s Neil Lawrence has a slightly different comparison: Data is coal. Not coal today, though, but coal in the early days of the 18th century, when Thomas Newcomen invented the steam engine. Newcomen built his device to pump water out of the southwest’s rich tin (锡) mines.

The problem, as Lawrence said, was that the pump was rather more useful to those who had a lot of coal than those who didn’t: it was good, but not good enough to be able to buy enough coal in to run it. That was so true that the first of Newcomen’s steam engines wasn’t built in a tin mine, but in coal works near Dudley.

So why is data coal? The problem is similar: there are a lot of Newcomen in the world of deep learning. New companies are coming up with revolutionary new ways to train machines to do impressive tasks, from reconstructing facial data from images to learning the writing style of an individual user to better predict which word they are going to type in a sentence. And yet, like Newcomen, their innovations are so much more useful to the people who actually have large amounts of raw material to work from.

But there is an ending to the story: 69 years later, James Watt made a nice change to the Newcomen steam engine, adding a condenser (冷凝器) to the design. That change, Lawrence said, “made the steam engine much more efficient, and that’s what triggered the industrial revolution.”

Whether data is oil or coal, then, there’s another way the comparison holds up: a lot of work is going into trying to make sure we can do more, with less.

“If you look at all the areas where deep learning is successful, they’re all areas where there’s lots of data,” points out Lawrence. That’s great if you want to classify images of cats, but less helpful if you want to use deep learning to diagnose rare illnesses. “It’s generally considered unacceptable to force people to become sick in order to acquire data.”

It’s not as impressive as teaching a computer to play a game better than any human alive, but “data efficiency” is a vital step if deep learning is to move away from simply taking in large amounts of data and giving out the best correlations (关联) possible.

1. The first of Newcomen’s steam engines wasn’t built in a tin mine because________.

A．its operation required a lot of coal	B．it would lose its function in a tin mine
C．it was in greater demand in coal works	D．the rich mines required more advanced aids

2. According to the passage, in which situation is deep learning the least successful?

A．Reconstructing facial data.	B．Predicting a word in a sentence.
C．Classifying images of cats.	D．Diagnosing rare diseases.

3. What can be inferred from the passage?

A．Watt’s condenser helped the steam engine consume less coal.

B．Data involving patients is often collected through immoral ways.

C．Teaching machines to learn is a vital step towards data efficiency.

D．Thomas Newcomen’s steam engine had revolutionary applications.

4. Neil Lawrence compared data to coal to indicate that________.

A．acquiring data is as complex as mining for coal

B．a change is required to make more out of less data

C．data is the new fuel to start an information revolution

D．a larger amount of data is needed to accomplish something

5 . A few years ago, Charles Barkley got into a lot of trouble for making the observation that sports figures didn't need to be role models. Thousands of fans and professional journalists were cross at this attack on the fundamental principle that the person who jumps highest must aim highest and the person who handles the running back must also be able to deal with life's problems with grace as well.

The problem is not that we look to these people for perfection when they take off their uniforms. It's that we expect anyone to be our representatives for perfection. That's stupid and it makes the rest of us down here lazy.

I get the importance of having heroes, the people who inspire us to cultivate the best potential within us and nurture our better angels. I personally have many heroes, from my mother, Lucy, to my favorite law professor, Howard. But these are personal contacts, people who have-actually touched my hand and my heart, and who occupy a pedestal（基座）built of my own experiences and aspirations. To look at an athlete or an actress with high salary and demand that he or she match our dreams is not only a waste of time, but it's dangerous. The danger comes in how this type of hero worship dehumanizes both the object of affection and the person who blindly adores. That was Barkley's point, not that we should give public figures a pass for being faulty but that we shouldn't abandon our own moral compasses and look to them for true north.

Recently on a television program I participated in, the discussion turned to Kathleen Kane. Someone suggested that the fact that the first female attorney general（首席检察官）in Pennsylvania was really messing things up could have unfortunate consequences for women seeking elected office. I offered the opinion that Kane was unquestionably criticized and that it was not hatred towards woman but incompetence at the root of the attacks. After the show aired, I had people emailing to tell me that I was either a traitor（叛徒）for publicly attacking a fellow female when we need to stand together behind this "role model", or a fool for not going a step further to say that this incompetent lawyer had made it harder for all women to move to the next level.

How depressing! Why should the inferior performance of one woman lead to such diverse but passionate views in people? The answer is obvious: Kane has stopped being an attorney general but has instead become The First Female Attorney General. She can't just make a mistake and pay the normal consequences.

If we stopped trying to live our lives through the accomplishments of public figures, many of whom look and sound like us, we'd learn how to recognize the heroic character of those we might actually know, and the heroic potential within ourselves. Or, perhaps, the honesty to accept our ordinary humanity.

1. Many people were angry with Charles Barkley mainly because________.

A．he broke fundamental principles in life	B．he was not good enough to be a role model
C．he doubted the perfection of some sports figures	D．he thought sports figures could have weaknesses

2. According to Barkley, why is it dangerous to take public figures as heroes?

A．Because we may let go of our own moral standards.

B．Because an athlete or actress cannot match our dreams.

C．Because we blindly admire public figures for their faults.

D．Because we shouldn't waste time imitating public figures.

3. From the passage we can infer that Kathleen Kane was________.

A．unfairly criticized due to being female	B．the first female attorney general in the US
C．less qualified than the public had expected	D．a role model for women seeking elected office

4. Which of the following might be the best title of the passage?

A．Be Our Representatives for Perfection	B．Exploration of Our Own Heroic Potential
C．Our Unrealistic Expectation of Public Figures	D．Our Conventional Views of Female Politician

6 . AI In the Future Workplace

Artificial Intelligence is making its way into business. As our special report this week explains, firms of all types are exploiting AI to forecast demand, hire workers and deal with customers. In 2017 companies spent around $22 billion on AI-related mergers and acquisitions, about 26 times more than in 2015. The McKinsey Global Institute, a think-tank within a consultancy, claims that just applying AI to marketing, sales and supply chains could create economic value, including profits and efficiencies, of $2.7 billion over the next 20 years.     1    .

Such forecasts fuel anxiety as well as hope. Start with the benefits. AI ought to improve productivity. Humanyze collects data from employees' calendars and e-mails to work out, say, whether office layouts favor teamwork.     2     Employees will gain, too. Thanks to the progress in computer vision. AI can check that workers are wearing safety equipment and that no one has been harmed on the factory floor. Some will appreciate more feedback on their work and welcome a sense of how to do better.

Yet AI's benefits will come with many potential drawbacks. Algorithms (计算程序) may not be free of the prejudices of their programmers.     3     The length of a commute (通勤) may predict whether an employee will quit a job, but this focus may harm poorer applicants. Older staff might work more slowly than younger ones and could risk losing their positions if all AI looks for is efficiency.

    4     If your skills are in demand, you are more likely to be able to resist than if you are easy to replace. Paid-by-the-hour workers in low-wage industries such as retailing will be especially subject to harm. That could fuel protest of labor unions seeking to represent employees' interests and to set regulations. Even then, the choice in some jobs will be between being replaced by a robot or being treated like one.

A．They can also have unintended consequences.

B．Some people are better placed than others to stop employers going too far.

C．These numbers are so impressive that we can't help feeling afraid of the power of AI.

D．However, some small companies may not have enough money to be equipped with AI technology.

E．Slack, a workplace messaging app, helps managers assess how quickly employees accomplish tasks.

F．Google's boss has gone so far as to declare that AI will do more for humanity than fire or electricity.